[3.4/10] What if you made a movie about a man who is completely lacking in empathy, who is spoiled, and offensive, and occasionally even abhorrent, and showed him never really growing or changing or learning anything? What if you hinted that he was more than a little broken, but and maybe even carries a desire to do or have something else in his life, but who kept regressing into the extended depths of assholery time and time again. The answer is that you end up with a film that’s interesting at a conceptual level, but a chore to sit through, and that is *The Comedy* to a tee.

Eventually, the film strays its way into a point, and maybe even a poignant one. But before you can get there, directo Rick Alverson subjects you to just endless reams of his movie’s protagonist being an unrelenting, insensitive prick to anyone and everyone he meets. At best, it’s establishing his desire for attention and to provoke a reaction the best way he knows how, and at worst, it’s just abject cringe comedy for cringe comedy sake, stretched out to mind-numbing lengths. There’s a few moments of genuine, if dry humor in the film, but most of it is just an excruciating look at the main character’s horrible antics.

*The Comedy* stars Tim Heidecker of numerous Adult Swim shows, and borrows some of that sensibility at times. I’m not averse to anti-comedy, or the humor of stretching a joke beyond its breaking point until it wraps back around and becomes funny again. The problem, though, is that some of the film is just going for shock value. And some of it is just deliberately random or off-putting for the sake of making a point. But all of it bundled together becomes a lot to take when stretched beyond a ten-minute Adult Swim time slot and stacked up to a ninety minute feature film.

I could have easily lived without spending an hour and a half with Swanson, Heidecker’s character in the film, and the character who gets 98% of the screen time. He’s depicted as an amoral adult toddler, who talks about Hitler having the right ideas, goes on a jokey character monologue about slaves dying, and embarasses himself with cab drivers and coworkers and bars full of people from different walks of life. He has no boundaries, no sense of tact, and absolutely no empathy for another human being.

There’s only two things that could ever make me recommend this movie in the slightest. The first is that every so often, it deftly suggests that Swanson is, in his own deranged way, reaching out for a genuine human connection that he has no idea, let alone the social skills, to achieve. The movie is opaque in its messaging, entirely devoid of exposition, but we know that his father is comatose and his brother is in a mental health facility. It’s never suggested that Swanson was a good man at some point, but there’s certainly suggestions that these events hurt him, and when a deeply stupid asshole experiences real pain, he has nowhere to turn and no conception of how to even begin processing his grief.

The second is the conceptual boldness going on here. At times, *The Comedy* almost feels like a dare. It feels like someone said to the producers “what if we made a film about someone being the most pathetic, awful person imaginable, and only teased the audience with the slight hope of his self-improvement in order to wreck things further when he becomes even more pathetic and awful. In a way, the film feels like a spiritual cousin to *Manchester by the Sea* suggesting that some traumas or perspectives are too deep-seated or ingrained to come back from.

The trouble I keep coming back to is that, however conceptually audacious it is to just deepen and deepen how much of a shit your main character is for a full length film, it is just fucking dreadful and trying to witness nonstop. Swanson jokes with his sister in law about sexually servicing his mentally ill brother. He and his jerkass friends harass multiple cab drivers. He constantly puts people with less money or power than him in compromising, sometimes even dangerous positions. Sure, there’s a modicum of commentary to that, but it’s just endless and these scenes are excruciatingly long. This behavior isn’t a part of the movie. It *is* the movie.

The best you can say is that *The Comedy* appears to be making a point in all this. It has these long scenes where Swanson is saying or doing something awful and the person he’s talking to basically just ignores him. There’s some strange sense that he’s a person who doesn't know how to behave, possibly one with genuine developmental issues, who takes refuge in the extreme in the hopes of provoking a human response and being paid attention to after he’s lost his family. In scenes where he combs a comatose stranger’s hair, or gazes at old family photos, there is certainly the sense that Swanson is missing and yearning for something he does not quite know how to articulate.

And I’ll at least say that, however much of a trial it is to sit through, *The Comedy* at least has the chutzpah to stick to its convictions. [spoiler]Just when it seems like Swanson has met his match, someone who appreciates his demented sense of humor and tolerates his selfish attitude, he proves himself almost impossibly, inhumanly callous when he just sits and watches as she has a seizure. Conceptually, there’s something impressive about pulling a reverse Manic Pixie Dream Girl and using the fractured meetcute and romancing merely to demonstrate that the protagonist is an inveterate shit who’ll never change and doesn't deserve your sympathy no matter what he’s been through.[/spoiler]

But god, that point could have been made in twenty-two minutes without sacrificing anything. Condensed down to a manageable runtime, streamlined into a less elliptical and indulgent encapsulation of Swanson’s flaws, and fit in with the rest of Heidecker’s high concept weirdness, *The Comedy* could work. But too often, this film is minute after minute of repugnant garbage in a meandering search for a point. It has something meaningful, if still overextended, to say in its last act, but the proceeding hour of soulless human cruelty is just not worth it to get there.