An American flop

In David Zucker’s “An American Carol,” a jihadist terrorist (Robert Davi) and his goofy minions try to hire anti-American documentarian Michael Malone (Kevin P. Farley) to improve the level of their training and recruitment videos. But soon they realize he may be their ticket to crashing an all-star concert, where they can detonate a bomb.

Meanwhile, Malone hates America so much he is crusading to abolish the Fourth of July. But then he’s confronted by the ghosts of John F. Kennedy (Chriss Anglin), George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer) and George Washington (Jon Voight), as well as the Angel of Death (Trace Adkins), who show him the error of his ways. Eventually, Malone will have to try to spread his newly found patriotism to his half-witted followers.

Sigh.

I tried. I really, really tried to lock my political opinions away in a little box in my mind while watching Zucker’s avowedly “conservative” comedy. In the normal course of things, I see no reason to abandon my world view; in fact, I think to do so is wrong, and nearly impossible to boot. But, as an aesthetic experiment, I wanted to see if I could find a right-wing comedy funny. I really wanted it to be funny, if for no other reason than to have an interesting excuse to discuss the relationship between art and ideology.

Alas, I quickly realized that to approach “An American Carol” that openly I’d have to lock away not only my political opinions, but also my political knowledge, my sense of history, my minimum standards for filmmaking, and, yes, my notion of “funny.” That the jokes were lame and the caricatures too removed from any defensible reality left me with only an uninteresting excuse to discuss the relationship between art and ideology.

The plot, of course, is a retread of one of the great archetypal stories, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” which has spawned innumerable adaptations. Indeed, this isn’t even the first time a radical activist has been plugged into the Scrooge role. For a precursor, check out Jerry Fairbanks’ short “Tragedy or Hope” (1972) at archive.org/details/Tragedyo1972.

I wish I could say that “An American Carol” bears the same relationship to “Tragedy or Hope” that Zucker’s “Airplane!” did to “Zero Hour,” but sadly the director is not spoofing the banalities of anti-left, midcentury “educational” films; he’s simply recasting them in what he hoped would be comic form. By the end, the movie is no less didactic than its forerunner: Malone’s transformation is explicitly spelled out. As he rushes to reconcile with his nephew, who is shipping out to a war zone, the background music is the sort of emotional pap that Elmer Bernstein composed for “Airplane!” — only this time it’s used without satirical or ironic intent.

Kevin P. Farley mugs terribly, with poor comic timing — which may well be the director’s fault, since the physical humor in general is executed badly. But there’s also a problem in the
very conception of the character.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that Michael Malone is a parody of Michael Moore. And I guess that, if you’re making fun of Moore, fat jokes — while presumably irrelevant to ideological disagreements with Moore — are hard to avoid. But Zucker also pulls out a lot of “sloppy radical who never bathes and smells bad” jokes, which are beyond irrelevant. They weaken whatever genuine satirical point is being propagated, in the same way that “ha ha, look at the unattractive left-wing dykes” jokes would ... and, in “An American Carol,” do.

Satire has to be brutal sometimes, but festooning a story with essentially baseless putdowns is not only gratuitously mean-spirited, it also blunts the real point. In “An American Carol,” all leftists and all pacifists — in fact, everybody except gun-toting militarists — are mindless, hypocritical sheep.

“Hey, it’s only a comedy!” “He’s just going for a joke!” Right: And that Zucker thinks he’s being funny only makes sense if, in Zucker’s world, there’s an essential truth to the setup. It may be funny to mock Bush as a complete dummy or fraud, because he is at least a partial dummy or fraud; there’s nothing funny about mocking him as a sexual deviant or a guy with a bad rug, since those accusations have no basis in the real world (I think).

Nonetheless, Zucker paints protesters as nothing but morons and the ACLU as the equivalent of zombies at the same time that he tries to milk humor from the idea that anyone might consider Christian zeal to be just as dangerous as Islamic zeal. How stupid that anyone would ever make such a comparison: Abortion clinics blow themselves up!

Did I find anything to laugh at in “An American Carol”? Sure, I did ... but only rarely. Bill O’Reilly’s appearance is inherently amusing — perhaps unintentionally — in part because he plays himself as a calm, restrained type.

Political satire from either direction is difficult. I can’t for the life of me think of a single clearly right-wing satire that’s any good. And I’m not sure that the really great ones can be called either right or left: To me, “Dr. Strangelove” and “The President’s Analyst,” for example, seem to come from a left-wing perspective, but I’m not sure that an opposing case couldn’t be made. Regardless of what we may know of Woody Allen’s political leanings, “Bananas” — one of his early, funny films — makes as much fun of crazy revolutionaries as it does of crazy fascist dictators.

“An American Carol” has some plot overlap with Paul Weitz’s “American Dreamz” — which has only grown funnier with time — but can’t hope to compete on any level. In fact, it’s telling that Zucker’s film isn’t even as funny as Michael Moore’s one fictional feature, “Canadian Bacon,” which was itself no masterpiece.

The bulk of the movie is presented as a story told by an alte kocker (Zucker fave Leslie Nielsen) to his grandkids on the 4th of July. And, on that level, the film is realistic: That is, the main narrative comes from exactly the point of view one would expect from an out-of-touch geezer whose calcified prejudices have left no room for subtlety. How David Zucker, whose age and background map pretty close to my own, has become this out-of-touch geezer is a sad mystery.