The standup in Is This Thing On? SUCKS

Bradley Cooper and Will Arnett are working their way along the trophy trail ahead of their new film, Is This Thing On?, opening in December. Last night they were at a special screening in New York, alongside Andra Day, who also stars in the film. (Laura Dern was absent, but she is doing double duty with Jay Kelly.) I’ll have a full and proper review of the film in December when it hits theaters, but for now let me just say…

Filmmakers, I am BEGGING you to get actual comedians to write the comedy bits that appear in your films and TV shows.

Is This Thing On? is inspired by the real-life story of British comedian John Bishop, who more or less stumbled into a comedy career while going through a divorce and impromptu bits about his estranged wife led to a thriving career as a standup. Is This Thing On? is not a biopic, it only uses Bishop’s story in the broadest strokes, which is fine, but it does include numerous scenes of Will Arnett as “Alex Novak” doing standup, primarily in New York’s legendary Comedy Cellar. Make no mistake, despite the numerous comedian cameos and fabled downtown comedy club setting of the film, Alex Novak’s comedy SUCKS.

And that would be okay if there was an actual arc of Alex getting better at standup the longer he does it, but there is not. And the film isn’t really about standup, which is also okay, except, again, there is SO MUCH STANDUP in the film, and except for slivers of bits overheard from real comedians, it SUCKS. 

There is simply no excuse for this! Bradley Cooper knows real comedians! He knows Amy Poehler and Ken Marino and Michael Showalter and David Wain! One of his earliest film roles is Wet Hot American Summer, he could call up literally ANYONE ELSE from that film and get them to punch up the material for his film about a standup and make it so that the standup bits aren’t f-cking embarrassing. 

I legitimately wonder what Dave Attell thought when watching Will Arnett perform at the Cellar as Alex Novak. Or Sam Jay, or Amy Sedaris, or Reggie Conquest, or any of the real comedians who appear in the film. I give Cooper credit for filling his film with the current set of Cellar regulars and not an all-star hit parade of now-famous comics like John Mulaney, Josh Johnson, Nikki Glaser, Gary Gulman, Mateo Lane, Colin Jost—anyone from SNL, really. It would have been easy to make every face recognizable. Instead, Alex Novak is welcomed to the comic’s table by a bunch of rising stars still grinding, teaching Alex how to grind, too. Dave Attell is the biggest comic to make a cameo, and he’s a comic’s comic, not someone the average audience member is likely to recognize. It’s a nice touch.

If only Alex’s comedy didn’t SUCK. It’s standup written by people who think standup is easy. I was having flashbacks to Aaron Sorkin’s wildly misguided behind-the-scenes series about an SNL stand-in show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which famously features some of the worst sketch comedy ever conceived. The comedy featured in Is This Thing On? isn’t THAT bad, but it’s a long way from good. And all it would take is Will Arnett, Bradley Cooper, and Mark Chappell admitting that standup comedy is a different kind of writing and they’re not good at it. They’re really, really not good at it.