balding angrily

It’s not that I dislike Ben Stiller; it’s more that I don’t like when he plays a “character.” Flirting with Disaster. There’s Something About Mary. Meet the Parents. Along Came Polly. (Yes, I saw it.) I like him in those because he’s just being funny-man Ben Stiller.

However, there’s this other Ben Stiller. Zoolander. Dodgeball. Tropic Thunder. Starsky & Hutch. He does this weird parody of nothing at all. In other words, it’s like he said, “Okay. I’m going to REALLY skewer Person Type A with this caricature. It’s going to be REALLY funny, and people are going to REALLY laugh because they’ll be thinking, ‘I totally know that person!’”

Except Person Type A doesn’t exist. Never did. So when you watch Stiller doing his schtick, you’re thinking, “What is this exceptionally unfunny, unlikeable character he’s doing?”

That’s what I thought until last week. There is a guy at the gym, a new guy, that has made me re-think everything. He has the Ben Stiller “Look at my funny Jersey wig” hair. He wears a muscle shirt that clings to a gut made prominent by a swayback. He wears 70s style basketball shorty shorts. He bobs his head while sucking on his bottom lip and plays air drums in a way that might have been cool at a Van Halen concert in 81. His grunts are obnoxiously loud when he lifts. So much so that a girl walking from his vicinity passed me and rolled her eyes.

And I can’t look away. I HAVE to watch him. I’ve never seen a living, breathing caricature before. Sure I exaggerate most of my stories for comic effect, but I’m not exaxaggerating this time. I swear! I keep staring at him thinking, “Surely he must be a method actor, and he’s adopted this Ben Stiller parody-of-a-parody-of-nothing-at-all for some role he’s playing. Surely.”