Tommy Boy; Chicken Wings

Son of a--that's gonna leave a mark

Tommy Boy (1995)

Director: Peter Segal

Had I seen this before: Yes

Did I recognize the “famous quote” in the ad: No

We are here today to discuss a film released in the first quarter of 1995, featuring a Saturday Night Live personality portraying a wealthy failson who must overcome his privileged slob lifestyle to prove himself worthy of taking over the family business and continuing the proud American plutocratic tradition of passing down wealth to decreasingly competent custodians. But Erica! you are saying. We already covered Billy Madison! Ah, yes, but this is in fact another such tale, because in early 1995 our nation had an insatiable appetite for goofy, undereducated young men with juvenile senses of humor and occasional bursts of shouting. If you pay close attention, however, you can tell the films apart by the fact that this one has a lot more fat jokes.

Cards on the table, of these two very similarly-conceived Lorne Michaels productions, I tend to be a Billy Madison partisan, but that is a completely arbitrary result of which movie I managed to see in the theater with my friends at the time, and not of any deep critical analysis. In fact, it’s possible that Tommy Boy is a slightly better movie—according to unassailable internet source IMDb, it’s one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite comedies, a factoid I sat with in silent contemplation for several minutes*—although now having revisited both in the past couple of years I would say they are pretty even in terms of overall quality. Tommy Boy may have a slightly higher hit rate of funny lines, but it is also slightly more afflicted by predictable 90s-comedy ailments (the aforementioned barrage of fat jokes, light gay panic, objectification of women). It also, like Billy Madison, still made me laugh, because at the end of the day there is only so much my superego can do in the face of having been 15 years old in 1995.

We first meet Tommy Callahan, Jr. (Chris Farley) as a young boy who is late for school. His desperate sprint to catch up with the bus demonstrates that he tends to have bad luck and a strongly contentious relationship with the physical world around him. We then see him as a young man, a fresh-faced college barely-graduate, still burdened by the little gray raincloud of slapstick mishaps that has presumably followed him around since birth. The success of Farley’s persona was always in the contradictions: his physical bulk belied a dancer’s strength and grace, while his shy, sweet naivete was punctuated by deep, booming rage. This is essentially the joke of the movie—I wouldn’t say there are a lot of notes being played here, but it is one fairly effective chord. Critically, he is accompanied by Richard (David Spade), former high school classmate and current accountant at his father’s company, who is tasked with nepo-babysitting as Tommy attempts to sell brake pads across the country and thwart the evil, company-unloading plans of his deceased father’s scheming bride (Bo Derek) and her actual, secret husband (Rob Lowe).

The Farley and Spade odd-couple dynamic is the real lynchpin of this film. As someone who frequently watched them on SNL, I would not say they are reinventing the wheel with this iteration of uptight pipsqueak vs. gregarious slob, but they are spinning it manically in a way that works more often than not. Farley has a charisma that runs very hot and is constantly crossing over into too much, which is balanced by Spade’s locked-down, sandpaper-dry quippiness. Obviously this is not the most scalding of takes—Chris Farley and David Spade are funny together—but I was pleasantly surprised at how well their rapport held up for me. I’m not sure I would buy bulk brake pads off of the duo, but…I’m also not sure I wouldn’t.

The plot of this movie will not exactly keep you guessing, but plot is beside the point in this specific style of comedy. It’s a tango of set pieces, a samba of silliness, a waltz from suddenly-conscious backseat deer to airplane flotation device stranglehold to unexpected toupee reveal. You know that Tommy will win because he is nice and the bad guys will lose because they are mean. And in the end we’ll all discover that the real treasure was the many, many, many fat jokes we made along the way.

*Other fun facts that caused me to sit in quiet contemplation: (1) four out of six movies referenced so far have starred male SNL cast members; (2) I am currently five years older than Bo Derek and her Golden Girls haircut in this film; and (3) while I have never personally participated in cow-tipping, I do hail from what must be one of the more cow-tipsy areas of the country and nothing made me feel more like I was a high school sophomore again than that scene.

The Regal Ad

The outfit: Everyone in this section of the ad is just wearing business suits, which in this case is exactly what the character is wearing as well. It’s still boring, though. B+

The line: Exclaiming “son of a—” is Tommy’s catchphrase, repeated somewhere around a dozen times throughout the movie. The “that’s gonna leave a mark” addition appears twice, both times in reference to being smacked hard in the face by some object. It was also, apparently, lifted by Chris Farley from the film Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. So this “great movie line” is someone imitating someone else imitating a funny line from another movie. You might think I would be annoyed by this, but actually I’m not sure. I sort of like the meta reference layers even if they were inadvertent. It’s turtles frat boys quoting comedies all the way down. B

The context: This gentleman, perhaps unnerved by his friend’s strangely intimate relationship with his own popcorn, has spilled some down the front of his shirt and is presumably concerned about the resulting buttery grease stain. It’s not that this doesn’t make sense in-world, but it is a very odd way to try to sell concessions, by creating sartorial anxiety around the act of eating popcorn. B-

Crispy Baked Chicken Wings by Tastes Better From Scratch

After a disappointing sales meeting, Tommy and Richard have lunch at an eatery called The Cluck Bucket, where Tommy uses his innate prattling charm (?) to convince a waitress to turn on the fryers and serve him some chicken wings even though it’s the wrong time of day for hot food. These chicken wings become a metaphor for Tommy’s sales approach for the rest of the film in a way that I did not fully follow, because I personally could not really distinguish Tommy’s disastrous failure babble from his disarming winning babble. For the record, the wings I made were not metaphorical. They were just dinner.

Up next: “She’s beauty and she’s grace.”