Eric Andre’s mockumentary comedy Bad Trip gained a passionate cult following when it was released on Netflix last month. The film starred Tiffany Haddish, Lil Rel — who nearly quit the film after the first prank he shot — and even Chris Rock, who only appears in the deleted scenes because he’s too famous to pull off a prank like the ones executed in the film.
Bad Trip owes much of its inspiration to the Jackass films (in fact, Jeff Tremaine, who directed the Jackass films also produced Bad Trip), as well as the mockumentaries of Sacha Baron Cohen. But while the Jackass films about finding the humor in the participants torturing themselves, and while the humor in the Borat films is in seeing Sacha Baron Cohen torture other people, Bad Trip offers a unique approach. Bad Trip is not about humiliating anyone for laughs, nor is it about Eric Andre humiliating himself (although there is some of that). It’s about how unsuspecting strangers respond to what they believe are difficult situations for Eric Andre, Lil Rel, and Tiffany Haddish.
As Conan O’Brien explained this week on Conan O’ Brien Needs a Friend, Bad Trip is a “comedy confection filled with delightful silliness, really intelligence silliness, but also silly and foolish silliness, all mixed together. And it’s made me like humans more because I thought, when it was over, that you weren’t ridiculing other people, and almost everybody who is ‘the victim in one of these pranks,’ you see them at their best. They’re stepping in, their reactions are real, and then you let them in on the joke in the end and everyone is hugging. We need more of what this is.”
O’Brien called it the “perfect movie” for the end of the pandemic. He’s not wrong, because after the divisiveness of the last four years perpetuated in some part by the divisiveness of the media, Bad Trips goes the other way and reveals that “most people are good.”
The “best quote” that Eric Andre got, however, came from the master of the genre, Sacha Baron Cohen, who saw an early cut of the film in his house with Eric Andre and the film’s director, Kitao Sakurai. “You know,” Cohen said to Andre. “My movies set out to expose the hypocrisy and evil of rich, white oligarchs. Your movie is exposing the beauty and humanity of the working class and people of color. It’s not polarized. It’s showing American unity.”
That’s exactly right. The film was shot during the divisive Trump era, and it was delayed over a year because of the pandemic, but it may have worked to the film’s advantage, if only because Bad Trip reveals what we need to see the most in America right now, which is the best of humanity (and also a prank in which two men get their penises caught in the same pair of finger cuffs).
Source: Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend
