Review of Beerfest

Sometimes the funny isn’t the focus of a scene. Watch the rest of the band while Coconut Pete , the faux-Jimmy Buffett, sings in Club Dread. Dig the Super Troopers-to-be at their desks in front of the sergeant in Super Troopers. Or spy what the two criminal students do every time the student lawyer isn’t looking in Puddle Cruiser. Background jokes are an essential element to the sometimes dry, sometimes slapstick humor of Broken Lizard, the five-member comedy troupe of writers/producers/goofballs/actors who have been bringing their peculiar kind of funny to stage and screen since forming as college classmates in the early 1990s.

"I love background humor," says BL’er Steve Lemme. "I mean, we all do. I’m not taking credit for the background jokes. Sometimes background jokes are better than the foreground jokes."

Sitting in the mahogany-dark Brickskeller saloon in Washington’s Dupont Circle, Lemme looks nothing like the Jewish scientist Steve "Fink" Finklestein he plays in Broken Lizard’s latest, Beerfest; his Fink curls are shorn, and he wears a red Puma T-shirt instead of a white medical jacket. He’s joined by his comedic partner and co-star Erik Stolhanske, who in person has a slight tan and finer features than his Todd Wolfhouse of Beerfest’s brew-swilling Wolfhouse brothers.

Beerfest is practically nothing without its background jokes. In it, the brothers Wolfhouse (Stolhanske and BL’er Paul Soter) assemble a team of beer drinkers/gamers (Lemme and the remaining two Lizards, Kevin Hefferman and Jay Chandrasekhar) to kick some rude, German cousin ass in a beer Olympics that makes Oktoberfest look like a kegger for pussies. That’s it.

"We tried to have a more complicated plot in the movie," Stolhanske says. "We always sort of wanted to emulate good John Landis movies, but I think what we realized is what people really like in our films is the set pieces and the jokes. And, ultimately, what it came down to in editing was trying to connect the dots and keep all the great laughs in it."

Stolhanske brings up Airplane!, a movie with the perfect setup: The camera faces a row of seats or the cockpit in almost every scene while the plane’s passengers pull off crazy shit. Plus, you don’t always have to hear these jokes to get them. It "works every time," Lemme smiles.

As does the tit shot--but, at least, Beerfest’s peek-a-boob scene is clever. Seriously, girls, when your tube top gets pulled down, isn’t your first reaction to grab hold of another girl’s top as you fall--and so on and so on, into eternity?

Five guys are doing these movies, right, so does humor have a gender? Stolhanske recalls a test screening where the highest positive responses came from young males. "Can you believe that?" Lemme deadpans. "Amazing."

"But this is what’s interesting," Stolhanske adds. "After we did the test screen we re-cut it and shot a couple of new scenes, tested again, and the highest scores were in young females." And this was after they added the Oktoberbreasts scene. Lemme blames the studio’s influence. "And we would like to get to a place where we can maybe tone back on [nudity], because it does cheapen it," he says.

Speaking of cheap, we’re sitting in Brickskeller, home of the "world’s greatest beer list," and both Lizards are drinking water and energy drinks. Fine, there’s a beer-related engagement later in the day but they must have thrown professionalism to the wind at some point during the filming of Beerfest. After all, watching it makes you want a beer, and so must have making it. Since they couldn’t get bombed, they drank O’Doul’s and fake beer concoctions of iced tea and pop. But Stolhanske fondly remembers a scene where "Jay is throwing darts, when he first comes in, and we’re sitting in that bar and we have pizza. And it’s such a fun environment hanging out with your friends that we’re like, ‘Let’s get some beers in here.’ And we brought in some Red Stripes and we had a great time shooting that scene all day."

Just like college--um, career. Broken Lizard formed when all five members were undergrads at upstate New York’s Colgate University, where it took them three days to come up with the moniker "Chocolate Speedo." "And then Jay went to the printing press and unilaterally changed the name to ‘Broken Lizard’ at the last second because he decided Chocolate Speedo’s Beerfest didn’t sound that good," Lemme says.

"And I thought we were going to be Hot Cocoa and the Mini Marshmallows," Stolhanske adds dejectedly.

Jay Chandrasekhar is the director. He helmed Beerfest, as he has all other BL productions: 1996’s Puddle Cruiser, the spot-on treatment of college relationships they did in, well, college; the well-received Super Troopers, in which Chandrasekhar looks exactly like Richard Pryor; and Club Dread, the flick Scary Movie wanted to be. Chandrasekhar also drove The Dukes of Hazzard to the finish line, even if he didn’t quite win the cup.

Since Chandrasekhar started the group and directs the films, he has "that extra right to make little changes like names," Lemme says. "And every time he does it, it’s like another thin coat of paint over our hearts."

But all five co-write the script. "We try to do as many drafts as we can to get to the end, for everybody, and develop every character," Stolhanske says. "And then the last thing we do is cast it, so people don’t specifically write for themselves." Nobody wants to look like an asshole for hording the good lines, before or during production.

Tricky maybe, but Broken Lizard has worked out a system that creates funnier movies with each successive one. And they’re not the only people who think so. Last September, all five signed a three-year deal with Warner Bros. to produce, write, and make Broken Lizard movies. Right now they’re writing a movie for somebody they only refer to as "a big actor" called The Nutcracker. Their script for Greek Road, which they plan to shoot next, is already finished.

And they hope to work on non-BL material. "We actually have a movie called The Babymaker about a guy who has to break into a sperm bank to get his sperm back," Stolhanske says. "It’s a bank heist movie, but a sperm bank heist movie. And Jay’s going to direct it and Kevin’s going to star in it, and we’re going to produce it."

It comes from Gerry Swallow, the writer behind Ice Age: The Meltdown. Ice Age 2 is "all about the acorn," Stolhanske says. "He’s just digging for a nut, isn’t he?"

"That little animal with the acorn was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen," Lemme adds. "Isn’t that all we really want--just an acorn?"

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