Clapter's Death Rattle

'Bottoms,' Emma Seligman's Gen Z riff on lesbian Fight Club, brings chaos and anarchy back to comedy.

Orion Pictures

In recent years, comedy movies have mostly been either too lazy or too mannered. We’ve gotten lots of half-written improv-as-streaming-company-loss-leader or neoliberal circle jerks like Booksmart, in which aspirational characters trade progressive memes we’re meant to nod at in recognition, but not much genuine laughter. 2016 scared the shit out of much of the artistic class, and comedy largely pivoted to affirmation in response (think: Kate McKinnon singing “Hallelujah” on SNL). Trouble is, the act of affirming is diametrically opposed to the kind of surprise on which most comedy relies.

Social media and clickbait collapsing all irony and sarcasm into a monolithic literalism hasn’t helped either. It’s tough to poke fun at the worst aspects of human nature, as so much good comedy does, when audiences can’t be trusted to separate depiction from endorsement. Together these factors created the rise of clapter comedy, so named for audiences’ tendancy to clap in agreement rather than laugh in edification (recorded for posterity in this Vulture headline but a phenomenon comedians had been discussing for at least a decade prior).

Having just seen Bottoms, directed by Emma Seligman (born in 1995), I now have fresh hope that maybe Gen Z nihilism will save comedy. Bottoms, a sort of lesbian riff on Superbad by way of Heathers with a Fight Club angle, is the most chaotic, anarchic comedy I’ve seen in years, a cinematic barely-in-tune punk band with anthemic choruses and drums like a guy falling down stairs. It’s affirming not for telling you what you already know, but for selling the dream that you too can maybe make something this weird and smart and stupid and it will somehow come together through sheer force of vibes.

Bottoms stars the best part of The Bear Ayo Edebiri and the best part of The Idol Rachel Sennott as Josie and PJ, their high school’s proverbial Outcast Best Friends Desperate To Get Laid Before Graduation. Almost every high school movie of the last half century has centered OBFDTGLBGs, but Bottoms takes care to note that its protagonists haven’t been ostracized on account of being gay, but because of being gay and untalented. An aggressively aggro football player underlines this point as Josie and PJ walk by, ignoring them completely as he fist bumps the flamboyantly gay star of the latest school musical to say how much he loved the performance .

It all lives on this level of hyperreal reality that feels almost as if Bottoms is pre-meming itself as it goes along. After Josie and PJ encounter and strike out with their respective crushes at the town’s fall kick-off fair, they get into a vehicular mishap with the star football player, the monomously-named JEFF, played by Nicholas Galitzine, who’s so hairless, chiselled, and pillow-lipped that he’s like a gay fever dream come to life. Here he plays the proverbial Johnny Football Hero, partly as a sight gag, partly as a comment on the homoerotic nature of heterosexual male friendships. The football players wear their spandex jerseys and pads at all times — at the fair, on the field, in the classroom — alternately roughhousing with each other and being cruel to outsiders like a Greek chorus of screeching queens.

Running afoul of JEFF, whose thrusting visage graces posters all over town, gets the two into hot water, with the principal (Wayne Pére, with a Neil Hamburger-esque combover) and basically everyone else, who all seem psychotically invested in the upcoming homecoming game and the associated blood feud with their rival town. PJ and Josie eventually paint themselves into a corner through a cascading series of lies, culminating with them having to start some kind of girls-only fight club or feminist self-defense organization, depending on who asks.

What follows is a brutal-yet-pathologically-zany skewering of “female empowerment as a genre” (as Hustlers director Lorene Scafaria once described it to me) undertaken with the high kitsch of Heathers, the joke density of Naked Gun, and the seat-of-the-pants passion of the Kingsmen shouting “Louie Louie” into their ceiling-mounted micophone. PJ and Josie have started this club mostly as a way to deflect responsibility and to get laid, of course, associating it with whatever cause best justifies it in the moment.

For their club advisor, they tap their social studies teacher, played by former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch. Judd Apatow helped to popularize, and then make excruciating, this kind of athlete-cameo-in-a-comedy movie, but there’s such a chaotic energy to both Seligman’s writing and to Lynch himself that this choice distorts against the formula like the gain knob on an amplifier, making art out of the fuzz.

When the girls in the club, which becomes a surprise hit at the school, sit in a circle cross-legged to pour out their hearts to one another, John Hughes-style, PJ casually begins the discussion, “So, who here has been raped?”

Many of the jokes in Bottoms are like this, clever and au courant, but delivered almost in the form of a challenge. Good luck trying to clap at this one, fucker.

Beyond its natural pugnacity, Bottoms has a level of craft far beyond the utilitarian, center-framed sitcom style that has come to dominate comedy in the age of easy affirmation. Many of Bottoms’ scenes feature a foreground conversation driving the plot, using the background action as a canvas for as many sight gags as Seligman and co. can squeeze in—like the school’s anatomically correct mascot with a huge dong. Social hot buttons and pure scatology are always battling for supremacy in Bottoms, with a joke density that would make the Zucker Brothers jealous. I wanted to rewatch it before I was even done watching it just to catch all the jokes.

The beauty of it is that none of Bottoms’ layered, cinematically literate construction or sharp satire of commoditized social justice can take away from its essential quality of being shot from the hip. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it’s almost always in surprising ways. Maybe it isn’t trying too hard to be liked, maybe it just isn’t trying too hard in general.

Best of all, it feels un-focused grouped, like its natural weirdness was just allowed to exist without being sanded into bland conformity. There’s a rudeness to Bottoms that’s been missing from the last five or ten years of comedies. On paper, a comedy created by a brain trust who were born when I was leaving middle school should make me feel old, but Bottoms mostly just made me feel alive.

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Also!

-New Frotcast just dropped. Frotcast 557: You Are SO Not Invited To My Butt Mitsvah, With Jessica Sele. Show here, teaser here. Episode 555 is still free.

-I wrote up the trailers for Saltburn (Barry Keoghan! The National Rascal Of Ireland!) and Cassandro (Gael Garcia Bernal as a gay wrestler!) for GQ. Trailers are fun, right??

-Episode one of Pod Yourself The Wire season four is in the can. Season four is the best season of The Wire, and thus, perhaps, the best season of Pod Yourself The Wire. Should be posted soon! Subscribe to the Patreon for early access.

-Most of all, THANK YOU TO ALL MY PAID SUBSCRIBERS! I probably could’ve gotten a few hundred bucks to post a sanitized version of this on some paywalled site somewhere, but thanks to the folks throwing me a few bucks every month or year, I feel great about giving it all to you here, f-words and all, with no autoplay ads or chumboxes about Whoopi Goldberg’s repulsive home.