Last week, Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg collaborated to produce a sequel to their popular music video "Dick in a Box." The new video is titled "Motherlover" and, like "Dick in a Box", its humor is couched in a combination of ridiculous sexual gestures and a parody of boy-band popular music. However, both elements are exemplary of a style of humor emerging in which it is becoming more and more difficult to determine not only the logic of the irony employed but the very object of parody. Part of the irony is obvious. Samberg and Timberlake wear horribly out of fashion clothes, jewelry and facial hair, and yet in their world, they are inexplicably cool. They act with confidence and succeed, impressing women and each other's mothers with sexual ingenuity and prowess, despite an appearance in which such feats would be impossible in the real world.
This is a standard device, see Austin Powers. But while Austin Powers was dressed in hyperbolic 60s fashion, Samberg and Timberlake seem to be attired in a combination of Miami Vice suits and shades, early 90s hip-hop formal wear, and trimmed petite beards from, well, I don't know where. If people ever did dress in such a combination in a particular time period, I never saw them singing. What is curious is not that someone is able to assemble an ironic outfit in which no referent ever existed -- after all it is done in sci-fi/fantasy movies all the time -- but rather that it is able to be such effective parody, if the word parody can still be used in this context.
Certainly, the pleasure of their outfits is one of several in these music videos. What we could call their content, in the first, putting one's erect penis in a box and giving it as a successful Christmas gift, and in the second, a mutual understanding between friends who preform sexual favors for each other's lonely mother, are aided at once by a shock of inappropriateness -- forever a tool of humor -- and an understanding of normalcy. The inappropriate act is never vilified (though at the end of "Dick in a Box" the characters are arrested). In "Dick in a Box" when the girlfriends open their Christmas gifts, after being told this gift would be special and more "real" than a "diamond ring" or a "fancy car", and seeing, we presume, an erect penis sticking into a box, the affect image is wholly positive; Maya Rudolf mouths "thank you" in response. I couldn't say this structure is novel. In fact, I'm certain I've seen it before, from Strangers with Candy to Flight of the Conchords. But what puzzles me is the way in which this logic of irony is able to comprise humor we find "fresh." It is very difficult to describe why this is so. It is no secret to most people that humor ages faster than any other style of media content, and is impossible to say now how well "Dick in a Box" will weather comedy which will proceed it in the following 20 years. But right now, can we imagine anything more inappropriate, where to go from here?
Much can also be said about the music, which is likely the greatest pleasure when combined with the other elements -- the back and forth between Timberlake's soaring tenor and Samberg's forgivably monotone bass, the intelligent use of pop cliches, and its general quality of production and melody. Yet in the end, I still am not sure who or what is being parodied through the music, and yet idea that something is being parodied persists. I think what this all implies is that in comedy today, that anything real being parodied is often secondary, or wholly unnecessary in lieu of the act of parody itself. Parody for parody's sake: think Will Ferrell's impression of Janet Reno a few years back. The only link that impression had to Janet Reno was, perhaps, her masculine face.
This also shows the delicate self contained worlds sketch comedy persists in. I think the reason why SNL sketches have a difficult time translating into feature films is not necessarily because they have one joke, although it doesn't help, but because the world in which a particular comedic logic exists is forced to reconstruct itself when that world expands through the necessities of narration. One imagines a movie of the "Dick in a Box" sketch would have to follow a formula similar to Austin Powers, in which their anachronistic fantasy world would be punctured by a contemporary world which defines them as ironic in the first place. Let's hope this never happens.
