Bunny Ultramod, Hollywood Art Critic

It’s hard to discuss “Casa de mi Padre,” the newest Will Ferrell film, without discussing idioms. And I am not just talking about the idioms of the Spanish telenovela, the limited-run soap operas that fill Latin American airwaves, which “Casa” spoofs. No, I am talking about comedy itself, which can be so idiomatic that the comedy of one region or historical era might be incomprehensible to another.

Some of what we react to, when we react to comedy, is the shape comedy takes. We recognize its structure and respond to that, to such an extent that there are comics who manage to have quite successful careers, telling jokes that are recognizably jokes, and that audiences respond to as jokes, despite not being funny. If you create something with a setup and a punchline, and clearly signal when the punchline happens, a certain percentage of an audience will respond to it, laughing uproariously despite the absence of anything particularly funny. It’s called selling a joke, and, if you’re a good enough salesman, you can even sell jokes that aren’t actually jokes.

I would say that “Casa de mi Padre” does the opposite. It’s an example of an avant garde sort of comedy that is very nearly anti-comedy, similar in spirit to the work done by graduates of “The State” and by the Tim and Eric Show. These are comics who eschew, and sometimes completely reject, typical comic idioms. There can be an experimental quality to this work, as though the artists are deliberately trying to create new idioms for humor, and daring us to find their work funny even when it does not take any form we recognize as funny.

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