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Kind of a Big Deal

How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century

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$29.00 US
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On sale Aug 22, 2023 | 320 Pages | 9780593186848
*Vulture's Best Comedy Book of 2023*

From the author of Generation Friends, featuring brand-new interviews with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, a surprising, incisive, and often hilarious book about the film that changed comedy, Anchorman.


It’s been nearly twenty years since Ron Burgundy burst into movie fans’ lives, reminding San Diego to “stay classy” while lampooning a time gone by—although maybe not as far gone as we might think? In Kind of a Big Deal, comedy historian Saul Austerlitz tells the history of how Anchorman was developed, written, and cast, and how it launched the careers of future superstars like Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, and Paul Rudd, also setting the stage for a whole decade of comedy to come and influencing films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Knocked Up, Superbad, and so many more.

But Kind of a Big Deal isn’t only a celebration of Anchorman—it’s also a cultural analysis of the film’s significance as a sly commentary on feminism, the media, fragile masculinity, 1970s nostalgia, and more. Featuring brand-new interviews with stars such as Will Ferrell, director Adam McKay, and other key players, the book includes insider commentary alongside updated pop-culture analysis. And it also shares surprising stories and facts: from the film’s original conception as a plane crash/cannibal comedy mashup to the surprising, real-life newscaster who inspired the character of Veronica.

Overall, this is a celebration of a movie that millions love—but it’s also an unsparing look back at what has and hasn’t changed, since the 1970s and since 2004. Perfect for fans of the film and anyone who cares about comedy today, Kind of a Big Deal proves that the movie was, and is, exactly that.
*A Vulture Best Comedy Book of 2023*
*Boston Globe’s Best New Books for Summer 2023* 

"Why does Anchorman still make us laugh nearly 20 years after it premiered? A smart, funny deep dive into the enduring magic of Ron Burgundy and company." —People

"Anchorman is one of the last great broad, blockbuster comedies, densely packed with over-the-top characters, jokes, catchphrases, and set pieces. It’s great to see it get the full, exhaustive, appreciative analysis and oral history, a treatment afforded to all iconic culture. Saul Austerlitz was the perfect author for the job.... He takes comedy seriously and respectfully, but also lovingly and critically, the right approach for Anchorman, which, Austerlitz posits, was a flash point for funny films." —Vulture

"Saul Austerlitz makes a compelling — and hilarious — case that [Anchorman] deserves much deeper consideration.... Austerlitz’s book is a fascinating account of how much work goes behind creating a movie that’s become a mainstay among weekend cable channel fare.... One doesn’t have to be an “Anchorman” to appreciate the book. They could, as Ron Burgundy would say, just need an addition to the many leather-bound books in their apartment that smells of rich mahogany." —Associated Press

"Austerlitz...assembles an impressive amount of research and reporting about the 2004 movie into an exhaustive, yet fast-paced text about how it was made and why.... No matter how small the movie detail, the author provides some kind of insight that places it into the broader themes he wants to tackle.... This surprising history doesn’t just stay classy; it reveals how remarkably deep the Ferrell comedy really was." —Kirkus (STARRED) review

Anchorman fans will thoroughly enjoy this appraisal, and students of film criticism will learn from Austerlitz’s readings. Sterling work.” —Booklist

"Austerlitz’s Kind of a Big Deal is a wickedly sharp, discursive study of a movie that has cast a long shadow on 21st-century comedy... The book is also an elegy of sorts for a time, not long ago, when blockbuster comedies could make a dent in an industry increasingly dominated (“Barbenheimer,” notwithstanding) by superhero and fantasy IP." —Los Angeles Times

"Many influential films have received exhaustive behind-the-scenes studies. Despite or perhaps due to its raunchy humor, Anchorman is absolutely deserving of this treatment.... An engaging read for fans of Ferrell and McKay’s iconic film." —Library Journal

"a well-reported...making-of Anchorman that’s a more insightful history of the (now broken) comedy partnership of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay." —Chicago Tribune

"Hilarious and insightful..." —Boston Business Journal

"Kind of a Big Deal really is an exhaustive history of ‘Anchorman’. You may think that there’s not much to know about the film but you’d be wrong. Austerlitz’s attention to detail and thorough research is impressive, and while reading this book I fell in love with the film all over again. ‘Anchorman’ is a true American comedy classic and honestly, as I bring this review to an end I’m thinking about digging out my DVD copy and giving it a rewatch (again)." —Entertainment Focus

"Perfect for fans of [Anchorman] and anyone who cares about comedy today, Kind of a Big Deal proves that the movie was, and is, exactly that." —Forces of Geek

Kind of a Big Deal is a hysterical, revelatory look at the creation of one of the funniest, most renowned comedies of the 21st century, as well as its massive cultural footprint. Even if you've seen Anchorman 1,000 times, you'll learn something new on every page.” —Andy Greene, New York Times bestselling author of The Office: An Oral History

“Here’s the news: Saul Austerlitz’s Kind Of A Big Deal isn’t just a pin-sharp reminder of the genius of Anchorman, full of riveting stories from its creation (though it is definitely that). It’s also an incisive examination of the societal factors that led to the movie’s birth, and how it in turn has impacted American culture. Funny, thoughtful and more profound than a book featuring the phrase “smelly pirate hooker” has any right to be. Added bonus: it smells of rich mahogany.” —Nick de Semlyen, author of Wild and Crazy Guys and The Last Action Heroes

"Kind of a Big Deal
is a stark reminder that enduring success often rises from the ashes of failure. This is not just a book about Anchorman, but a chronicle of the lo-fi comedy scenes from which Will Ferrell and Adam McKay emerged.” —Kliph Nesteroff, author of The Comedians and We Had a Little Real Estate Problem

"An entertaining, informative take on an influential comedy classic, a book that also somehow manages to touch on broader cultural issues and not in an academic way. A must for any comedy geek." —Mike Sacks, author of Poking a Dead Frog, And Here's the Kicker, and Stinker Lets Loose

"Saul Austerlitz's deeply reported, funny, smart writing takes you right off the page and deep inside the making of an iconic film that, it turns out, we all sorely underestimated. Kind Of a Big Deal not only weaves together countless delicious behind-the-scenes stories but offers a fascinating study of comedy and lively portraits of some of the greats -- from Carell to Ferrell. You won't watch Anchorman the same way again." —Thea Glassman, author of Freaks, Gleeks and Dawson's Creek

"In Kind Of a Big Deal, Saul Austerlitz goes beyond behind-the-scenes, showing us that, as silly as Anchorman seems on first glance, its impact and legacy matter deeply in the realms of comedy, gender relations, and even politics. It’s a riveting read that will make you rethink its place in film history and recognize Ron Burgundy as the massive star he always knew he was."
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of Seinfeldia and Sex and the City and Us

"In his deep dive into the legend of Anchorman, Saul Austerlitz brings us on an insightful, entertaining, and laugh-out-loud ride through Ron Burgundy's zany world. Fans of the beloved film will devour the delicious behind-the-scenes stories and gain new appreciation for the improv-comedy titans who created Burgundy from scratch. Anchorman and its descendants, Austerlitz persuades, remain sources of light and community, and a balm for an imperfect society." —Erin Carlson, author of I'll Have What She's Having and Queen Meryl

"Saul Austerlitz’s Kind of a Big Deal is in-depth scholarship with an approachable smile: genial and easy to like, but the product of tireless, unrepeatable research. Austerlitz digs revealingly into every aspect of the making of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the reasons why the film is a veritable switch box, wired into contemporary American culture. How big a deal is it? Considerable." —Stuart Klawans, author of Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges
© Sub/Urban Photogaphy
Saul Austerlitz is an adjunct professor of writing and comedy history at New York University, as well as the author of Generation Friends, named by Vulture as one of the “15 Best Books About TV Comedies”; and Just a Shot Away, which The New York Times Book Review called “the most blisteringly impassioned music book of the season.” He is a graduate of Yale University and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. View titles by Saul Austerlitz
Introduction

Every January, I welcome a new group of students to my classroom at New York University. After the preliminaries and icebreakers and perfunctory reading of syllabi, I slide open the tray of the classroom’s DVD player and slip in a disc. And every year, when the DVD arrives on its landing screen and the students realize what movie we will begin our journey together with, I am greeted by an admixture of cheers, groans, and puzzled silence that never ceases to fascinate and surprise me. But before I get to the responses, I suppose I should explain myself.

One of the great and all-​too-​rare pleasures of teaching is to watch a student reconsider an opinion or impression that they held without knowing precisely why they held it. I show Anchorman that first week of Writing About American Comedy to dive into the deep end of a debate we have been collectively having in American culture for decades about the meaning, import, and value of comedy.

I put on Anchorman and ask my students to watch it with an eye to how they might put the movie in context. We watch together, and then in our discussion, their initial confusion—why is the professor showing us this silly movie?— is sometimes overcome. We settle into the story of the wildly popular San Diego newscaster Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell)—who surpasses no one in his fawning self-​love—and the ways in which his world is changed, and threatened, by the arrival of his colleague and future love interest Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), and a nearly infinite array of themes and subthemes reveal themselves: the rise of second-wave feminism, masculine fragility, media satire, the grown‑up Peter Pan protagonists of so many comedies of the early 2000s.

We put our heads together and begin to talk about Will Ferrell as a cultural phenomenon, about the conjoined nostalgia and mockery of comedic depictions of the past, the influence of Saturday Night Live on American culture in the last five decades, the feminist impulses of Veronica Corningstone, the ways in which the film asks us to laugh at Ron Burgundy’s odious antics while also holding him at a notable distance, and I can sense a new path of inquiry opening up for (at least some of) my students. But before we can get to discussing any of those topics, we must first wrestle with an unavoidable reality of Anchorman: It is really fucking funny.


Of all the film’s scenes, the one that often prompts the most classroom discussion comes when Veronica confronts Ron in the newsroom, prompting the two newscasters to trade barbs, and Ron to reach deep into his store of misogynistic insults in an effort to hold Veronica at bay.

The confrontation begins slowly. Ron Burgundy has commandeered the office VCR to study clips of his Emmy speeches from years past, pressing a lowly underling into a likely unwanted role as polisher of his rhetorical trophies. (“Turn the music off ! I’m still talking!” a profoundly agitated Ron shouts at the orchestra as they attempt to play him off. Ron watches himself and murmurs, “I don’t even remember doing it.”) Ron’s ego parade is keeping Veronica from her work, and she hovers in the background as Ron stares lovingly at his own on-screen image.

They begin to argue, and Ron escalates the conflict. From his perspective, Veronica is not merely a workplace rival but the embodiment of all threats to masculine authority everywhere. “I’m not a baby. I’m a man.” (Not something you want to have to say out loud.) “I am an anchorman!” Hidden inside Ron’s retort is the belief that an anchorman is the highest form of man, man at the peak of perfection. “You are not a man,” Veronica retorts. “You are a big fat joke!”

Here is where Ron gets weird, and where we get our first deep insight into the uglier crevices of his caveman brain. Ron is ridiculous, but we also see here just how harmful he can be when his masculine privileges are questioned. “I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal, and brawn,” he brags. “That’s what kind of man I am.” The course of human history has been compressed into two singular accomplishments, each called to represent a kind of ingenuity and muscularity that Ron defines as masculine. Ron is a man with a nice head of hair and a gorgeous blue suit and little more but has rendered himself the inheritor of all human accomplishments throughout history. Moreover, he has craftily edited women out of this tale. History is the story of great men and their accomplishments. Ron places himself at the tail end of this potted history, standing poised to reap the bounty of all human accomplishment and accept it on behalf of men and men alone. (It is telling that earlier in the film, Ron says, in response to Champ’s not knowing the definition of the word diversity, “I believe that diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era,” with Brick [Steve Carell] nodding along to every word.)

Ron’s heated claims are silently undermined by the presence of a poster of what looks like Veronica herself, blurred but clearly visible over his left shoulder. The image gives the scene the feeling that Ron is arguing not only with the real Veronica but with an apparition or an invisible presence as well. Veronica has rattled him, and his men’s‑rights temper tantrum is perhaps the result of her having taken up residence, rent-​free, inside his mind.

By now, Ferrell has dropped his right eyebrow. Ron Burgundy is about to lower the boom. “You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It’s science.” Ron jerks up the side of his mouth at us, with a what-​can-​you‑do shrug to accompany it. He shakes his head and tilts it disparagingly at Veronica at It’s science, his body language telegraphing his just-​the-​facts misogyny. In this moment, Ron channels every threatened masculine underachiever, forced to lean on others’ accomplishments in the hopes of feeling better about himself. He is speaking to an audience that he conceives of as being solely other men; note the us, with its implicit drawing of gendered sides for this playground brawl.
 
Veronica is our ally here, taking the blows of a cruel world and fighting back on our collective behalf. Veronica understands the terms of their debate and is frustrated with Ron’s intransigence. “I will have you know,” she begins, “that I have more talent and more intelligence in my little finger than you do in your entire body, sir!” Veronica raises her pinkie when she says “little finger,” and while her comments are ostensibly devoted to her talent and intelligence, one cannot help but see the ghost of a schoolyard taunt. Here is Veronica’s representation of Ron’s body, or to be precise, one particular part of his anatomy, and her depiction is not flattering.

While Ron ranges the course of history and biology to come up with his factually challenged assaults, Veronica cuts to the chase. Her hastily appended sir does not do much to dampen the force of her blow, and Ron and Veronica exchange a series of rapid-​fire insults: “You are a smelly pirate hooker.” “You look like a blueberry.” “Why don’t you go back to your home on Whore Island?” Ron’s cheek quivers on pirate hooker, and Veronica similarly trembles on delivering her line. It is telling that Ron’s insults circle around the same idea: that the polished, self-​confident Veronica is some kind of prostitute, selling herself for money. Men are their accomplishments, and women are nothing more than their bodies, to be purchased by men at their leisure.

Ron’s insults are cruel but also creative and, in the context of the movie, quite funny. They are also relatively generic. Ron is resorting to the epithets favored by every thin-skinned man convinced any woman who does not favor him must be lowly and despicable. They can be reused for any woman, while Veronica’s are personal and targeted. She is responding to his blue suit (which is truthfully quite striking), not to some platonic ideal of men’s suits. But after being called a hooker and a whore, Veronica wheels in the big guns. She knows it, too, as witnessed by her pausing midway through, assessing whether she really wants to say it: “Well, you. . . have bad hair.”

Veronica raises an eyebrow once she finishes, as if to silently ask Ron what he thinks of that. It was bad enough when Veronica was insulting Ron’s manhood; now she is reaching into the core of his being, the most precious part of his anatomy, and seeking to tear away a chunk of his self-esteem. Ron is rattled. He furrows his brow in disbelief, and his voice drops to a whisper: “What did you say?” “I said your hair looks stupid.” Veronica dances closer to him with each word, relishing the realization that she has, at last, found Ron’s weak spot.

We cut to an ultra-​close‑up of Ron’s eyes, in which twin nuclear explosions detonate. His eyes look like two fiery comets skidding through space, and as they explode, Ron shrieks, seizes Veronica by the shoulders, and sends her flying over the desk, knocking over an array of office supplies. “Let ’em work it out,” Champ shouts, holding back the crowd, and Brian (Paul Rudd) agrees: “It’s between the two of them.” Veronica staggers upright, grabs a typewriter from the desk, and flings it at Ron’s head, then leaps off the front ropes of the desk and pile-​drives Ron to the ground. Veronica reaches into her purse and sprays Ron with Mace, then grabs an antenna off the television set and whips him with it. Ron grabs the canister of Mace but only succeeds in spraying himself once more. (In an alternative version of this scene, which did not make it into the final cut of the film, Ron asks Veronica to marry him and sings to her as she beats him mercilessly.)



All this casual cruelty raises a question that might feel somewhat peculiar within the pages of a book devoted to the subject: Just why do people like Anchorman, anyway? The simplest answer is to merely reiterate the obvious. Anchorman is a comedy, and a very funny one at that, and people enjoy the prospect of laughing at high-​quality jokes.

Having established that, let’s try poking at the dirt a bit more. People love Anchorman because it offers viewers a comically twisted sense of superiority. Ron Burgundy and his colleagues are boorish, sexist dolts, too clueless and self-​involved to even realize how offensive they are.

Every generation likes to believe itself the first to ever be truly enlightened. Revisiting the past, especially in a comedic vein, offers the distinct pleasure of laughing at the limitations and blind spots of the past. (Cue the New Testament quote about the mote in your brother’s eye and the beam in your own.)

Ron Burgundy is a clownish mascot for the bad old days, when men were men and men were obnoxious blowhards. Haven’t we all advanced so far since the time when any of this behavior was acceptable? Anchorman asks us.

A great deal of preparation went into filming the scene. Applegate and Ferrell reviewed what each of them would do to the other and made sure that they were comfortable with the physicality of the scene. They also rehearsed it extensively, with Applegate making use of a foam-​rubber typewriter to launch at Ron’s temple.

Ron’s fabled masculine brawn, inherited from those bygone builders of the Eiffel Tower, serves him well at first, but by the time Ed (Fred Willard) arrives to break up the fight, Ron is red-​faced and breathless, having been literally whipped by Veronica. It is symbolically fraught, as well, that the weapon Veronica seizes is a TV antenna. (In the original script, she reached for a curtain rod.) Ron is being humiliated with the very tool of his chosen profession, the metal that connects him to his beloved viewers. Veronica has seized control of the antenna and is using it to publicly thrash him.


Every year, I show Anchorman to my students at NYU, and every year, it feels like a subtly different film. Annual rewatches make for a fascinating scientific experiment, and each visit with Anchorman is affected by events in my own life and in the world at large: the election of blatant misogynist Donald Trump as president, the rise of the #MeToo movement. We are forever adjusting our response to the movies we love, calibrating our reactions and finding ourselves changed by our experiences—personal and collective—each time we arrive again.

If I feel a bit iffier about a handful of Anchorman’s jokes than I once did, I also feel more secure in the knowledge that Anchorman arrived here first, considering questions of toxic masculinity, emotional sadism, and culturally approved cruelty long before the culture at large did.

We develop special relationships with the comedies we love. We watch them over and over again. We select favorite scenes that we force our friends or our children (or our students!) to sit through as we cackle heartily. We quote them in casual conversation and use them in our Twitter bios and our email signatures. We imagine ourselves into their spaces. We make them our own. We even take umbrage with their missteps and failed attempts at humor.

A good comedy is like a magic trick. A great comedy is like actual magic. It is to start with nothing and create something that might ease the burdens of others for a brief, wonderful moment. It is to bring a group of talented people into a room with nothing more than an idea and emerge with a work of art that will convince a roomful of people to temporarily set their troubles aside and laugh.

Of all the comedies of the past twenty years, Anchorman is perhaps the one with the most dedicated fan base, still able to quote vast swaths of the film’s script by heart. It is that rare movie able to get fans to snicker at the mere thought of, say, Ron Burgundy’s pre-​broadcast vocal warm-ups (“The arsonist has oddly shaped feet”) or Brian Fantana donning the foul-smelling Sex Panther cologne. Anchorman is the film that, more than any other, has defined the course of twenty-first-century comedy to date.

Anchorman is the product of two Saturday Night Live alumni with a gift for improvisational comedy and a yearning to create a ludicrous ode to the newscasters of their youth. What began as a screenplay about plane crashes and cannibalism turned into a story of roiling misogyny and professional jealousy in the hothouse world of local television reporters; and what started as an oddball film crammed onto the 2004 release calendar transformed into one of the most acclaimed and beloved comedies of its time.

To properly tell the story, then, we must start at a particularly chaotic moment in the nearly fifty-year-long history of Saturday Night Live, when a disastrous season had led to a wholesale turnover of the show’s cast and writers. Two young men had been brought in as fresh blood for SNL: one a veteran of the Chicago improv-and sketch-comedy scene with a penchant for letting his routines drift wildly out of control, and the other a performer from Los Angeles with a deceptively milquetoast appearance and a willingness to give every joke, no matter how inconsequential, his utmost. They would meet for the first time at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in the fall of 1995.

About

*Vulture's Best Comedy Book of 2023*

From the author of Generation Friends, featuring brand-new interviews with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, a surprising, incisive, and often hilarious book about the film that changed comedy, Anchorman.


It’s been nearly twenty years since Ron Burgundy burst into movie fans’ lives, reminding San Diego to “stay classy” while lampooning a time gone by—although maybe not as far gone as we might think? In Kind of a Big Deal, comedy historian Saul Austerlitz tells the history of how Anchorman was developed, written, and cast, and how it launched the careers of future superstars like Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, and Paul Rudd, also setting the stage for a whole decade of comedy to come and influencing films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Knocked Up, Superbad, and so many more.

But Kind of a Big Deal isn’t only a celebration of Anchorman—it’s also a cultural analysis of the film’s significance as a sly commentary on feminism, the media, fragile masculinity, 1970s nostalgia, and more. Featuring brand-new interviews with stars such as Will Ferrell, director Adam McKay, and other key players, the book includes insider commentary alongside updated pop-culture analysis. And it also shares surprising stories and facts: from the film’s original conception as a plane crash/cannibal comedy mashup to the surprising, real-life newscaster who inspired the character of Veronica.

Overall, this is a celebration of a movie that millions love—but it’s also an unsparing look back at what has and hasn’t changed, since the 1970s and since 2004. Perfect for fans of the film and anyone who cares about comedy today, Kind of a Big Deal proves that the movie was, and is, exactly that.

Praise

*A Vulture Best Comedy Book of 2023*
*Boston Globe’s Best New Books for Summer 2023* 

"Why does Anchorman still make us laugh nearly 20 years after it premiered? A smart, funny deep dive into the enduring magic of Ron Burgundy and company." —People

"Anchorman is one of the last great broad, blockbuster comedies, densely packed with over-the-top characters, jokes, catchphrases, and set pieces. It’s great to see it get the full, exhaustive, appreciative analysis and oral history, a treatment afforded to all iconic culture. Saul Austerlitz was the perfect author for the job.... He takes comedy seriously and respectfully, but also lovingly and critically, the right approach for Anchorman, which, Austerlitz posits, was a flash point for funny films." —Vulture

"Saul Austerlitz makes a compelling — and hilarious — case that [Anchorman] deserves much deeper consideration.... Austerlitz’s book is a fascinating account of how much work goes behind creating a movie that’s become a mainstay among weekend cable channel fare.... One doesn’t have to be an “Anchorman” to appreciate the book. They could, as Ron Burgundy would say, just need an addition to the many leather-bound books in their apartment that smells of rich mahogany." —Associated Press

"Austerlitz...assembles an impressive amount of research and reporting about the 2004 movie into an exhaustive, yet fast-paced text about how it was made and why.... No matter how small the movie detail, the author provides some kind of insight that places it into the broader themes he wants to tackle.... This surprising history doesn’t just stay classy; it reveals how remarkably deep the Ferrell comedy really was." —Kirkus (STARRED) review

Anchorman fans will thoroughly enjoy this appraisal, and students of film criticism will learn from Austerlitz’s readings. Sterling work.” —Booklist

"Austerlitz’s Kind of a Big Deal is a wickedly sharp, discursive study of a movie that has cast a long shadow on 21st-century comedy... The book is also an elegy of sorts for a time, not long ago, when blockbuster comedies could make a dent in an industry increasingly dominated (“Barbenheimer,” notwithstanding) by superhero and fantasy IP." —Los Angeles Times

"Many influential films have received exhaustive behind-the-scenes studies. Despite or perhaps due to its raunchy humor, Anchorman is absolutely deserving of this treatment.... An engaging read for fans of Ferrell and McKay’s iconic film." —Library Journal

"a well-reported...making-of Anchorman that’s a more insightful history of the (now broken) comedy partnership of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay." —Chicago Tribune

"Hilarious and insightful..." —Boston Business Journal

"Kind of a Big Deal really is an exhaustive history of ‘Anchorman’. You may think that there’s not much to know about the film but you’d be wrong. Austerlitz’s attention to detail and thorough research is impressive, and while reading this book I fell in love with the film all over again. ‘Anchorman’ is a true American comedy classic and honestly, as I bring this review to an end I’m thinking about digging out my DVD copy and giving it a rewatch (again)." —Entertainment Focus

"Perfect for fans of [Anchorman] and anyone who cares about comedy today, Kind of a Big Deal proves that the movie was, and is, exactly that." —Forces of Geek

Kind of a Big Deal is a hysterical, revelatory look at the creation of one of the funniest, most renowned comedies of the 21st century, as well as its massive cultural footprint. Even if you've seen Anchorman 1,000 times, you'll learn something new on every page.” —Andy Greene, New York Times bestselling author of The Office: An Oral History

“Here’s the news: Saul Austerlitz’s Kind Of A Big Deal isn’t just a pin-sharp reminder of the genius of Anchorman, full of riveting stories from its creation (though it is definitely that). It’s also an incisive examination of the societal factors that led to the movie’s birth, and how it in turn has impacted American culture. Funny, thoughtful and more profound than a book featuring the phrase “smelly pirate hooker” has any right to be. Added bonus: it smells of rich mahogany.” —Nick de Semlyen, author of Wild and Crazy Guys and The Last Action Heroes

"Kind of a Big Deal
is a stark reminder that enduring success often rises from the ashes of failure. This is not just a book about Anchorman, but a chronicle of the lo-fi comedy scenes from which Will Ferrell and Adam McKay emerged.” —Kliph Nesteroff, author of The Comedians and We Had a Little Real Estate Problem

"An entertaining, informative take on an influential comedy classic, a book that also somehow manages to touch on broader cultural issues and not in an academic way. A must for any comedy geek." —Mike Sacks, author of Poking a Dead Frog, And Here's the Kicker, and Stinker Lets Loose

"Saul Austerlitz's deeply reported, funny, smart writing takes you right off the page and deep inside the making of an iconic film that, it turns out, we all sorely underestimated. Kind Of a Big Deal not only weaves together countless delicious behind-the-scenes stories but offers a fascinating study of comedy and lively portraits of some of the greats -- from Carell to Ferrell. You won't watch Anchorman the same way again." —Thea Glassman, author of Freaks, Gleeks and Dawson's Creek

"In Kind Of a Big Deal, Saul Austerlitz goes beyond behind-the-scenes, showing us that, as silly as Anchorman seems on first glance, its impact and legacy matter deeply in the realms of comedy, gender relations, and even politics. It’s a riveting read that will make you rethink its place in film history and recognize Ron Burgundy as the massive star he always knew he was."
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of Seinfeldia and Sex and the City and Us

"In his deep dive into the legend of Anchorman, Saul Austerlitz brings us on an insightful, entertaining, and laugh-out-loud ride through Ron Burgundy's zany world. Fans of the beloved film will devour the delicious behind-the-scenes stories and gain new appreciation for the improv-comedy titans who created Burgundy from scratch. Anchorman and its descendants, Austerlitz persuades, remain sources of light and community, and a balm for an imperfect society." —Erin Carlson, author of I'll Have What She's Having and Queen Meryl

"Saul Austerlitz’s Kind of a Big Deal is in-depth scholarship with an approachable smile: genial and easy to like, but the product of tireless, unrepeatable research. Austerlitz digs revealingly into every aspect of the making of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the reasons why the film is a veritable switch box, wired into contemporary American culture. How big a deal is it? Considerable." —Stuart Klawans, author of Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges

Author

© Sub/Urban Photogaphy
Saul Austerlitz is an adjunct professor of writing and comedy history at New York University, as well as the author of Generation Friends, named by Vulture as one of the “15 Best Books About TV Comedies”; and Just a Shot Away, which The New York Times Book Review called “the most blisteringly impassioned music book of the season.” He is a graduate of Yale University and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. View titles by Saul Austerlitz

Excerpt

Introduction

Every January, I welcome a new group of students to my classroom at New York University. After the preliminaries and icebreakers and perfunctory reading of syllabi, I slide open the tray of the classroom’s DVD player and slip in a disc. And every year, when the DVD arrives on its landing screen and the students realize what movie we will begin our journey together with, I am greeted by an admixture of cheers, groans, and puzzled silence that never ceases to fascinate and surprise me. But before I get to the responses, I suppose I should explain myself.

One of the great and all-​too-​rare pleasures of teaching is to watch a student reconsider an opinion or impression that they held without knowing precisely why they held it. I show Anchorman that first week of Writing About American Comedy to dive into the deep end of a debate we have been collectively having in American culture for decades about the meaning, import, and value of comedy.

I put on Anchorman and ask my students to watch it with an eye to how they might put the movie in context. We watch together, and then in our discussion, their initial confusion—why is the professor showing us this silly movie?— is sometimes overcome. We settle into the story of the wildly popular San Diego newscaster Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell)—who surpasses no one in his fawning self-​love—and the ways in which his world is changed, and threatened, by the arrival of his colleague and future love interest Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), and a nearly infinite array of themes and subthemes reveal themselves: the rise of second-wave feminism, masculine fragility, media satire, the grown‑up Peter Pan protagonists of so many comedies of the early 2000s.

We put our heads together and begin to talk about Will Ferrell as a cultural phenomenon, about the conjoined nostalgia and mockery of comedic depictions of the past, the influence of Saturday Night Live on American culture in the last five decades, the feminist impulses of Veronica Corningstone, the ways in which the film asks us to laugh at Ron Burgundy’s odious antics while also holding him at a notable distance, and I can sense a new path of inquiry opening up for (at least some of) my students. But before we can get to discussing any of those topics, we must first wrestle with an unavoidable reality of Anchorman: It is really fucking funny.


Of all the film’s scenes, the one that often prompts the most classroom discussion comes when Veronica confronts Ron in the newsroom, prompting the two newscasters to trade barbs, and Ron to reach deep into his store of misogynistic insults in an effort to hold Veronica at bay.

The confrontation begins slowly. Ron Burgundy has commandeered the office VCR to study clips of his Emmy speeches from years past, pressing a lowly underling into a likely unwanted role as polisher of his rhetorical trophies. (“Turn the music off ! I’m still talking!” a profoundly agitated Ron shouts at the orchestra as they attempt to play him off. Ron watches himself and murmurs, “I don’t even remember doing it.”) Ron’s ego parade is keeping Veronica from her work, and she hovers in the background as Ron stares lovingly at his own on-screen image.

They begin to argue, and Ron escalates the conflict. From his perspective, Veronica is not merely a workplace rival but the embodiment of all threats to masculine authority everywhere. “I’m not a baby. I’m a man.” (Not something you want to have to say out loud.) “I am an anchorman!” Hidden inside Ron’s retort is the belief that an anchorman is the highest form of man, man at the peak of perfection. “You are not a man,” Veronica retorts. “You are a big fat joke!”

Here is where Ron gets weird, and where we get our first deep insight into the uglier crevices of his caveman brain. Ron is ridiculous, but we also see here just how harmful he can be when his masculine privileges are questioned. “I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal, and brawn,” he brags. “That’s what kind of man I am.” The course of human history has been compressed into two singular accomplishments, each called to represent a kind of ingenuity and muscularity that Ron defines as masculine. Ron is a man with a nice head of hair and a gorgeous blue suit and little more but has rendered himself the inheritor of all human accomplishments throughout history. Moreover, he has craftily edited women out of this tale. History is the story of great men and their accomplishments. Ron places himself at the tail end of this potted history, standing poised to reap the bounty of all human accomplishment and accept it on behalf of men and men alone. (It is telling that earlier in the film, Ron says, in response to Champ’s not knowing the definition of the word diversity, “I believe that diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era,” with Brick [Steve Carell] nodding along to every word.)

Ron’s heated claims are silently undermined by the presence of a poster of what looks like Veronica herself, blurred but clearly visible over his left shoulder. The image gives the scene the feeling that Ron is arguing not only with the real Veronica but with an apparition or an invisible presence as well. Veronica has rattled him, and his men’s‑rights temper tantrum is perhaps the result of her having taken up residence, rent-​free, inside his mind.

By now, Ferrell has dropped his right eyebrow. Ron Burgundy is about to lower the boom. “You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It’s science.” Ron jerks up the side of his mouth at us, with a what-​can-​you‑do shrug to accompany it. He shakes his head and tilts it disparagingly at Veronica at It’s science, his body language telegraphing his just-​the-​facts misogyny. In this moment, Ron channels every threatened masculine underachiever, forced to lean on others’ accomplishments in the hopes of feeling better about himself. He is speaking to an audience that he conceives of as being solely other men; note the us, with its implicit drawing of gendered sides for this playground brawl.
 
Veronica is our ally here, taking the blows of a cruel world and fighting back on our collective behalf. Veronica understands the terms of their debate and is frustrated with Ron’s intransigence. “I will have you know,” she begins, “that I have more talent and more intelligence in my little finger than you do in your entire body, sir!” Veronica raises her pinkie when she says “little finger,” and while her comments are ostensibly devoted to her talent and intelligence, one cannot help but see the ghost of a schoolyard taunt. Here is Veronica’s representation of Ron’s body, or to be precise, one particular part of his anatomy, and her depiction is not flattering.

While Ron ranges the course of history and biology to come up with his factually challenged assaults, Veronica cuts to the chase. Her hastily appended sir does not do much to dampen the force of her blow, and Ron and Veronica exchange a series of rapid-​fire insults: “You are a smelly pirate hooker.” “You look like a blueberry.” “Why don’t you go back to your home on Whore Island?” Ron’s cheek quivers on pirate hooker, and Veronica similarly trembles on delivering her line. It is telling that Ron’s insults circle around the same idea: that the polished, self-​confident Veronica is some kind of prostitute, selling herself for money. Men are their accomplishments, and women are nothing more than their bodies, to be purchased by men at their leisure.

Ron’s insults are cruel but also creative and, in the context of the movie, quite funny. They are also relatively generic. Ron is resorting to the epithets favored by every thin-skinned man convinced any woman who does not favor him must be lowly and despicable. They can be reused for any woman, while Veronica’s are personal and targeted. She is responding to his blue suit (which is truthfully quite striking), not to some platonic ideal of men’s suits. But after being called a hooker and a whore, Veronica wheels in the big guns. She knows it, too, as witnessed by her pausing midway through, assessing whether she really wants to say it: “Well, you. . . have bad hair.”

Veronica raises an eyebrow once she finishes, as if to silently ask Ron what he thinks of that. It was bad enough when Veronica was insulting Ron’s manhood; now she is reaching into the core of his being, the most precious part of his anatomy, and seeking to tear away a chunk of his self-esteem. Ron is rattled. He furrows his brow in disbelief, and his voice drops to a whisper: “What did you say?” “I said your hair looks stupid.” Veronica dances closer to him with each word, relishing the realization that she has, at last, found Ron’s weak spot.

We cut to an ultra-​close‑up of Ron’s eyes, in which twin nuclear explosions detonate. His eyes look like two fiery comets skidding through space, and as they explode, Ron shrieks, seizes Veronica by the shoulders, and sends her flying over the desk, knocking over an array of office supplies. “Let ’em work it out,” Champ shouts, holding back the crowd, and Brian (Paul Rudd) agrees: “It’s between the two of them.” Veronica staggers upright, grabs a typewriter from the desk, and flings it at Ron’s head, then leaps off the front ropes of the desk and pile-​drives Ron to the ground. Veronica reaches into her purse and sprays Ron with Mace, then grabs an antenna off the television set and whips him with it. Ron grabs the canister of Mace but only succeeds in spraying himself once more. (In an alternative version of this scene, which did not make it into the final cut of the film, Ron asks Veronica to marry him and sings to her as she beats him mercilessly.)



All this casual cruelty raises a question that might feel somewhat peculiar within the pages of a book devoted to the subject: Just why do people like Anchorman, anyway? The simplest answer is to merely reiterate the obvious. Anchorman is a comedy, and a very funny one at that, and people enjoy the prospect of laughing at high-​quality jokes.

Having established that, let’s try poking at the dirt a bit more. People love Anchorman because it offers viewers a comically twisted sense of superiority. Ron Burgundy and his colleagues are boorish, sexist dolts, too clueless and self-​involved to even realize how offensive they are.

Every generation likes to believe itself the first to ever be truly enlightened. Revisiting the past, especially in a comedic vein, offers the distinct pleasure of laughing at the limitations and blind spots of the past. (Cue the New Testament quote about the mote in your brother’s eye and the beam in your own.)

Ron Burgundy is a clownish mascot for the bad old days, when men were men and men were obnoxious blowhards. Haven’t we all advanced so far since the time when any of this behavior was acceptable? Anchorman asks us.

A great deal of preparation went into filming the scene. Applegate and Ferrell reviewed what each of them would do to the other and made sure that they were comfortable with the physicality of the scene. They also rehearsed it extensively, with Applegate making use of a foam-​rubber typewriter to launch at Ron’s temple.

Ron’s fabled masculine brawn, inherited from those bygone builders of the Eiffel Tower, serves him well at first, but by the time Ed (Fred Willard) arrives to break up the fight, Ron is red-​faced and breathless, having been literally whipped by Veronica. It is symbolically fraught, as well, that the weapon Veronica seizes is a TV antenna. (In the original script, she reached for a curtain rod.) Ron is being humiliated with the very tool of his chosen profession, the metal that connects him to his beloved viewers. Veronica has seized control of the antenna and is using it to publicly thrash him.


Every year, I show Anchorman to my students at NYU, and every year, it feels like a subtly different film. Annual rewatches make for a fascinating scientific experiment, and each visit with Anchorman is affected by events in my own life and in the world at large: the election of blatant misogynist Donald Trump as president, the rise of the #MeToo movement. We are forever adjusting our response to the movies we love, calibrating our reactions and finding ourselves changed by our experiences—personal and collective—each time we arrive again.

If I feel a bit iffier about a handful of Anchorman’s jokes than I once did, I also feel more secure in the knowledge that Anchorman arrived here first, considering questions of toxic masculinity, emotional sadism, and culturally approved cruelty long before the culture at large did.

We develop special relationships with the comedies we love. We watch them over and over again. We select favorite scenes that we force our friends or our children (or our students!) to sit through as we cackle heartily. We quote them in casual conversation and use them in our Twitter bios and our email signatures. We imagine ourselves into their spaces. We make them our own. We even take umbrage with their missteps and failed attempts at humor.

A good comedy is like a magic trick. A great comedy is like actual magic. It is to start with nothing and create something that might ease the burdens of others for a brief, wonderful moment. It is to bring a group of talented people into a room with nothing more than an idea and emerge with a work of art that will convince a roomful of people to temporarily set their troubles aside and laugh.

Of all the comedies of the past twenty years, Anchorman is perhaps the one with the most dedicated fan base, still able to quote vast swaths of the film’s script by heart. It is that rare movie able to get fans to snicker at the mere thought of, say, Ron Burgundy’s pre-​broadcast vocal warm-ups (“The arsonist has oddly shaped feet”) or Brian Fantana donning the foul-smelling Sex Panther cologne. Anchorman is the film that, more than any other, has defined the course of twenty-first-century comedy to date.

Anchorman is the product of two Saturday Night Live alumni with a gift for improvisational comedy and a yearning to create a ludicrous ode to the newscasters of their youth. What began as a screenplay about plane crashes and cannibalism turned into a story of roiling misogyny and professional jealousy in the hothouse world of local television reporters; and what started as an oddball film crammed onto the 2004 release calendar transformed into one of the most acclaimed and beloved comedies of its time.

To properly tell the story, then, we must start at a particularly chaotic moment in the nearly fifty-year-long history of Saturday Night Live, when a disastrous season had led to a wholesale turnover of the show’s cast and writers. Two young men had been brought in as fresh blood for SNL: one a veteran of the Chicago improv-and sketch-comedy scene with a penchant for letting his routines drift wildly out of control, and the other a performer from Los Angeles with a deceptively milquetoast appearance and a willingness to give every joke, no matter how inconsequential, his utmost. They would meet for the first time at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in the fall of 1995.