Kind of a Big Deal

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.