Strange Brew: A Cinematic Guilty Pleasure

Photo from the "Strange Brew" IMDB page.

The term guilty pleasure is pretty well known and can refer to an assortment of different things.  The general definition is something that someone enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.  My personal definition for the term is something that I recognize that I shouldn’t like for one reason or another but do anyway despite myself.  Most of my guilty pleasures are movies that belong in groups that I normally don’t enjoy.

I typically don’t enjoy base humor, and absolutely hate gross-out humor, instead preferring more intelligent humor that often embraces wit and subtlety.  In other words, I enjoy watching “Frasier” and will most likely never watch an “American Pie” movie.  Despite this preference for smart humor, there are a few movies I enjoy that fall into a category that I would describe as “dumb humor”, or a comedy whose humor is a kind that definitely can’t be described as sophisticated.  One of these movies is the 1983 film “Strange Brew”.

The movie features two characters named Bob and Doug McKenzie who originated as characters on a popular Canadian sketch comedy show called SCTV that was also syndicated in the United States.  Due to differences in the amount of time allocated for commercials, SCTV aired for 2 additional minutes in Canada.  After the show moved to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), network heads there asked that the show include more “Canadian Content”.  Clearly resenting the CBCs meddling, and any need for “Canadian content” on a show completely made in Canada by Canadians, two of the show’s stars, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, would improvise for two minutes at a time while portraying the characters of Bob and Doug McKenzie hosting a panel show called The Great White North.

The Great White North segments featured Bob and Doug chatting about an assortment of random topics related to Canadian culture such as harebrained schemes to get free beer, and the issue of parking availability at take-out donut shops.  All this was done in over-the-top Canadian accents with frequent use of the interjection “eh?” while downing beers, smoking cigarettes, and/or frying Back Bacon.  To proverbially stick it to the man, Moranis and Thomas gave the show “Canadian content” that embodied every aspect of humorous, but decisively less-than-flattering, stereotypes about Canadians.

I don’t know what the expected result for the recurring sketch and characters was, but Bob and Doug McKenzie quickly became SCTV’s most popular characters.  This success and popularity enabled them to release a successful comedy album in 1981.  Two years later, the Great White North sketch and its characters became the lone SCTV creation to do what Wayne’s World, The Coneheads, and The Roxbury Guys among other Saturday Night Live creations did and crossover into the world of feature films with the 1983 comedy, one of my cinematic guilty pleasures, “Strange Brew”.

The movie was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios, known for its iconic introduction featuring a roaring lion in the center of its logo.  “Strange Brew” is a very rare comedy film that gets me laughing in literally the opening shot as the first moment features a cutout of the MGM logo complete with a lion who does something other than roar.  It then goes into a Great White North sketch where the MacKenzie brothers introduce a movie that they made before proceeding to show it.

Of all the movies within a movie that I have seen, the movie that the MacKenzie brothers present at this point is the one that I most wish was real.  The homemade movie has technical difficulties and we transition into the actual “Strange Brew” movie at this point.  The plot gets going when Bob and Doug attempt to get free beer from their favorite local brewery and very inadvertently get involved in a nefarious plot that is (extremely) loosely based on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” involving the potential heiress to the brewery.  The central plot is peppered with involvement by our incompetent protagonists and, despite my preference for smart humor, I find myself enjoying it from start to finish.

My oldest brother is a Colonel in the U.S. Army who has been serving as a defense attache to various foreign countries for more than a decade.  His current assignment is Canada and when he received this assignment I joked that his affinity for “Strange Brew” meant that he was already an expert on the local populace.  There is some substance to this as the characters use a lot of Canadian vernacular with the frequent use of terms such as “hoser”, “take off”, and “knob”.  Other elements of Canadian culture, such as an affinity for donuts and love for Ice Hockey, also come up in the movie.

I completely recognize that I should dislike this movie due to its complete lack of sophistication and the prevalence of dumb humor, but my fighting it is a losing battle as I can’t help but love the movie for various reasons, one of them being that the movie is remarkably quotable.  The improvisational spirit of the original sketches is omnipresent throughout the movie through conversations that Bob and Doug have with each other.  As a testament to the writing talents of Moranis, Thomas, and Steve Da Jarnett, material that has no business being funny or anything worth watching instead becomes memorable, if not comedy gold.

Something about the movie that makes it unique is that nearly all the humor is generated by the Bob and Doug characters while the other characters in the movie carry on as though in a separate film dealing with the more dramatic storyline.  Bob and Doug are like bumbling observers in a modern take on “Hamlet”, and realizing this makes me want to see a version of “Hamlet” that has a couple of idiots just stumbling through the story while the audience watches.  It would be like “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, without the sophistication.

Possibly the greatest strength of the movie is that it doesn’t take itself seriously.  The worst thing that a comedy can do, especially one that is supposed to be silly, is to present itself as though it is a sophisticated drama demanding to be taken seriously and mentioned in the same breath as more pretentious fare.  Instead of falling into this proverbial pit, “Strange Brew” embraces the stupidity and borderline Monty Python levels of absurdity that are ever present throughout as the performers embrace and commit to the material.

Everyone involved understands what kind of movie they are making, and you can tell that they love that and are wanting to make the best silly comedy fraught with dumb humor that they can.  While I will always prefer intelligent humor, sometimes it is great to experience a movie fraught with more basic humor delivered by committed performers.  “Strange Brew” remains a guilty pleasure for me, but it is the kind of guilty pleasure that I anticipate revisiting whenever I need to turn my brain off and simply have a great laugh.