Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.
There’s a problem with the comedy of Albert Brooks. If we lived in a better, closer to perfect, smarter and better educated world, Albert Brooks would be heralded as the funniest human being to ever be alive. Sadly, we live in a world where clowns who fall on their butts are considered the height of comedy. Albert Brooks is far more subtle. A lot of his jokes don’t have a solid payoff. What they have is a great premise that takes us to the point of the punch line, and then forces us to fill in the punch line ourselves. It’s genius stuff, really, but it requires effort from the audience. To really get why Albert Brooks is so damn funny, you have to be willing to walk part of the way there yourself, and a lot of people would rather see wacky antics.
What this means is that a film like Real Life is something that will pass over a lot of people who aren’t willing to get why it’s so funny. Brooks needs his audience to fill in blanks, and with Real Life, this is particularly true. This is a mockumentary of the first order. Brooks plays himself as a filmmaker with the idea of fitting the home of a typical American family with cameras and a crew to film their lives for a year, hoping to get the actual lives of the people on film. Naturally, everything goes to hell immediately, and that’s the comedy.
