“I have this Jackie Chan tattoo to inspire me,” mumbles Will Ferrell.
Really?
“Yeah. It takes up most of my back.”
Really?
“Naw.”
Welcome to a typical discussion with comedy demigod Will Ferrell, whom, we are delighted to report, is Just As Funny In Real Life, albeit in a mortuary deadpan, screwing-with-you kind of way.
There are plenty of critics who might suggest otherwise, but in this quarter, we firmly believe that Mr. Ferrell is the kingpin in what we’re calling the Golden Age of American Comedy Part Deux, a lively nexus occupied by Judd Apatow’s ‘bromance’ pictures, Ben Stiller brand sadomasochism, assorted Saturday Night Live graduates and Vince Vaughn’s Frat Pack.
“That is correct,” Ferrell tells me. “We are all in on it. Once a year, we use our secret keys and telephone shoes and meet up in an underground bunker in Nevada to decide the state of American comedy. Then we make it so. I can tell you were the bunker is. But you’ll never find us.”
Step Brothers, Mr. Ferrell’s latest opus, is rather typical of ‘the state of American comedy’. The brainchild of Mr. Ferrell and his frequent co-writer and director Adam McKay, the film stars the gangly 6 ft 2 actor as an arrested 39-year-old who lives with his mom. When she gets remarried to a doctor with his own 40-year-old manchild (John C. Reilly, distinguished character actor turned Golden Ager) the newly formed household swiftly descends into infantile chaos.
What’s so funny about seeing Ferrell and Reilly behaving like spoiled teenagers and hitting each other over the head with blunt objects for an hour-and-a-half?
Erm, like everything.
“It’s funny because the reviews in the States were really mixed,” Ferrell tells me. “Robert Ebert’s was my favourite. He wrote: ‘I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate this movie’. There were a lot of people who just couldn’t get it. You’d hear these old man voices asking, ‘What’s the deal here? Are these characters supposed to be special needs?’”
Ferrell, as everyone who knows him keeps telling us, is Not A Natural Comedian. Though his teacher mom and Righteous Brothers keyboardist dad divorced when he was five, it was an amicable affair and he grew up well loved and supported in what he calls ‘a boringly normal suburban environment’. His home life has continued to be a stable one. His wife is an antiques dealer.
“Yep”, he nods. “No demons. Just a really dull tall man.”
A popular kid at school and a football star jock at college, he trained to be a sportscaster before a crack on air led to an epiphany – he really wanted to be Chevy Chase. Having honed his skills with the improvisational troupe The Groundings, he landed a job at Saturday Night Live. For the seven years of his residency, he would enliven that programme with skilled impersonations of Neil Diamond, Shaft, Janet Reno, Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush. Indeed, SNL producer Lorne Michaels cites Ferrell’s ridiculous approximations of the Commander-in-Chief playing with wool like a kitten as the reason for Bush the Younger’s reelection in 2004.
“It really is a horrible idea,” says Ferrell. “We naively imagined that making the guy look like an idiot would not help his career out. We just didn’t realise how much people like stupidity.”
Since graduated from SNL, Ferrell has created such dazzlingly outrageous movie concepts as warring newscasters.
Where, I wonder, does this surrealism spring from? Is it simply a consequence of Saturday Night Live sketch culture?
“No. I don’t think so. It’s funny because the movies that have come out of Saturday Night Live, except for Wayne’s World, have a very negative connotation. If anything, while we enjoyed our time there, we were very restricted. There were a lot of rules. That’s probably why, when we went off to do films, they ended up being like Anchorman, which is really the most surreal of the lot.”
He instead attributes his flair for the outlandish to the sheer tedium of his childhood.
“I grew up in Orange County in a master planned community,” he tells me. “It was the most boring place. There was nothing to do. I just started making things up in my head to keep myself amused.”
We’re so glad Will Ferrell has turned out to be such a nice chap. This will come as no surprise to the people of Longford, who have enjoyed the comedian’s company on many occasions.
“My family know we’re from Ireland but we have no idea where exactly,” he says. “We do know that the name Ferrell or Feral as I like to call it, comes from Longford, so I’ve been there six or seven times. It’s just fantastic. The whole town comes out and I never have to put my hand in my pocket. It’s like the happiest place on earth.”
How’s that for a tourist slogan?