MONTREAL – Experts are sounding alarms about the new film Is This Thing On, starring Will Arnett, warning how its depiction of a newly divorced man doing stand-up comedy to process his failed marriage could trigger a dangerous surge in cases of divorced men doing stand-up comedy.
“The world of stand-up was already flooded with recently-separated, emotionally-spiralling men,” wrote Dr. Hannah Mill, social psychologist at Concordia University. “And while the film does show the power of humour in helping people in difficult times, we fear that it will inspire newly single men who lack the self-awareness needed to be good at comedy to try stand-up, thus exposing audiences to hacky material about dating apps or how they don’t like the guy their ex-wife is seeing.”
And while audiences have been forced to watch divorced men attempt amateur stand-up comedy for decades, Dr. Mill and her team of researchers warn that if this film does inspire more men fresh from their divorce hearing to go up and share their side of the story ‘without having a judge interrupt them,’ this may lead to the end of comedy as an artform.
“Audiences will not be able to withstand hearing guy after guy complain about how their ex-wife took the house, or how their kids don’t want to see them,” Mill noted in her report. Then adding how “plus it’s super cringe.”
Asked what would happen to those men who aren’t able to get the stage time they feel they’re entitled to, Mill said this will unfortunately lead many to become comedy producers and start running their own shows in places not built for comedy – i.e. restaurants, dive bars, and worst of all – public parks.
In response to this report the film’s director, Bradley Cooper, reported being totally unaware of how much of a sausage fest stand-up comedy is and how he was just trying to make something like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel… “but for boys.”
Cooper went on to say how “if I knew my movie would cause an uptick in the number of bad comics and potentially expose audiences to sick material, I would have made Will Arnett’s character try and make sense of his divorce through another creative endeavour like poetry… or podcasting.”
