Bridesmaids: Laugh Out Loud Hilarious!

This just in: chicks are funny. No, no, it’s true. Honest. I know we’re cool with women jumping from moving cars, shooting machine guns, and throwing wicked right hooks, but the notion of our double-X-chromosomed sistren making us bust a gut laughing for two hours makes many men skeptical. Recently, though, Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler have pushed that envelope, making it culturally cool for dudes to find chicks funny. Look at us evolving! Throw in Lisa Lampanelli and Whitney Cummings both gaining popularity with their vulgar contributions to celebrity roasts, and it’s safe to say that women have matched men on their own level: providing filthy, gross-out humor at it’s nastiest. Because if it’s one thing that won’t change, no matter how mature we get, it’s the fact that us guys find dick and fart jokes hysterical.

Enter Kristin Wiig. She gets all of this. She’s been one of the funniest parts of SNL for the past few years, taking over for the void that Fey and Poehler left when they went off to do their own shows – and could likely be jumping ship herself with the likely success of Bridesmaids, in which she stars and co-wrote, along with co-writer Annie Mumolo, a first draft that reportedly was finished in six days. Sure, a lot of rewrites to follow, but six days? Clearly, these women are awesome.

Still, I didn’t really know what to expect when walking into this one. Was it going to be a rom-com disguised as more comedy than romance? Was it going to be a total gross-out comedy that just happened to star women? Was it going to be a terrifying expose on the lives of those creatures that used to be normal, cool girls until their friends said “I do” and become wedding-obsessed monsters for the next 365 days of their lives? Regardless, I just wanted to laugh. And laugh I did.

Bridesmaids is hilarious. Laughing out loud constantly hilarious. It’s also uncomfortable. You know those moments when you squirm in your chair because you know the next couple minutes in this person’s life on the giant screen you’re watching is going to be just painful, horribly awkward for her, and all you want to do is go, “No, oh don’t do that”? There are a handful of those in here, which provide those thank-god-that’s-not-me laughs. And then there are the full-on puke-and-dook scenes, too, where the aftermath of Brazilian food poisoning wreaks intestinal havoc at the most inopportune time (is there ever an opportune time for that?). It’s a comedic brew of jokes, gags, callbacks, and a nice dash of ridiculousness that definitely induces the laughs for all genders. A rare feat, indeed.  And it’s all owed to the talent in front of the camera. These are some funny people; Wiig, yes, and especially Melissa McCarthy, who steals every scene she’s in as Megan, the over-the-top, highly vulgar sister of the groom, the family sanctioned addition to nearly all bridal parties. She’s downright fearless. But best of all, everyone can act. Rather than everyone playing the stereotypical roles that you’d see in something like Couples Retreat, these are people with actual development, with the comedy coming from them rather than something happening to them.

While comparing Bridesmaids to The Hangover will be inevitable considering the similar subject matter – thirtysomethings taking the plunge down the aisle – and the fact that the latter was a big enough hit to warrant a repeat coming out in just two weeks time, they’re two completely different comedies. The Hangover was a straight-up buddy picture (albeit with three buddies instead of the usual two) while Bridesmaids is a female character-driven indie rom-com masquerading as a gross-out mainstream sex comedy. Despite its moniker, the latter is all about just one bridesmaid in particular, maid-of-honor, Annie Walker (Wiig); not the ensemble piece that the trailer makes it out to be. Even when all the bridesmaids are in fact together – which isn’t all that often – it quickly goes back to Annie and her rival, fellow bridesmaid Helen (Rose Byrne), dueling for the coveted “best friend” status from Lillian (Maya Rudolph). Tweak most of the scenes to play for tears over yuks and this could’ve easily have been an indie character drama starring Michelle Williams as a woman dealing with her own issues while trying to be there for her friend’s wedding despite a new best friend encroaching on her territory.

Paul Feig’s direction reinforces this through loose pacing and by having scenes breathe more than they normally do in mainstream comedies. Not every line needs to be poster-worthy in order to be funny, and Wiig and Feig understand this. It’s still a bold move, one that producer Judd Apatow made famous and successful with The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, but one that doesn’t always work (see: Funny People). In Bridesmaids, there are a number of scenes that felt like they should’ve ended long before they did, as if they had a basket full of jokes for the particular scenario, couldn’t decide which was funniest, and wanted to see them all play out. Which is fine for the shoot, but not for the final cut that hits theaters. But some of the scenes, like the bridal shower speech(es), benefited from the length because of the awkward factor – oh, no, she’s not going back up there again! – but, when other scenes that just don’t need it keep going… and going… and going (maybe it’s that SNL sketch comedy factor), it elicits a different response: okay, we get it, next.

Still, having a truly funny, R-rated summer comedy with all female leads – that caters to both Venus and Mars and everything in between – is refreshing. Hell, it’s rather unprecedented. Plenty of women find male-centered comedies funny – The Hangover didn’t make over $250 million domestically on men alone – and there’s a strong, mostly silent group of men who enjoy romantic comedies. But a quality movie with the heart and character honesty of a romance and the balls-out humor of a comedy that appeals to both men and women alike doesn’t come together very often, especially when spearheaded by talented female filmmakers on both sides of the camera. In that sense, thanks to Wiig and Mumolo, Bridesmaids could be in a genre all its own.