You Can Say That Again: They Came Together Is One of the Funniest Spoof Movies Ever Made

The concept of a feature-length rom-com spoof isn’t necessarily novel—hell, Friedberg and Seltzer had their own stab at it in 2006 with Date Movie, which in itself is an exemplary case study of what makes Wain’s send-up work where Friedberg and Seltzer’s fails. They’re lampooning the exact same clichés, and the films have gags and storylines reminiscent of each other: They share a “meet the parents over dinner” scene, as well as a thread about the male partner still being emotionally involved with an ex after a bad breakup. This is to be expected when they’re pulling from the same romantic comedy canon, but Date Movie exists on a plane of uninspired, obnoxious crudity, too often relying on cheaply provocative jokes that look to get laughs out of fatphobia, scatological humor or immediately tired pulls from pop culture. Look no further than a scene with the main characters in a jewelry store where they see Gandalf attempting to talk Frodo out of pawning the One Ring. It’s like a particularly groan-worthy SNL skit that got clumsily inserted into a major studio comedy, completely divorced from the spirit of what the film is supposedly attempting to achieve.

The humor of Wain and his co-writer Michael Showalter (a fellow alum of comedy sketch groups The State and Stella) is, to put it bluntly, far superior. It’s not that their style is of a much higher intellectual quality. I would warn anyone going into They Came Together that they should have a tolerance for the stylings of stupid comedy. But there’s a method to their stupidity, engineered not around shallow references, but around an aura of pure, infectious, silly glee—the kind that comes with mining every laugh possible out of a given scene. It’s a movie whose inanity is funny because its clever and knowing filmmakers are clearly in love with the tropes they’re lampooning, as opposed to looking for an easy structure to use as a conveyor belt for lazy skits.

Indeed, the more obviously apt comparison for They Came Together would be the work of ZAZ, that being the creative partnership of Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker. Wain’s work has frequently felt indebted to movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun, spoofs that exist as pure joke machines with the aptitude to make 90 minutes of goofing off actually stick. (Wain and Showalter even recreate and expound on a bit directly from The Naked Gun wherein Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley have a ridiculous falling-in-love montage that ends with the production credits for the accompanying song like a music video.) Just like those films, every scene in They Came Together exists to deliver some new instance of slapstick, off-the-cuff sight gag or silly punchline—all of it delivered at such a rapid-fire velocity that makes it ripe for repeat viewings to find a new bit that you assuredly missed.

The comedy connections of Wain and Showalter also ensured that the extended cast of They Came Together is made up exclusively of pros who understand the assignment, further solidifying the paradoxical cleverness of a movie filled with such nonsense. Both Wain alumni, Rudd and Poehler, both Wain alumni, play Joel and Molly in a story that cribs graciously from You’ve Got Mail, wherein Joel and Molly begin a terse relationship that gradually turns romantic despite Joel working for the corporate candy conglomerate CSR (Candy Systems and Research, of course) that’s trying to put Molly’s independent candy store Upper Sweet Side out of business. Oh, and this is a story they’re recounting to their friends Kyle (Bill Hader) and Karen (Ellie Kemper) over dinner, assuring them that they realize how much their love story sounds like a corny romantic comedy.

From there, it’s one absurd scenario and celebrity sighting after another, with the movie deliberately focused on structuring each scene around some left-field joke while resisting the idea of exclusively being a series of vignettes loosely following a plot. Yes, in some ways They Came Together is just an excuse to have 90 minutes of sketches all strung together, but they all feel of a piece—all part of this ridiculous world that Wain and Showalter have created—and the jokes are frequently baked into the strange developments and quirks of these characters.

Take for instance that Joel and Molly initially fall for each other over their love of fiction books (“I’ve never met anyone who reads fiction!”). This is a funny gag about the way couples, especially in rom-coms, easily fool themselves into thinking they have a romantic connection over the most superficial shared interests, but it comes back to further inform the story later after Joel and Molly have broken up and Molly goes on a date with Eggbert Flaps (Ed Helms), who vehemently does not like fiction books. Elsewhere, They Came Together satirizes the idea of the traumatic backstory that leads to a greater understanding of a character’s emotional guards, as Joel has a dramatic fight that becomes a reconciliation with his brother Jake (Max Greenfield) about the tire swing that Joel sold when they were kids to keep food on the table following the death of their parents.

Other sketches turn more toward the outright surreal, more directly pulled from the likes of something Stella would have thrown together (fellow Stella member Michael Ian Black is also featured as Joel’s blowhard workplace rival Trevor). Take a Halloween party scene in which Christopher Meloni, portraying Joel’s boss at CSR, commits to an elaborately absurd lie after accidentally shitting in his superhero costume and leaving it in the bathroom. Someone else must have found his discarded costume and decided to shit in it: “It’s the only logical explanation!” Or, a scene with Joel drinking his troubles away in a bar, home to the film’s pièce de résistance in which Rudd creates a conversation loop with the bartender, who keeps repeating the same line about how Joel looks like crap as Joel keeps responding with “You can say that again,” and “Tell me about it.” It goes on for so long that it reaches that rare, profound comedy where it’s not funny the fourth or fifth time it happens, but becomes hysterical again by the time you get to the tenth. 

For Wain, Showalter and the cast, every scene is a new opportunity for a laugh; it’s rare that any element is brushed off as something that exists purely to advance the story. Even the most minor development or conflict is an opening for a new bit. Joel’s hesitance about attending a Halloween party doesn’t just establish him as somewhat of a drip, it’s actually because a few years ago he was assaulted by a group of trick-or-treaters who made him choose between “Dick or Teat.” Zak Orth as the maître d’ at a fancy restaurant isn’t just funny because he has a “pole up his ass,” but because he literally has a giant pole sticking out of his ass. It’s deliberately overstuffed with jokes—sometimes with something as small as Rudd making an outlandish facial expression during a reaction shot, the film quickly cutting away before you’ve even had the chance to digest it.

When writing about a comedy like this, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of reiterating the best jokes the movie has to offer, and there are a dozen other segments in They Came Together that deserve their own spotlight. But doing so could never accurately convey the sense of giddy creativity that comes with seeing every one of these bits played in such tight succession. For as many movies that attempt to layer joke after joke in making the gag-dense comedy movie possible, I’m not sure I’ve seen one that succeeds on the same level that They Came Together does. Its recognition in the pantheon of great comedies is 10 years overdue, thanks to a creative team that manages to pull off a 100% hit ratio while throwing every single seemingly random idea at the wall without a second thought. On top of everything else, one shouldn’t overlook how New York City adds yet another layer of charm to its wacky love story—you might say it’s like another character in the movie!

Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.