I just watched what was available, which, at a remote boarding school in the mountains of New Hampshire, was limited to the secret stash of DVDs a floormate kept tucked in his closet. When I was twelve, I wasn’t entirely cognizant nor critical of the representation problem that I am writing about in retrospect. This, too, couldn’t be the something we should settle for. He was a cinematic prop, painted a shade of brown deemed permissible for public consumption. But on screen, he was a caricature of a foreigner, whose ultimate salvation came at the hands of Ryan Reynolds helping him indulge in American debauchery by sleeping with an American woman. Kal Penn (Kumar) was of similar stature, though he played a more prominent role in another 2000s comedy Van Wilder as a sexually repressed, heavily accented exchange student from India. Prior to H&K, John Cho (Harold) was mainly known for his role as the “MILF guy” from American Pie, and while that’s not nothing - at the very least, we could say an Asian man helped coin the truly timeless term and all its progeny in the modern vernacular - it’s not quite the something that we were willing to settle for. You’d be lucky to see an Asian character with a speaking role in any Hollywood films then, and if you did, you’d probably find them pigeonholed into a karate-chopping, keyboard-clacking corner, and if not, they’d probably be lingering in the background with one-line quips. These movies signify the tail end of an era when the white American populace could live carefree and careless lives on screen, because they were the whole of America and not just an aspect of it. Interestingly enough, something else these films all share is the sheer whiteness of the cast (not including, of course, White Chicks and Soul Plane and other movies catering to Black American audience), which is still in congruence with how untroubled they all seem. And if you don’t think too hard, it all feels good and harmless, which is exactly what most millennials are reminded of when they scroll past these titles on Netflix and are brushed with pangs of nostalgia. And that’s the point: you watch it explicitly not to think. The general vibe of these comedies can be best described as “untroubled” - lighthearted, often formulaic, devoid of anything particularly illuminating about the seriousness of life. It’s less that they are timeless - the more crude humor have certainly lost its luster with time - but rather that they all embody the same type of inane, happy-go-lucky sensibility as laugh tracks in prime time sitcoms. The list goes on: Napoleon Dynamite, Along Came Polly.
2004 is often touted by the popular mass as a notable year for comedies: you can find anything from the millennial favorites ( Anchorman, Dodgeball) and satires ( White Chicks), to “sex comedies” ( EuroTrip) and coming-of-age films ( Mean Girls, 1 3 Going on 30).
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