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#362 - Sausage Party
Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan, 2016
In a world where supermarket products are sentient and worship humans as gods, a sausage starts to learn the horrifying truth about what really happens to food.
Over the past few years, I've begun to regard any humour that relies on being offensive with extreme skepticism. While a lot of it has to do with the ways in which the jokes tend to "punch down" at marginalised groups and individuals in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to justify, there is also the sense that these jokes are wholly dependent upon people being amused by shock value more so than any semblance of wit. The conscious realisation that such jokes have no greater goal does not do much (if anything) to actually make them funnier. After all, how much can you actually convince yourself to find something funny? I feel like this is an important distinction to make when it comes to writing about Sausage Party because, well, to say anything else would be boring. At this point, launching into self-righteous tirades about the sheer cavalcade of politically incorrect jokes on display (especially in regards to how many of the characterisations are rooted in some sort of stereotype of the ethnic or sexual variety) seems virtually redundant. Given the film's obviously irreverent nature, the question then becomes whether or not it can adequately justify said nature.
One does have to concede that Sausage Party provides the kind of parody that builds upon the possibilities offered by its target; in this case, it extends Pixar's standard "what if ______ had feelings" set-up to food, offering an angle that the family-friendly studio would be unable to handle. Despite that, its run-through of such a narrative's beats proves an uninspired imitation; the same goes for the film's anti-religious subtext that also proves a simplistic reflection of your average family film's tendency to champion tolerance and togetherness (especially when it comes to two characters serving as a none-too-subtle representation of the Israel-Palestine conflict). This lack of subtlety and inspiration is reflected in the jokes, which seem very dependent on quantity over quality and also lean very hard on some very basic profanity to work (especially when a punchline involves nothing more than a character dropping the c-word). If anything, this is what truly sinks Sausage Party for me; it's not so much offensive as boring. Creating a provocative send-up of kids' movies doesn't matter when you're just as dependent on formulaic developments and obnoxious humour as the movies you're mocking; even satirically-minded overindulgence in the genre's weaknesses can't save this overlong-at-eighty-minutes movie from being the 'wurst.
Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan, 2016
In a world where supermarket products are sentient and worship humans as gods, a sausage starts to learn the horrifying truth about what really happens to food.
Over the past few years, I've begun to regard any humour that relies on being offensive with extreme skepticism. While a lot of it has to do with the ways in which the jokes tend to "punch down" at marginalised groups and individuals in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to justify, there is also the sense that these jokes are wholly dependent upon people being amused by shock value more so than any semblance of wit. The conscious realisation that such jokes have no greater goal does not do much (if anything) to actually make them funnier. After all, how much can you actually convince yourself to find something funny? I feel like this is an important distinction to make when it comes to writing about Sausage Party because, well, to say anything else would be boring. At this point, launching into self-righteous tirades about the sheer cavalcade of politically incorrect jokes on display (especially in regards to how many of the characterisations are rooted in some sort of stereotype of the ethnic or sexual variety) seems virtually redundant. Given the film's obviously irreverent nature, the question then becomes whether or not it can adequately justify said nature.
One does have to concede that Sausage Party provides the kind of parody that builds upon the possibilities offered by its target; in this case, it extends Pixar's standard "what if ______ had feelings" set-up to food, offering an angle that the family-friendly studio would be unable to handle. Despite that, its run-through of such a narrative's beats proves an uninspired imitation; the same goes for the film's anti-religious subtext that also proves a simplistic reflection of your average family film's tendency to champion tolerance and togetherness (especially when it comes to two characters serving as a none-too-subtle representation of the Israel-Palestine conflict). This lack of subtlety and inspiration is reflected in the jokes, which seem very dependent on quantity over quality and also lean very hard on some very basic profanity to work (especially when a punchline involves nothing more than a character dropping the c-word). If anything, this is what truly sinks Sausage Party for me; it's not so much offensive as boring. Creating a provocative send-up of kids' movies doesn't matter when you're just as dependent on formulaic developments and obnoxious humour as the movies you're mocking; even satirically-minded overindulgence in the genre's weaknesses can't save this overlong-at-eighty-minutes movie from being the 'wurst.