Michael Cera

Michael Cera Doesn’t Return Confrontation With Confrontation

by Josh Rosenblatt

In an era of unapologetically male comedy, where round, doughy, hairy, self-obsessed man-children like Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Seth Rogen, and Danny McBride have taken over every movie and TV awards show – competing with all their might to be the lewdest, loudest, and most bombastic of the bunch – it takes a special kind of mind to traffic in awkwardness and self-deprecation. In fact, after eight years of the cowboy president Bush and his comic frat-house doppelganger Ferrell, it was getting hard to imagine that anxiety and disappointment might ever play a role in cinema comedy again.

But anxiety and self-doubt have been cornerstones of great American comedy since there’s been great American comedy. Buster Keaton, for example, took outsider status and social awkwardness to transcendent heights of self-actualization and death-defiance, leaving the corn-fed go-getter Harold Lloyd and the over-precious romantic Charlie Chaplin in the dust of silent-comedy supremacy. Then there was Jack Lemmon, who could turn incurable shnookiness into high art and heroism, finding something hilariously balletic in even the worst moments of intimidated ineptness. And just because we’ve been living in an age of ungovernable and uncritical testosterone (the Bush Age), there’s every reason to believe (or at least hope; one can never be too sure in Nascar America) that comedy heroes will rise to give ironic texture to our new age of brains over brawn and self-awareness over rollicking self-indulgence (call it the Obama age).
Anyway that’s the hope that led me  to the movie theater a few days ago to see Year One, which stars one of the boisterous kings of our recent comedy tradition, Mr. Black, and the inward-facing boy-prince of the era now being born, Michael Cera. To know Black is to like him a great deal, but set against the near-subliminal introversion of Cera, his larger-than-life leering seems like a relic from a distant time.

Cera, meanwhile, has very quietly become the best actor working in comedy today. From his work on TV’s Arrested Development to his performance in new-comedy auteur Judd Apatow’s Superbad, Cera has defined himself by being an almost indefinable half-person you can all but ignore, until you realize long after you’ve stopped watching that he’s the one you remember.

Watch most TV comedy troupes or theater improv ensembles or Funny or Die “comedy supergroup” viral videos, and you’ll see a bunch of  desperate souls crawling over one another to be the most noticed or the most adored or the most shocking. Louder!, Faster!, More Raucous!, demand drunken American crowds with their jingling coins and their brains half-skewered by prolonged exposure to reality television. And the comedians oblige, knocking themselves out to leave the strongest (if most fleeting) impression and break the most taboos.

And there, on the sidelines, sits Michael Cera, master of the stutter and the tragic-comic ellipsis, whose words seem to leak out like water from a broken spout, who sees more value in a line that insinuates or comes from an oblique angle than one that knocks you directly on the head (or kicks you directly in the balls). Unlike so many of his comedy contemporaries, he doesn’t return confrontation with confrontation. He deflates aggressiveness and violence by pointing out, under his breath, how self-defeating that aggressiveness and violence are. And though he may not always succeed, he always wins.

The great director Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby) used to add unnecessary words to the beginnings and ends of his actors’ lines so that his other actors could feel free to run-over those lines, creating an overlapping effect where it felt like the verbal action never stopped. Cera flips that approach upside-down, saving the really funny stuff for the ends of his phrases, the throwaway moments when his fellow actors have already begun their next lines, subsuming his own words just when he was about to make a point. It’s an act of both self-deprecation and self-actualization in the face of seemingly impossible social odds. Pick any scene from Arrested Development or Superbad or Year One, and watch Cera wait for that moment when he believes he’s just out of earshot (and therefore less likely to face the consequences of his words) before letting loose with some tiny absurdist  moment of observational acumen. Watch this (from Year One) and you see how ably he can turn an entire scene full of manly fortitude into an exercise in absurdity with just a few well-placed, poorly enunciated words. All those other man may not know they’ve been topped, but they feel it.

What’s interesting is that these seemingly ineffectual, lightly spoken asides say more about modern-day America  than Ferrell, Black, or Stiller, for all their noise and attitude,  could ever hope to. Today’s pop-culture-infused generation has been raised on the idea that (as in reality TV) the cameras are always on and will catch everything one does, not matter how insignificant. Meaning everything is potentially significant, even the stuff that’s been tossed off. As such, Cera is both a perfect representative of his generation and a satirical critic of it, with its millions of denizens who shout to hide the fact that they don’t have the foggiest idea how to overcome their own awkwardness or make themselves heard above the din of gossip shows, celebrity blather, and 24-hour news bunk.
What’s a sensitive and funny man supposed to do in the face of so much noise? According to Cera: Keep your mouth shut until you’re convinced nobody’s listening and then let your words creep out unheeded, secure in nothing but the knowledge that somewhere a camera is watching and catching the whole thing.

And that, in the end, you’ll get the last laugh.

Editor’s Note: Please tell us how Michael Cera’s comedic style captures your attention and why you are a fan.