AUSTIN-TATIOUS
By Saul Sudin
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STUDIO: Image Entertainment
MSRP: $14.98
RATED: Not rated
RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Stuffed to the gills. But no, there aren’t any special features.
The Pitch
South Park’s Cartman grew up and became a real boy.
The Humans
Ralphie May, more Ralphie May, and a crowd of Texans dumb enough to sell out a show put on by Ralphie May.
The Nutshell
In 2008, comedian Ralphie May recorded a live concert special with a sold-out crowd at Austin, Texas’ Paramount Theater. It was filmed by a team of trained monkeys, and released on DVD. In 2009, Saul Sudin watched said DVD in four separate sittings, because 99 minutes of this crap is just too damn much.
“I’m not planning to eat the microphone, but if I lean forward with my mouth open and one happens to go in, I can’t make any promises.”
The Lowdown
Apparently Ralphie May is a known comedian. Apparently he was featured on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and apparently Variety listed him as one of their “10 comics to watch in 2008”. I can only presume this is because with Ralphie May around, you can’t see any of the other comics. I ended up with this disc at the bottom of the Chewer Reviewer slush pile (believe me, the other options were worse) and thought, “I love comedy; surely this can’t be that bad?”
This is as exciting as the stage show gets, folks.
Every comedian has a shtick. Some are in the Lenny Bruce mode of storytelling with intelligent profanity. Some are understated and rely on the string of witticisms like Steven Wright. And some run around the stage with boundless energy like a coked-up Richard Pryor. Ralphie May subscribes to a style I’m not quite familiar with, where the comic kind of stands there like a loaf, leaning in slightly to reach the microphone without actually picking it up off the mic stand. With that level of excitement going on, and an entire performance stage to fill, Ralphie May has chosen to focus more on diversion. For example, a giant orange jacket he wears, which jokingly he addresses at the beginning saying he is “under construction”. Unfortunately, making a short joke out of it doesn’t make the jacket a good idea. What’s worse, he’s wearing it all over the DVD package.
You can see the seam where this jacket was sown together from several wilderness tents.
With this much excitement going on visually, the special more likely works better as a stand up record than a television special or DVD. Visually, the director and his crew struggle to add something- anything- to the 90-plus minutes of run time. One camera on the left side is in black and white the entire time, making cutaways jarring. I can only assume they were going for some kind of edgy effect, but it never works because May’s material isn’t that shocking. What’s worse, the camera man chooses to focus on May’s hands most of the time, so we go from a full color wide shot of the stage to suddenly a black and white close up on hands. This is just one example of an overall shoddy directing and editing scenario.
Why is this shot in the final film?
You can see the wheels rolling in Ralphie May’s head as he performs. This is never a good thing. Sometimes subtleties of jokes are forgotten and then included. Sometimes it just makes Ralphie laugh at his own material. But it is never a good thing. And it is especially telling because everything he says seems calculated. Years of watching shocking comics must have convinced him that the way into an audience’s heart is to pretend to be cruder or more socially unacceptable than you actually are. Every time he makes a joke about his “Jew wife” or instructs the audience to find the closest black person in the audience so that they know “it’s okay to laugh” you can see how he backtracks on the joke, telling the audience why he isn’t really racist. Offensive as it may seem, this is actually a flaw. Like any other performer, a comedian must sell you on an image or character and May never quite dedicates himself fully to being the grown up “Eric Cartman” as he may come across as at times. This wouldn’t be such a problem if most of his act didn’t revolve around joking about Jews, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Mexicans.
Ralphie sweats his way through the second half of the show.
May comes across as an engineered success, and I can only assume he has had success based on the other comedy specials advertised with the DVD and the hype on the back of the package. But all the comedy is something we’ve seen before, and better. He seems like an intelligent enough person; smart enough to know the structure of a joke and how to involve an audience. It is no easy task to handle one as large as a grand old theater like the Paramount, which was never intended for a lone man standing still on stage talking to you. Thankfully the people in the rear of the balcony section had no problem seeing a man of Ralphie May’s girth from afar.
Nice video transfer.
The Package
Did you hear the one about the comedian who was so fat (how fat was he?) that he needed 5.1 surround sound just to fit in your ears? Ralphie May: Austin-Tatious is so fat it is presented in a 1.78:1 extra, extra-widescreen aspect ratio.
There are no redeeming features, nor anything I would refer to as “special”.
OVERALL: Fat Joke out of 10
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