What is it about that cowbell sketch? As moderator of the More Cowbell tribe on tribe.net, it's incumbent upon me to understand.
First, it's just viscerally funny. Watching the the rest of the players try to keep it together as Will Farrell and Christopher Walken try to out-deadpan each other is just flat out hysterical. Then there's also the "a ha" moment when you realize that, yes, Don't Fear the Reaper has a cowbell and no, you never heard it before but yes, you can now hear the cowbell in your head even without hearing it in real life. Then there's Will Farrell's physical comedy as he "explores the space" and Christopher Walken's oddly enunciated delivery.
So, it hits all the comedy chakras. It's socially, verbally, physically and culturally perfect.
But there's a higher perfection. Something pure. And it's this. Consider that pretty much every halfway successful sketch on SNL over the past ten years has become a shitty, shitty movie. "A Night at the Roxbury" was the apotheosis of this phenomenon. The Roxbury Guys were funny on the show precisely because they lacked the requisite depth to hold together even a paper thin movie plot. Asinine head bouncing, pre-lingual mating vocalizations and inappropriate, space-violating dance moves gave them a charming, chimp-like quality. But movies about chimps don't work unless you team them up with, like, a cop or a baseball coach or something.
So now whenever a reasonably funny sketch comes on the show, your stomach fills with the nameless dread that, in three or four years, it will be painfully stretched to 87 minutes and haunt the cable airwaves (if there is such a thing) for decades.
Not so Cowbell. First off, Christopher Walken is not a regular cast member. He doesn't need Lorne Michaels to launch his fledgling film career. Secondly, you really, really, really couldn't make this premise work for a film. Really. What would the joke be? One man's quest for more cowbell? Foiled by the evil cowbell-hating conspiracy?
Plus, it's a period piece. So, expensive.
No. We can rest assured that More Cowbell will be allowed to exist in its rarified, pure, crystalline state for all time. And that is comforting.
Posted by Jason at October 24, 2003 05:27 PM