I have figured out a particular school of thought in Hollywood. It goes like this:
You know who are just as funny as all hell? Midgets.
Christ, are they a panic. Did you ever see Return of the Jedi, where they dressed up all the midgets they could round up like teddy bears, and then had them kick the shit out of Stormtroopers? Say what you want about George Lucas, but he knew the formula for success: The original Star Wars movies had a midget in almost every scene, stuffed inside of R2-D2. And what happened in the prequels, where they started computer-animating stuff? The movies went straight to shit, that’s right.
No midgets, no success.
Have you ever actually sat down and watched the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory all the way through? It’s absolutely terrifying. Gene Wilder isn’t heartwarming, he’s creepy and intense and weird; Charlie isn’t sympathetic, he’s boring and more than a little bit annoying. The only thing worth watching in the movie, and frankly what most people remember? Two words, and they don’t rhyme with anything but awesomeness: Oompa Loompas. You dress twelve midgets up in green wigs and orange body paint, get them to sing weird moralistic songs in surprising harmony, and you have an instant children’s classic.
Did you see how they turned the chore of dumping murdered children into an opportunity for entertainment? The movie even knows it has to dress them up as sperm later on, because there’s no other way to improve on such greatness.
Yep, short people equals big laughs, there’s no doubt about it. So when Mike Meyers said he was drawing on classic British comedies for Austin Powers, you might have thought that Mini-Me was a one-note joke among many — but by the end of Goldmember, that one-note joke was dressed up in a tiny velour suit and a coiffed wig. Mini-Me had screen time roughly equal to Michael Caine, and before we move on, I’d like you to ponder the implications of that. Such was the character’s significance, when his main gag was that he was a small version of a big person.
When you’re ready, and you’ve wiped the tears out of your eyes, you’ll haven taken all of this in and suddenly found that the advertising for The Love Guru suddenly makes sense. Yeah, you don’t know anything about the plot; sure, you know vaguely that Mike Meyers is playing a white guy who’s a swami or whatever; okay, the Toronto Maple Leafs are in there so it probably involves hockey somehow. But you know that Verne Troyer gets shocked so hard by a defibrillator that he explodes and rockets into a goalie net (because he’s small!), that he keeps an office that’s proportional to his size and therefore highly uncomfortable to everyone else (because he’s wee!), and he’s used in an Oscar trophy joke (because he’s the size of an award statue!) and referred to as a hobbit (because they’re small! Like the midgets of fantasy!).
So, despite the name-brand reliability of Mike Meyers’ brand of comedy, notwithstanding the male demographic out there who would pay to see Jessica Alba in anything (and the female segment who would do the same for Justin Timberlake), and regardless of the cameo by Stephen Colbert riffing on Hockey Night in Canada, of course The Love Guru still bases the last week of ads prior to its release on midget jokes.
It just makes sense! It worked for R2-D2, the Ewoks, the Oompa Loompas and Mini-Me. Why fix what works?
Yeah, I figure that’s exactly how it must go.