Balls of Fury

[August 29th, 2007] It might be argued that Dan Fogler’s performance in the sports farce Balls of Fury strikes some sort of blow for diversity, if only by dismantling the stereotype that overweight people are humorous. As the former table-tennis phenom Randy Daytona, Fogler sweats profusely, flops awkwardly and bulges out of his undersized track shorts. But he isn’t funny. He’s just fat.

A comedy with a profoundly tedious leading man leaves a fair amount of time for reflection. You have the luxury, for example, of mulling over the fact that the actor David Proval makes a 30-second appearance. He has one line and is killed without the dignity of being named. So why is he in the movie? Is it possible that director Robert Ben Garant, a television veteran of The State and Reno 911! , saw Proval as dead-eyed Richie Aprile on The Sopranos and decided it would be funny to have him in this movie? If so, why did he think it was funny? Did he think that people would think “Hey, it’s that guy from The Sopranos, ” and start laughing?

Actually, it seems entirely plausible Garant thought exactly that. It fits into the sort of comedy that State veterans specialize in: The sort in which things are not funny because they are ironic or funny because they’re absurd or even funny because they’re strangely juxtaposed, but simply funny because they’re there . For example, you may have gathered that Balls of Fury is a movie about international competitive ping-pong that co-stars Christopher Walken. This is indeed the premise. It is also the joke. There are no further jokes about ping-pong or Christopher Walken, because Garant and his team are laboring under the impression that these subjects are inherently hilarious. In the case of Walken, I can almost grant the point.

Come to think of it, this is the same assumption that girds at least two other obscure-sports parodies from earlier this year: Hot Rod (He’s a stuntman! He’s not a very good stuntman!) and Blades of Glory (They’re ice skaters! They’re two dude ice skaters!). None of these movies are offensively awful; they all have moments of slapdash charm. But the addition of Balls of Fury seems to mark the advent of a new Theater of the Lazy, a cinematic slush pile for sketch-comedy writers to toss their ideas into when they’d rather not bother with difficult tasks like satire or character development. These films aren’t funny. They’re just flat. PG-13.