What’s funny these days? Is it a cartoon cat getting his face smashed in with a frying pan? Nah, too passé. Is it a morbidly obese man throwing tables to the floor and being restrained by a crowd of restaurant-goers while screaming, “As God is my witness…”? Maybe, but surely we can do a little better.

How about something cerebral? An autistic physicist who punctuates his intellectual one-ups with a punchy catchphrase? The etiology of said catchphrase? Well, that’s just a lazy reupholstering of conventional sitcom structure. As any smart person will tell you, smart characters don’t make a smart show.

Smart people get their yuks from the likes of the Coen brothers, whose humor is dry and understated and requires the willing participation of the viewer. Prerequisite to successful engagement with this sort of comedy is fluency in “affective sarcasm”, the awareness that the obvious emotional takeaway from the images being presented isn’t the intended one.

When the Big Lebowski weeps before a fireplace, assuring his homonymic counterpart that “strong men also cry” as Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor haunts the backdrop, we’re not meant to take his sorrow at face value. We’re meant to laugh at him. For one thing, Jeff Bridges is sitting beside him chiefing a doob, visibly perplexed as to where this heaviness came from. But furthermore, the big man’s egregiously violating the realms of social convention that well-adjusted people are familiar with. Don’t overshare, don’t trauma-dump, and for God’s sakes don’t get sentimental without a really good reason. Nothing matters, man. The viewer is the Dude in this situation. All the Dude wants is his rug back.

All the viewer wants is a similar return to normalcy, which, in an increasingly hyperactive world where attention is a precious resource, means freedom from freaks and weirdos who impose themselves in our lives when we’ve got better things to do. With the Internet giving us unprecedented access to the minds of millionaires and celebrities, the Big Lebowski character rings truer than ever: out-of-touch people so often want to see themselves as important/tragic/misunderstood figures when they’re really just pathetic. We can only laugh and thank God we’re not like them.

These sorts of eccentrics abound in the Coens’ oeuvre, including A Serious Man’s Arthur Gopnik, hopelessly dedicated to his kabbalistic maps of the universe, or Barton Fink’s title character, a pretentious playwright gone Hollywood. What makes them work, however, is that there’s a sense of the human at the center of each one, of the unconscious desires making them tick. Their drives aren’t always explicit on the screen, but can be intuited by anyone with a heart. The Coens weave rich tapestries as they intertwine the lives of these characters — we laugh at them, sure, we use their scenes to process and trivialize our experiences with their ilk, but we’re also invited to grasp for something deeper. It’s an elevated style of comedy, one which has proven incredibly difficult to pull off with the same flair as its masters.

Inimitable as those Coens may be, I can’t help but wonder how the hell the creators of The Curse managed to shoot for their ideal and miss so badly. Perhaps unconsciously, millennial media darlings Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie seem to have cribbed the bones of their drama straight from the reels of A Serious Man — emotionally vacant middle class life, a failing marriage in the shadow of a nebulous metaphysical malice, a host of insouciantly unhelpful side characters — it’s all there. What Fielder and Safdie appear to have deemed unnecessary is the Coens’ thematic depth, their keen eye for human passion as a bulwark against chaos, their penchant for finding the subtle beauty in an uncaring world. They’ve replaced these qualities with a mixture of clunky satire, Office-lite cringe humor, lingering shots overlaid with creepy electronic music, and an unearned baby’s-first-surrealism final act. The result? According to Rotten Tomatoes’ consensus, “a wickedly uncomfortable marriage of sensibilities … [that] will make viewers cackle and squirm in equal measure.” I have to ask: who’s cackling at this? Who’s squirming?

You’re telling me the generation which squeezed every last drop of pleasure out of The Office, which grew up with cringefests like Peep Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm, is squirming because a woman who’s a hollow epitome of privileged detachment acts a teensy bit racist? Because a man with a micropenis has some peculiar bedroom habits? It doesn’t work as comedy, it doesn’t work as drama.

The show operates on uninspired logic which can be solved with simple calculus based on the initial positions and velocities of the characters. As Asher’s comedy teacher points out, it’s hard to be funny when you don’t do anything unexpected. From the first minutes of the pilot you can glean that Asher might as well have a microdick because he’s a paragon of emasculation and his condition is low-hanging fruit (pun not intended) for lazy writers looking to personify impotence. It’s trivial to derive his cuck fetish and submissive, pathetic personality from these premises — even when he tries to assume the traditional masculine stance of anger, he fails miserably, and it’s never funny because it’s so predictable. In nine hours of TV he’s never pushed remotely near the comedic highs or lows of Serious Man protagonist Larry Gopnik, who goes from willingly leaving his own home so his wife’s lover can move in to nearly getting it on with his bombshell neighbor.

All the same goes for Emma Stone’s Whitney. Stone is the easy highlight of the show, acting circles around the other leads, leaning so hard into every inauthentic platitude the writers put in her mouth that she might convince you they’re saying something new about the paint-by-numbers millennial narcissist she’s portraying. But she can’t save herself from the fact that nearly every scene she’s in, every line she has, is checking a box, affixing a new cutout to the collage of pathologies that is her character. She doesn’t get a chance to breathe, to make Whitney feel real. When she plays a stilted game of HORSE with her reluctant friend Cara it’s like the script is screaming, “See? See how she yearns but fails to connect? Makes you think about how psychologically stunted she is, doesn’t it?” But it doesn’t make you think. Nothing in the show makes you think. These characters are zoo animals designed to make us feel better about our mild-in-comparison neuroses and self-centered traits. It’s impossible to imagine the unconscious humanity driving Asher or Whitney because they’re just mouthpieces for smug writers who want to feel more complete than their characters.

For a show lampooning people obsessed with checking boxes, The Curse is fixated on checking its own boxes, pushing the right buttons. Gentrification’s a glaring issue in its world, but so are the people who are aware of gentrification and exploit its negative valence for personal gain while continuing to marginalize its victims. Don’t go thinking those victims are perfect angels, though — they ain’t! A Pueblo woman who exploits her identity to further her art career? A poor man who calls the cops on shoplifters? A Blue Lives Matter type who’s a passionate environmentalist? It’s a Hollywood simulacrum of the real world, where people can be more than the sum of their identities, but only insofar as the show can use these subversions to mock the liberal characters’ (or viewers’) preconceived notions.

The commentary on art and reality TV is so trite as to be barely worth mentioning. Every idea presented is discrete, every statement is simply a negation of the last, with nothing constructive in sight. The train never stops; where we hop off is arbitrary and has no impact on the overall effect.

The show isn’t even funny in a Succession way, where the characters are so over-the-top that you can’t help but laugh. It seems to dare you, the viewer, who’s made the assumption based on its star and its marketing that it’s a comedy, to find humor in an endless stream of cruel, boring caricatures and awkwardly-timed sequences but never fully admitting (until the finale) that you’ve been hoodwinked. It applies the Coen brothers’ style to the new meta-comedy paradigm where what matters isn’t whether the joke is funny but whether you’re in on it. Under this framework jokes become increasingly byzantine and exclusive, to the point where they form a separate language intelligible only by those who got in near the ground floor.

So maybe my inability to connect with The Curse is a “me” issue. Maybe I didn’t watch enough Tim & Eric growing up to learn the basic grammar you need to parse the humor. I felt similar frustration watching Fargo and The Big Lebowski as a kid, but came around to loving them after learning more about Lebowski’s playful nods to Chandler-type noir films or the central nihilist-humanist divide at Fargo’s heart.

The Curse, unlike a Coen flick, does nothing to make me want to understand it. It’s ugly in form and pedestrian in content. Its contribution to gentrification discourse amounts to that of a Twitter or Reddit thread. I’m baffled at the praise I’ve seen for its camerawork. If the goal is to create a painful disorienting effect, I guess it succeeds, but it begs the question of why Fielder & co. would want to distract us from the unfolding drama in the first place. The direction doesn’t lend any credence to the story, it just apes Wong Kar Wai with all the grace of a freshman film student trying his hand at Wes Anderson. Mirrors, reflections, doorways — who cares? Derivative window dressing for a show that’s shallow and cynical at heart.

How did Fielder, aspirational documentarian of decay, get to the point where he thought this schlock was a good idea? Let’s backtrack a bit. He made a name for himself with 2013’s Nathan For You, a fake reality show in which he posed as a business expert attempting to save unassuming entrepreneurs from bankruptcy by getting them to go along with his absurd, convoluted plans. When I blind-watched the first season I was unimpressed. I mistakenly assumed it had to be scripted. There was no way real people would fall for Fielder’s propositions, would believe that his character, a walking charisma vacuum, had anything to offer them. I realized I was wrong, of course — it was a genuine reality show, and Nathan had managed to bamboozle nearly every participant, to hilarious effect. Make no mistake, while my lack of awareness provided further evidence that I’m an idiot moron dumb-dumb, it helped me arrive at a realization which Nathan himself seems to have missed: the show only worked because it was real! It would have been banal had it been cooked up in a lab, but when infused with the intoxicating voyeurism of reality TV it became electrifying. It was a sort of televised Milgram experiment, demonstrating how drastically people will debase themselves when they believe they’re following the will of an authority figure.

In the same way the Milgram experiments’ most salient result may be the way in which participants wrestled with the immorality of what they were ordered to do, the humor of Nathan For You arises from the way participants’ confusion, apathy, and disgust at Nathan’s emotionless demeanor and harebrained schemes evolves inevitably toward full, if insipid, compliance. How do we react when the person to whom we’re supposed to offer our full faith and confidence turns out to be a freak? It’s a Coenesque subject, and it’s studied well here, but it mostly works because it’s funny. Not in a conceptual way, not in a cerebral way, but simply taken at face value, it’s as sublimely insane as any Chris Farley sketch.

The show made Fielder a millennial icon, shouting (or mumbling) down the institutional wisdom of boomer capitalism by repeating it back to us with a very straight face. Furthermore, the exploration of his character’s loneliness and his abortive attempts to befriend participants implied a keen understanding of modern social dynamics. In Fielder, viewers could see their own yearning, their struggle to form personal connections, in grotesque union with the Number One Reason they fear and loathe vulnerability, namely, that the person on the other end of the line is often as weird and desperate as they are.

Nathan For You inspired similar mockumentary-type shows, most notably HBO’s How To with John Wilson, filmed and narrated by a Fielder-esque neurotic who nonetheless possesses enough social awareness to point his camera at anyone acting stranger than he is. It’s blatant “punching-down” humor in an era when “punching down” has been declared verboten, and there’s a bitterness beneath the offbeat surface of shows like How To and Nathan For You. They seem to say, “You think I’m a weirdo? Well, get a load of this guy! He’s a weirdo and he doesn’t even know it!” What made these shows kosher was that their hosts weren’t “Hollywood elites” taking the piss out of ordinary folk, they were merely clever ordinary folk taking the piss out of their dimmer peers. Candy for people who need to feel they’re too smart for their lot in life.

Following Nathan For You’s success, Fielder found himself breathing rarefied air, a veritable comedy superstar. His “gawk at the freakish normies” schtick would no longer fly with his morals-minded fanbase, and I imagine it was getting old for him anyway. He’d hit it big, he could do whatever he wanted. Why not go conceptual?

His follow-up effort, 2022’s The Rehearsal, found him hyperanalyzing the intricacies of mundane social situations while leaning further into the self-deprecating aspects of his earlier character. It seemed a natural step for him, one which allowed him to drill down at the heart of what made his own style of comedy work so well. While the execution left something to be desired, The Rehearsal felt like a confident step toward a more mature Nathan.

The Curse, with its turn toward a strictly fictional narrative, seemed to come out of nowhere. Sure, it had proven anxietycore filmmaker Benny Safdie on board, but being that it was marketed as a comedy one would have assumed Fielder to be the driving creative force. If Nathan For You falls flat without the “certified organic” sticker of reality TV, how would his offbeat sensibilities line up with the demands of creating a storyline from scratch? Well, they didn’t line up, and the new show did fall flat. It’s no big deal that it did — it was a creative experiment from two people with an empty canvas and a blank check. Not all experiments are successful. But that hasn’t stopped the rave reviews, the online communities dedicated to “solving” the show, or legions of fans exalting it as a triumph of art.

We’re told it’s a bold exploration of inauthenticity, of liberal hubris, of the grim world of real estate. We’re told it’s “like nothing else on television”. Sorry, but did I walk into an alternate reality? Succession ended less than a year ago, tackled all these issues and more in a similar but far breezier style, and remained the darling of entertainment media for its entire run. Sure, home flippers Asher and Whitney are small potatoes next to power couple par excellence Tom and Shiv, but their struggles could hardly be more identical: gain money/power, exploit their friends even at the expense of their dignity, somehow reconcile their actions with the belief that they’re fundamentally good people.

Everything else on the show’s been done before and better, too. The Pueblo friend doing his Indian act to mock Whitney is such a tired trope I felt secondhand embarrassment for whoever wrote it. Fielder handing Nala a crisp Benjamin only to demand it back off-camera is “Scott’s Tots” redux. The scene in the comedy class where Asher’s “condition” is revealed to everyone is a pale imitation of a sketch my aspiring comedian roommate (and likely many others) made in 2015. Like the Coens, Fielder has a dry, subtle touch for humor, but when he drops the thrill of showing us how real people react to his antics while simultaneously adding nothing new on the drama side, he fails to hold up.

You don’t need high production values and overwrought surrealism to be told gentrifying home flippers suck, that behind its cheery facade reality TV is a vacuous wasteland, or that the weirdos we wish would vamoose from our lives are often broken, useless people. If you’re already a fan of Fielder, of this type of media, you know it. Every force of life, online and in your bustling day-to-day, has made these truths self-evident. If you gained anything from The Curse besides the opportunity to spend a few hours sneering at the sort of person you already have no respect for, then congratulations, I hope you had a nice ten-year nap under your rock. We’re back at the questions that’ve been asked so many times before: why do we keep making satire in a world where satire writes itself? Why do we keep insisting comedy needs to “say something”? Why do we turn to increasingly abstruse forms to communicate these simple truths? Why not throw in the towel and go back to being actually funny?

This brings us to The Curse’s copout ending, which seems to answer these questions with a poignant “fuck you, that’s why.” As with any piece of ambiguous media, folks will fall over themselves trying to analyze it or smugly asserting that there’s nothing to “get”. Nonetheless, I feel obligated to give my little fan theory on the conclusion and the show in general: the “curse” isn’t present in the narrative at all, but in the metanarrative. It’s in Fielder’s life, it’s in our lives, it’s taken hold of the realm of comedy and criticism. Now on top of the world, Fielder finds he can’t make a statement or even make a joke. Every idea’s been expounded, every bit’s been beaten to death. Yet he’s cursed to write and we’re cursed to watch. He must give us something to talk about, and we must convince ourselves it’s good because we’ve somehow equated being able to make people uncomfortable in humorous ways with being a shrewd social critic. So what if it’s a clumsy narrative about inauthenticity? People will think it’s smart if the guy flies away at the end.

It’s sheer nihilism, a Heideckerian slap in the face to the unsuspecting viewer, the one not in on the joke (the only joke being that, quelle surprise, there’s not much to these characters beyond their unpleasantness). The only ones in on the joke are those who want to see bad caricatures of bad people screwing up their lives, failing upwards in the worst way possible, or else those who think it’s wild enough seeing avatar of awkwardness Fielder next to Emma Stone of all people.

How do we break this curse? For one thing, let’s stop pretending that glossy production means a show’s as well thought-out as it appears. Artisanal camerawork, especially in premium cable originals, is so often substituted for substance that I’m surprised we’re not inured to it by now. Furthermore, let’s exercise a little critical detachment instead of letting our enamoration with Fielder and Safdie’s previous work convince us that they can do no wrong. Just because these likable pioneers of stressful cinema said something, it doesn’t mean they had something to say. Let’s admit it: they laid an egg here, substituting cringe and self-righteousness for laughs and original ideas. So what? It doesn’t mean they’re bad at what they do. I’m sure they had fun making the show, and it doesn’t seem like they set out to achieve much more than that. But hailing shallow messes like The Curse as groundbreaking or necessary TV is only doing the work of pushing the cultural needle further toward resignation, toward pointless spectacle.

I know we can aspire to more than that. If Fielder’s not the one to pull it off, if he wants to remain a bitter nihilist, well, maybe he should go back to being funny. Not conceptually funny, not meta-funny, actually funny. We know he’s capable of it. His dead-eyed demeanor would play well in so many scripted situations, I’m in awe that this is the first one he landed on. Oh, well. While I wait for whatever he’s cursed to curse us with next, I’ll be checking out that cat who gets his face smashed in with a bowling ball.

☉