Fuck Buddies, Or, Zack And Murray Make A Porno

If you’re writing a sitcom or a comedy sketch and you want a guaranteed laugh, all you have to do is have two male characters kiss each other. (Cheers ran for 11 seasons, and seldom did they get a bigger, more delighted response from the studio audience than when two gay guys kissed Norm — or when Norm and Cliff gave each other a peck as a gag.) By that logic, writer/director Lynn Shelton’s Humpday should be the funniest movie ever made: it’s the story of two longtime male friends who decide to have sex with each other.

That’s a pretty startling premise, but Shelton arrives at it in a surprisingly plausible way. Mark Duplass (one half of the Duplass Brothers filmmaking team, who made the mumblecore hits The Puffy Chair and Baghead) is Ben, a paunchy Seattleite in his early 30s whose somewhat sleepy domestic routine with his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) is disrupted by a surprise visit from his buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard, who you may recognize as one of the three doomed heroes of The Blair Witch Project). Andrew — bearded, bohemian, well-travelled, wearing a hat he claims was given to him by a princess — may be an immature slacker, but something about the way he looks at Ben’s house with its neat little kitchen and its coffee table books plants a few seeds of dissatisfaction in Ben’s head.

Soon, Ben finds himself at a party with Andrew in a house full of sexually liberated strangers where the conversation turns to porn — specifically Humpfest, the amateur porn festival The Stranger runs every year. Andrew, who fancies himself an artist, talks vaguely about wanting to create a submission — to which Ben, a little drunk, a little high, with Anna at home, perhaps wanting to prove to the assembled crowd that he’s not as square as they probably think he is, observes that if Andrew wants to create something really fresh and original, he should make a movie in which two guys have sex. Two straight guys. You know, like him and Andrew. He says he’d totally be into it. Even the next day, after he sobers up, he says his mind hasn’t changed.

Shelton has written a very shrewd screenplay here. The humour in Humpday doesn’t depend so much on the idea of two guys deciding to have sex as does on the way a certain young, well-educated, left-wing segment of the population talks about sex. Ben, Anna, and Andrew have no idea what they really think about anything — at one point, Ben literally says he has absolutely no idea why he is so determined to go through with his “date” with Andrew — but they are hilariously articulate about their inchoate emotions. Ben may not know why he wants to try having sex with Andrew, but he can talk Anna’s ear off about how wanting to have sex with him makes him feel. It’s a small, buried running joke that while the only thing Humpday’s characters ever want to talk about is sex, up until the final scene between Ben and Andrew, there’s not a single sexual encounter that ever gets consummated. (Of course, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling whether Ben and Andrew actually get it on.) Conversation is these characters’ preferred method of intercourse — Shelton could almost have titled it Deep Throat.

I don’t know how well Humpday’s no-name cast and semi-improvisational acting style will go over with multiplex audiences, but the mere fact that this cheaply made little comedy is getting the wide distribution it’s getting represents some sort of cinematic landmark: it may be the first commercial film in which it’s not entirely outside the realm of reasonable possibility for a straight guy to consider having a homosexual experience. If Ben and Andrew have their misgivings about the idea, it’s not because they’re worried about “turning gay” or being penetrated; on the contrary, they’re just not sure they can overcome their inalterable heterosexuality long enough to complete the act.

If Brüno tries to make the case that America is populated by latent homophobes, Humpday takes the opposite position, and suggests that America is full of people who’d at least be willing to give homosexuality a shot, if only for a night. But it would have to be with a good, trusted friend. And there’d need to be a video camera recording everything. See it with someone you love — but never even considered kissing until now.