Okay, I finally got access to a computer with a sound, and I watched the preview, although after watching it, I see that I wouldn't have been missing much with the sound off.
The bit with the cop show got a smirk out of me, but the rest of it smacked of pointlessness. It reminded me of this phrase, attributed to Larry Miller: "A good comedian looks at the world and sees a funny place; a great comedian doesn't." The makers of TFYOVWKUSMAFSBAI want the world to be a funny place where pregnant women are enormous blimps and guys wear shirts that say "virgin" and have 20-inch hard-ons and old people have sex in public and crazy chicks vomit like firehoses and...huh. These people have a sense of humor very different from mine.
But even if all of this weren't tasteless and unoriginal, it wouldn't be great comedy. Great comedy requires sincerity. "Juno" had sincerity - it coupled awkward teenage romance with painful teenage pregnancy. "Napoleon Dynamite" had sincerity - as rambling and plot-less as it was, we could really feel sorry for Napoleon, and when he finally had some sort of triumph, it was as awesome as it was goofy. Bugs Bunny had sincerity - he faced genuine peril and had to summon all his wits and wiles to overcome it. I detect no sincerity in TFYOVWKUSMAFSBAI. The title itself is putting on a front. It's doing its best to be funny in a funny world, but it only ends up being out of touch in a sad world. To quote Vohn Exel:
Vohn_exel said:
These movies try to do too much at a time. They should try more to focus on one thing, and then throw in an occasional laugh or two. The old spoofs had a bit of sillyness in them, but they were regulated. It was cartoony, Looney Tunes type humor, but it was reigned in before going to far, and they were usually subtle with it. The new spoofs seem to almost have a man in a silly hat jumping up and down and pointing at thier joke going "Look! Laugh! LAUGH!"
There's something else missing: discipline. Look at the title - it's gone wild and overgrown its boundaries, and it needs to be trimmed. Compare this to "Don't Be a Menace". Sure, you can call it "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood", but "DOn't Be a Menace" works too, showing that the title can be reined in. It has control. There is no control in TFYOVWKUSMAFSBAI, and this manifests throughout the rest of the preview, a sure sign of further recklessness in the film. Everything is exaggerated and taken well beyond logical conclusions. Nothing is left out, everything is unchecked and played for shock value. The pregnancy and birth might be the best example of this. She balloons to mammoth proportions, then bloats to humanly impossible proportions, and gives birth to...Verizon guy. Now there's a sign that nothing here is serious, everything is pointless, and anything can happen, especially if it's confusing. This was also visibly present in the Dance Movie trailer. (Giving birth on the dance floor? Giving birth to a dancing baby? Where am I?)
Lack of sincerity and self-control are hardly unique to modern comedy - indeed, I would say that these are also sorely lacking in modern action and modern drama - but it's clear that their absence is crippling comedy, and their complete absence completely killed TFYOVWKOSMAFSBAI.
