American Pie

American Pie

The comedy “American Pie” is about four senior boys in high school who make a pact to lose their virginity before the end of the school year. It is almost touchingly old fashioned in this respect alone; I didn’t know Hollywood still allowed high school seniors to be virgins.

Real teenagers are doubtless about as inexperienced and unsure as they ever were, and many wisely avoid the emotional and physical hazards of early sex, but in the movies it’s the kids who make the grownups look backward. Teenagers used to go to the movies to see adults making love. Now adults go to the movies to see teenagers making love. I get letters from readers complaining that Clint Eastwood or Sean Connery are too old for steamy scenes, but never a word from anyone who thinks Christina Ricci or Reese Witherspoon is too young.

“American Pie” comes in a summer when moviegoers have been reeling at sex, vulgarity, obscenity and gross depravity aimed at teenagers (and despite their R ratings, these movies obviously have kids under 17 in their cross-hairs). Consider that until a few years ago semen and other secretions and extrusions dare not speak their names in the movies. Then “There’s Something About Mary” came along with its hair gel joke. Very funny.

Then came “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” with its extra ingredient in the coffee. Then “South Park,” an anthology of cheerful scatology. Now “American Pie,” where semen is not only pitched onto a lad’s clothing after he has simulated sex with a pie, but used to create a pie by Jim Levenstein’s mom, which he then eats apparently forgetting that his best friend has just gotten busy with the ladle.

How long will it be before semen jumps from pies back into American theater seats? I say this not because I am shocked, but because I am a sociological observer, and want to record that the summer of 1999 was the season when Hollywood finally acknowledged that there is no such thing as too gross. While newspapers and broadcast television continue to enforce certain standards of language and decorum, kids are going to movies where I hear raw sewage is brought up from the bottom of the sea and thrown against a brick wall.

I rise to those who would call this comedy base and vile. I seek an underlying comic principle to apply. I find one. I discover that gross-out gags are not funny when their only purpose is to gross us out, but they can be funny when they emerge unwittingly from the action. It is not funny, for example, for a character to drink a beer that has something in it that is not beer.

But it is funny in “Mary” when Ben Stiller has his zipper snagged on his privates shortly before he’s scheduled to go on national TV; or in “Austin Powers,” when powers himself takes a long swig from a water bottle filled with what he presumes is Evian water; or even in “South Park,” when Cartman mistakes semen for Worcestershire sauce and eagerly pours it onto his fries.

It is humorous because the characters aren’t in on the joke. They are ashamed. We share their embarrassment and, being human, find it funny. If Stiller were to say hi to Diaz knowing what was on his ear, that would not be funny. Humor comes when characters are victims, not when they are perpetrators. Humor is produced by context not content which is why “Big Daddy” isn’t funny. It’s not funny because the Adam Sandler characters knows what he is doing, and wants to be doing it.

But back to “American Pie.” It involves a great deal of sexual content that in my opinion is too advanced for high school, and a lot of characters who are more casual about it than real teenagers might be. But it observes the rules of comedy.

When the lucky hero gets the foreign exchange student into his bedroom and she turns out to be ready for a romp, it is funny that he has forgotten and left his CU-See Me software running, so that the entire Internet community can watch him be embarrassed by her. It would not be funny if he left it on deliberately.

The film is in the tradition of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” and all the more recent teen sex comedies. It’s lovable but unoriginal and hard working and sometimes funny, but here’s the most important thing it’s not mean spirited. Its characters are sort of sweet and lovable. As I swim through this summer tide of vulgarity, I find that’s what I’m looking for: Movies that at least feel affectionate towards their characters. Raunchy is OK but cruel isn’t.

Watch American Pie For Free On Gomovies.