When Eric Andre’s mockumentary comedy Bad Trip was released on Netflix last month, it sparked a fervent cult following. Tiffany Haddish, Lil Rel (who almost left the film after the first prank he pulled), and even Chris Rock (who only appears in the deleted scenes because he’s too popular to pull off a prank like the ones in the film) all appeared in the film.
Bad Trip was heavily influenced by the Jackass films (indeed, Jeff Tremaine, who directed the Jackass films, also produced Bad Trip), as well as Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentaries. While the humor in the Jackass films comes from the participants torturing themselves, and the humor in the Borat films comes from Sacha Baron Cohen torturing other people, Bad Trip takes a different approach. The point of Bad Trip isn’t to humiliate anybody for laughs, nor is it to humiliate Eric Andre (although there is some of that). It’s about how random people respond to Eric Andre, Lil Rel, and Tiffany Haddish in what they perceive to be challenging circumstances.
As Conan O’Brien explained this week on Conan O’ Brien Needs a Friend, Bad Trip is a “comedy confection filled with delightful silliness, really intelligence silliness, but also silly and foolish silliness, all mixed together. And it’s made me like humans more because I thought, when it was over, that you weren’t ridiculing other people, and almost everybody who is ‘the victim in one of these pranks,’ you see them at their best. They’re stepping in, their reactions are real, and then you let them in on the joke in the end and everyone is hugging. We need more of what this is.”
It was the “right movie” for the end of the pandemic, according to O’Brien. He is right, because after the divisiveness of the previous four years, which was exacerbated in part by the media’s divisiveness, Bad Trips shows that “most people are nice.”
However, Eric Andre’s “best quote” came from the genre’s master, Sacha Baron Cohen, who saw an early cut of the film with Eric Andre and the film’s director, Kitao Sakurai, in his home. Cohen said to Andre, “You remember.” “My movies set out to expose the hypocrisy and evil of rich, white oligarchs. Your movie is exposing the beauty and humanity of the working class and people of color. It’s not polarized. It’s showing American unity.”
That’s exactly right. The film was shot during the divisive Trump era, and it was delayed over a year because of the pandemic, but it may have worked to the film’s advantage, if only because Bad Trip reveals what we need to see the most in America right now, which is the best of humanity (and also a prank in which two men get their penises caught in the same pair of finger cuffs).
