Making a dramatic film in which the main character is a stand up comedian is always a risky proposition. If the stand up bits aren’t funny, you risk not only undermining the credibility of the main character, but the credibility of the entire film itself. At the very least, it’s distracting and kills the fun.
That takes us to, “Good On Paper”, which details what happens when an attractive, thirty something stand-up comedienne named Andrea (Iliza Shlesinger) ditches her usual hunky type and starts dating Dennis (Ryan Hansen) – the kind of dull, nerdy and overly emotional dude she’s spent her entire adult life avoiding like the plague.
Since our main character is a stand-up comedienne, the plot screeches to a halt every so often so Andrea, performing stand-up, in a small comedy club, in front of an adoring crowd, can riff on the story being told. It doesn’t work because she just isn’t funny enough. I chuckled exactly once during the first stand-up bit and sat stone faced through the rest of them.
The weird thing is that the actress playing Andrea is an actual, successful stand-up comedienne named Iliza Schelsinger. She has a career and tons of fans. Check her out on YouTube. So, clearly, I’m not one of them. I’m not saying she’s not funny, I’m just saying that I didn’t find her GOP stand-up bits funny. It’s subjective. Maybe you’ll find them gut-busting. Maybe not.
The other problem is that I didn’t find much of anything else, in GOP, funny, either. Much of the plot is stale and as predictable as a traffic light. It takes very little time to see where this movie is going and far too long to see it actually get there.
The humour is forced and clumsily executed and, worse, Andrea just ends up coming across as shallow and not too bright. Margaret Cho, who turns up as Andrea’s best friend Margot, doesn’t have much to work with and, consequently, spends the entirety of the film in a half-baked, stock role desperately failing to turn lame, overly familiar set-ups into laughs.
Towards the end of the film, things get a little weird and preachy. Though you can call those scenes a “twist”, it’s not the kind of twist that makes any sense or grows out of an earlier part of the story or enhances our understanding of the characters or story or is an extension of or deepening of the theme or themes being explored by the filmmakers. They are just a big collection of nothing moments that are silly, unfunny and unrealistic.
To sum it up as simply as I can, “Good On Paper” is bad on screen.
You knew something like that was coming, didn’t you? Thought so. My apologies.
