'Hot Sauce and the Importance of Humor', by Kyle A. Massa
During my sophomore year at Ithaca College, I filmed a movie for an introductory cinema course. I can’t recall what grade I received, but looking back on it, I would’ve given myself an F. Maybe an F+.
My film was called 61 Days, and it was about death—but not in a fun way. Instead, I packed a staggering amount of sappy closeups and emo voiceover into three minutes and 32 seconds of runtime.
To collect those shots, the cast and I wandered around the rural gray expanse of Ithaca, New York, searching for locations with both scenic vistas and free parking. Our explorations took us from IC’s campus to Robert Treman State Park, Tremen to the Ithaca Commons, and the Commons back to IC. (We stopped at Shortstop Deli somewhere in there, too.)
I shot on real film, not digital, using a hefty old camera shaped like a black cigar box, lenses and levers sprouting from all sides. It was called a Bolex. I can’t remember if that was the brand name, the model name, or both. To me, it was just the Bolex. After a full day of filming, the word became a curse.
The final cut of my movie screened at Cinemapolis in downtown Ithaca, along with about forty others from my peers. This might sound impressive, only the school had a partnership with the theater and the audience was entirely students. We only attended because we had to.
When 61 Days appeared on the theater’s big screen, I sank into my seat, since even back then I suspected it wasn’t great. I’ll let you be the judge, reader…
We begin with a pair of figures trudging down an empty road. I provide the following Eeyore-inspired voiceover: “On the last day of April, 2011, my little brother was given two months to live.”
We’re off to a rollicking start. A terminal illness movie, the viewer must be thinking. What fun!
Our dying fella is played by Shane, who’s one of my best friends in real life. That’s probably why he agreed to be in this crap-ass flick. We were paired as roommates freshman year, and now, a decade and change later, we’ve been the best men at each other’s weddings. Kudos to IC’s housing department.
In the next scene, Shane receives a phone call while he and his brother (portrayed by Pete, a real-life British mate of Shane’s visiting for the weekend) are playing Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Shane and I played a lot of Black Ops. We’d return from class and, rather than do productive things like, say, study, we’d shoot zombies with Tommy guns. So it goes.
Shane steps into the hallway to answer his cell, and there he hears his prognosis.
“Two months was all the doctor gave,” I state in solemn voiceover.
Here we must wonder what sort of supreme asshole this fictional doctor is. Giving your patient a two-month expiration date…over the phone?
“Well, champ,” one imagines the doctor saying, “I’m gonna get back to watching Wheel of Fortune. Peace.”
Next, we watch Shane looking sad. He does a convincing sad face. You can almost read his thoughts: Why am I filming this movie when I could be playing “Kino der Toten”?
The glaring flaw in this sequence is the subsequent insert shot of Shane’s guitar, which is a little fuzzy. I remember the focus on the Bolex being a real Bolex, since it was all manual. Problem was, you wouldn’t know you’d F-ed up a take until you received the developed film, and by then, it was too late to correct. If anyone asked, I’d just nod, stroke my chin, and murmur, “It was an artistic decision.”
My next artistic decision: More closeups of sad Shane. Gazing out the window, gazing at the ceiling, gazing off-camera at our Big Lebowski poster on the wall.
I’m a sensitive young filmmaker, my movie seems to insist. I appreciate the fragility of life. I understand the duality of existence and oblivion. There’s no word undergrad film students love more than “duality.”
Eventually, Shane gets to do something besides stare.
“And then one day, I heard a sound from his room,” I inform the viewer, my voiceover elevating from monotone to sort-of tone. “Music.”
We see Shane playing guitar, accompanied by soft chords in the soundtrack (the Bolex couldn’t record sound, so we had to add this in post production). This is really Shane playing. His music is one of the few redeeming qualities of the film. It’s moving and hopeful, perfect for the momentarily positive mood.
More voiceover: “‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to do,’ my brother told me. ‘Ever since I got this guitar. I want to go somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, and just…play.’ So…we did.”
The double ellipses here are clumsy, but oh well. At least Shane’s gotten out of bed. Now we get several shots in succession, with more music to accompany them: Shane and Pete at the park, Shane and Pete by the water, Shane and Pete in the grass, always playing guitars. (If I’m being honest, it gets dull fast.)
Mercifully, 61 Days is nearing its end. We return to the introductory shot of Shane and Pete trudging down the road.
“It’s been four months since my brother’s diagnosis,” I intone. “He’s still here, and we’re still on the road.” (Which begs the question, That’s nice, but shouldn’t your brother be seeing his asshole of a doctor every once in a while?)
“Who knows?” my voiceover concludes. “We may never leave it.” (“It” being the road, I guess.) In the closing shot, we watch Shane glance upward and smile in slow motion.
…Then, in the post-credit sequence, we discover he died a day later.
Nah, just kidding. But that would’ve been funny.
I’m adding humor because my film didn’t have any. No jokes, no self-awareness, no attempts at lightheartedness. If there were any laughs in 61 Days, they were unintentional.
When my film ended, my fellow students applauded. It was the polite thing to do. At least he took the assignment seriously, I expect they were thinking.
Because to us young filmmakers, “serious” meant death. It meant substance abuse. It meant bad breakups, mental illness, suicidal ideation, grief, depression, obsession, repression. (One project also depicted a topless woman in a bird mask, which was pretty wild.) Of the 40 or so short films screened that afternoon, all but one involved such topics.
The outlier? It was a movie about a guy who travels back in time to feudal Japan to steal an ancient hot sauce recipe. The film featured samurai sword fights, goofy one-liners, and intentionally poor language dubbing. It was, in a word, hilarious.
When it finished, everyone applauded, though the applause felt begrudging. I’m pretty sure we all thought the same thing: Amusing tripe, but tut-tut, come now. We shan’t call this art, shan’t we?
The unspoken assumption of us wannabe auteurs was clear: Art is serious, and humor isn’t. Therefore, humor isn’t real art.
Yet when I watched that time-traveling hot sauce samurai movie, I remember feeling lighter, as if gravity had slackened its grasp on my ass (it takes a long time to watch 40 films—even short ones). I felt satisfied. I felt inspired.
By contrast, when I endured my film and those other sad slogs, I didn’t feel enlightened, or moved, or really anything.
Yet art’s value lies in how it makes its audience feel. And though there is value in grief, there is also equal—and oftentimes greater—value in feeling joyous.
I don’t think artists acknowledge this often enough. Adam McKay wrote and directed a masterpiece in Anchorman, yet institutions like the Academy, BAFTA, and the Golden Globes ignored him until he made The Big Short (comedic, yes, but certainly more “serious” than his previous films). To paraphrase Ron Burgundy, that’s kind of a big deal.
We see this bias against comedy as legitimate art elsewhere, too. Aside from Slaughterhouse-Five and the occasional Shakespeare comedy, humor is omitted from many English class curriculums. All I recall reading were “classics” like Of Mice and Men and Ethan Frome, which are about as amusing as roadkill. Or consider this insight from Understanding Comics, where writer/illustrator Scott McCloud notes, “Even today, there are those who ask the question, ‘Can comics be art?’” Comics aren’t exclusively comedic, true, but many are, which contributes to their lower-class status observed by McCloud. Even the English language itself seems skeptical of comedy as art, with idioms like “fooling around” and “goofing off” equating humor with laziness.
I never met the director of the samurai hot sauce film, but I wish I had. I imagine they’re pretty cool. If I’d asked them why they made the movie, I imagine their response would not have been, “My inspiration was born of my desire to explore the duality inherent in everyday condiments.”
Instead, I suspect they would’ve said this: “I wanted to make people laugh.”
Months after the screening of 61 Days, Shane, myself, and our friends Erik and Sean arrived in Ithaca to find the campus deserted. We’d returned from holiday break a day early, meaning we were the only ones around.
With nothing better to do (one can only play so much Black Ops), we decided we’d make a movie. The story was hastily assembled, the dialogue mostly improvised. I played a hardened homicide detective, while Shane played a documentary filmmaker. Erik played a traumatized survivor, and Sean played a hapless bar patron.
The film begins with Erik describing his ordeal to Shane. He’s the sole surviving victim of a serial killer, and when Shane presses him for details on said killer, all Erik manages to croak is, “He made me call him WD.”
This is where I enter as the detective, using a horrible Boston accent I’d lifted from The Departed. While driving around Ithaca looking for WD, I recount my childhood to Shane:
“My dad always used to say, you fackin’ work haad, you fackin’ play haad, you mothafacka.”
During the ride-along, we spot Sean, who’s standing outside an Ithaca townie bar, smiling and waving. Taking this as suspicious behavior, I park my Honda Element (what we describe as an “undercover police vehicle”) and leap out of the car, tackling Sean to the ground. If viewers wonder why both the detective and the suspect are giggling, it’s never explained.
Next, we have an interrogation scene filmed in a student lounge that looks not unlike a police station. After some standard confession-seeking tactics (I remove my sock and slam it on the table, then command Sean to “tell the sawk what you did, you fackin’ prick!”), we learn an eerie detail.
WD isn’t a person. WD is a stuffed animal.
(In real life, WD was a plush bear wearing an IC sweater that Sean’s mom had sent him for Valentine’s Day.)
This brings the story full circle. Erik agrees to a follow-up interview with Shane.
“We know who—or quite frankly, what—WD is,” Shane says. “Which means you’re the real killer. Aren’t you, Erik?”
We didn’t know how to end the movie, so after Erik fake sobs for several minutes, he strangles Shane and flees the scene. The film concludes with an eerie subtitle about Erik still being at large. (Then some bloopers, which are almost as long as the movie itself.) We named it The WD File.
When our friends returned from break the following day, we held a private screening in our dorm room. It was a smaller audience than the one gathered at Cinemapolis, yet there were many more laughs.
If art’s value lies in how it makes its audience feel, I daresay The WD File made everyone feel fantastic. After all, I’d never earned such a favorable reaction for any of my serious work. Maybe I needed to take myself less seriously. Maybe, sometimes, we all do.
My friends and I weren’t trying to make great art. We were just trying to make each other laugh. Yet by fishing for laughs, I think we made great art on accident.
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Kyle A. Massa is a writer living in upstate New York, and has been previously published in Unidentified Funny Objects 9, Grimdark Magazine, and Allegory, among others.
Photography by Donald Tong