By Ethan Gough
WKTV Community Contributor
It looks like this week is finally the week I’m right about a film that most people have probably seen. I guess it had to happen sometime. This article is about what is possibly the most iconic comedy film of the 2000s, a movie that catapulted its two leads into the spotlight, and established the now Oscar-winning Emma Stone as a bright new star to be reckoned with. This article is about the 2007 raunchy teen comedy Superbad.
This movie is a right of passage for every teenager in an American high school. It’s rare that a comedy that’s so unashamedly crass and immature successfully balances its juvenile sense of humor with genuine heart and poignancy. People may be attracted to this movie because of its edgy jokes and innuendo, but they return to it because of its likable characters and relatable story.
Superbad had been forming in the minds of its creators, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, since they were both teenagers. Its authenticity can be accredited to the fact that the two men based it on their own experiences of being seniors in Vancouver (a conclusion easily reached when you realize that the main characters are named after them). It’s those personal elements that distinguish Superbad from other thinly plotted, raunchy comedies of the 2000s. This movie wasn’t made by people who go by the “Adam Sandler Method” of hiring moderately prevalent comedians to stand in front of a camera and speak and act out nonsense. It was made by people who had a genuine story to tell and a message to share about growing up. Many of the film’s most memorable moments, such as the period blood on Seth’s leg and Mcclovin’s whole personality, apparently find their origins in the real lives of Rogen and Goldberg.
Seth and Goldberg clearly took a lot of their cues from past coming-of-age classics like American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, but the screenplay doesn’t feel derivative. Neither of those movies chose to include a subplot that involves the dorky sidekick befriending two man-child police officers and causing more public endangerment than your average radical terrorist. On a more serious note, none of them were as adept in their approach to adolescent friendship. American Graffiti comes close, but that film is more about individual growth. Superbad, however, is all about how we grow through our relationships with our friends; and how that growth inevitably causes us to grow apart from each other. Seth and Evan are portrayed as having been friends their whole lives. They’ve been through everything together, and love each other despite the fact that their antics (mostly Seths) constantly derail their lives. That’s an incredibly sweet and relatable theme for a movie that’s mostly about three guys trying to score booze to impress some attractive girls that (for whatever reason?) already liked them anyway.
If nothing else, the film succeeds in what it sets out to do, it makes us laugh. I’ve seen it many times now and most of the scenes still send me into hysterics, even when I’m watching it by myself. I don’t love every movie that has Seth Rogen’s name attached to it. I find many of them to be subpar gross-out comedies with a few solid laughs and absolutely no brains, but this was clearly a very personal story for him and Goldberg, and that human element puts it above all the other entries in the genre.
Ethan Gough is an Independent filmmaker and film critic pursuing his passion for cinema at Motion Picture Institute in Troy, Michigan this fall. He received the award for Best Live Action Short at the 2020 Kent County Teen Film Festival for his film Summer Days. He had two films in the 2022 Kent County Teen Film Festival, Bros Night and Alone. Ethan also written from Reel Rundown and Hub Pages.
