Mustache Shenanigans

by Jay Chandrasekhar

  His delivery always makes me laugh.

  FARVA AT THE GAS STATION

  During our postcollege cross-country road trip, Heffernan and I saw a sign that advertised a free hot dog with the purchase of a full tank of gas. We thought it was hilarious that there was someone out there who would be enticed to spend $60 to get a 60-cent hot dog. For us, that someone was Rod Farva, who when he came up short on the minimum spend, dumped $3 worth of gas into the garbage to get his dog.

  STRANGLEBATION

  Mac is parked, radar-gunning cars, when he gets turned on by the image of a woman on a casino billboard. Mac starts to masturbate and then gets into a little autoerotic asphyxiation, or as we nicknamed it, “stranglebation.” For the record, I’ve never done it. Regular, nonlethal masturbation has always been good enough for me. We’ve riffed a lot over the years about how that had to be the most humiliating way to die—nude, with a belt around your neck, and a hard-on in your hand, with tissues and lotion nearby. Yech.

  Steve Lemme’s girlfriend at the time, Sue Ryan, was the model on the casino billboard. Sue also played Landfill’s unlucky wife in Beerfest.

  A TEN-INCH COCK

  My performance in Super Troopers is meant to be an amalgamation of the styles of three of my acting idols—Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, and Billy Dee Williams. For the love scene, though, it was Billy Dee all the way. In the (later deleted) scene, my wife, Bobbi, and I make love and then talk about moving when the station shuts down. The scene had an overly emotional tone, which was meant to lure the audience in before we dropped the big punch line on them. Which was, when Bobbi and I get up to shower, she opens the bathroom door, and the mirror reveals my (Thorny’s) ten-inch penis.

  We loved the joke, but we were new filmmakers and we were embarrassed, so we didn’t even tell the prop master about it. Instead, I called the prop houses myself to ask about making my fake ten-incher, since my own black demon is slightly less. “Yes, hello, I’m making a film and I need a prosthetic penis. Ten inches and brown, though black will do.” They hung up on me.

  The lady at the second prop house angrily screamed, “We don’t do porno!”

  At the third prop house, a guy with a big New York accent said, “Take ya black dick and go fuck yahself!”

  So we killed the ten-inch cock joke. When we shot the scene, it ended up being just a romantic scene between Thorny and Bobbi. It had no punch line and, frankly, no place in the movie.

  After Sundance, the German swingers proved so popular that we brought them back, writing a scene where Thorny and Bobbi swing with the German couple. That was lucky for me because the reshoot allowed me to say five of my favorite words in this order: “Who wants a mustache ride?”

  UNDERCOVER

  When O’Hagan tells Mac and Foster to investigate the local truck stops to see if they can find anything about the truck driver Galikanokus, they decide to go undercover. In the original script, they dress as truck drivers, go to a truck stop, and infiltrate a bare-knuckle trucker-fighting ring. To prove that they’re not cops, Foster agrees to fight one of the truckers. During the fight, the trucker hits Foster so hard that his fake mustache goes flying. Trying to cover for him, Mac yells, “He punched the mustache clean off of him!” We all thought that was hilarious, though there were internal fights about whether punching the mustache off and getting away with it was too broad for our film’s tone. In the end, we didn’t have the money to rent a truck stop, so we nixed the bit. Instead, neither Mac nor Foster can drive a truck, so they never make it to the truck stop.

  In a bit of good news for lovers of this joke, we found a home for it in Super Troopers 2.

  IT'S JUST A QUARTER . . .

  The idea for this scene came from the McDonald’s invention of supersizing. McDonald’s workers were instructed to hassle customers into paying twenty-five cents more to get the next size up of a meal. Since I always knew exactly how much food I wanted, I never took the bait on the upsell. Also, to me, the fries in the extra-large always got a little soggy in the end, didn’t they? But saying no was never enough, because McDonald’s workers would keep pushing. This annoyed the shit out of us, so we wrote the scene where the Dimpus Burger kid, played by Charlie Finn, refuses to give up on upselling Farva.

  COUNTER GUY: Do you want to Dimpa-size your meal for a quarter more?”

  FARVA: “Do you want me to punchasize your face for free?”

  COUNTER GUY: “It’s just a quarter and look how much more you get!”

  FARVA: “I said, ‘No!’”

  COUNTER GUY: “It’s just twenty-five cents.”

  I feel Farva’s rage.

  POWDERED SUGAR

  After Farva attacks the burger kid, he’s arrested, stripped nude, and hosed down in the basement of the local police station. The local cops also attempt to delouse Farva with powdered sugar, because their chief believes that “the lice hate the sugar.” Aside from the sugar, this scene was meant to mirror the one in First Blood when the ex–Green Beret John J. Rambo is arrested, stripped nude, and cleaned up with a fire hose. Stallone was nude, so Farva had to be nude.

  In our scene, Chief Grady stops the hosing so he can speak with Farva. This would require Kevin to turn toward the camera (and Grady), and he was concerned. “Just don’t show my dick, dude.”

  I smiled. “Don’t flatter yourself. No one wants to see that.” And then, to reassure him, I told our director of photography / camera operator, Joaquin Baca-Asay, to tilt up when Kevin turned. Essentially, don’t show his dick.

  Joaquin smirked, “Obviously. Who would want to see his dick?”

  And so we shot the scene. Kevin was up against the wall, nude, while the local cops hosed him down from behind and scrubbed his body with a long brush. Big puffs of white sugar flew at him as well. When Chief Grady came in, Kevin turned toward the camera, and the cameraman, Joaquin, tilted up to avoid showing his penis.

  The story jumps to the edit room, weeks later, where we were watching the raw footage for the first time. In take one, as Kevin turns, Joaquin starts to tilt the camera up—oops, there it was—a second and a half of Kevin’s shriveled cock—a cock that seemed to be wider than it was long. A cock that would quickly acquire the nickname “the Tuna Can.” Now, to be fair, it wasn’t his fault. The water coming out of that hose was freezing. At Colgate, I showered with the man a thousand times (in the group shower room), and his cock is bigger than that. So . . . you’re welcome, Heffernan.

  Seeing his dick on 35 mm film was stunning. Joyous. I looked at him and smiled, but I didn’t say anything. He didn’t either. To be honest, I don’t think either of us was 100 percent sure that we had seen what we thought we had seen.

  I rolled take two, and then three and then four, five, and six. There were no cocks in any of those takes.

  Then I played the first take again, “the cock take.” Bam! I froze the film on his nude dick and pointed! “Ha-ha!”

  Heffernan looked at me. “No fuckin’ way.”

  I paused and then parried. “But that’s the funniest take, man.”

  Heffernan shook his head, “We’re not showing my dick, dude.”

  I went for it. “This scene is about Farva’s emotional breakdown. He’s arrested, covered in powdered sugar, nude, and vulnerable. How much more vulnerable can you be than to show your naked, shriveled cock?” Sorry. I couldn’t resist that tiny (shriveled) insult. Then, I went on. “When the audience sees that we’re so committed to our sense of humor that we’ll do this, man, that’ll just signal to them that we’re willing to go wherever the joke takes us.”

  He steeled his face. “No.”

  I tried another tack. “Look, we’re liberals. We show naked women, drugs, booze, whatever. If we don’t show Farva’s dick, we might as well join the fuckin’ Republican Party!” His willpower was waning, so I poured it on. “The Farrelly brothers go there. If we’re gonna be in the big leagues, we h
ave to go there.” He scowled, but I was a dog with a bone. “Buddy, you’re gonna make film history . . . First dick in an American comedy.” (Graham Chapman had shown dick in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.)

  Defeated, Kevin grumbled. “Fine, we’ll show my dick.” And then, his price: “But next movie, we’re showing your dick.”

  I had won. I could afford to be magnanimous. “If the story calls for it, my man. If the story calls for it.”

  So, in Club Dread, he came up with an idea where my character, as a punch line to a scary story, leaps up at a campfire, nude. But the best version of that joke required that I tuck my dick between my legs, thus hiding it from the camera.

  In Beerfest, Heffernan suggested that my character, Barry Badrinath, would get drunk and then wake up in a field, nude, next to a dead deer, whose throat I’d eaten during the night. It was an homage to An American Werewolf in London, so nudity was critical. I did that without complaint, but still made sure to keep my dick hidden from the camera.

  In Slammin’ Salmon, a film Kevin directed, my character, Nuts, a waiter, doesn’t take his medications and goes crazy in the restaurant. Kevin suggested one way to show that Nuts had lost it was to have him wait tables nude from the waist down. Like any good actor, I dutifully took my pants off. My director commanded it. But I also made sure to keep my dick away from the camera’s lens.

  Ha! Fuck you, Heffernan! Still no dick!

  After we first saw the dick on-screen, I called our director of photography, Joaquin, to ask him what had happened. He told me that when Kevin turned, he did in fact tilt the camera up, but the image he saw through the lens of Kevin nude, sputtering powdered sugar out of his mouth, was so funny that he thinks he might have laughed—“He-he-he”—which caused the camera perched on his shoulder to briefly dip down, capturing a second and a half of Kevin’s historic cock. Awesome.

  SHENANIGANS

  The troopers have reached a dead end in their investigation and are grasping at straws to save their jobs. Foster and Mac ask Thorny and Rabbit if there were any clues in the Johnny Chimpo cartoon. When the response is that “there was nothing there,” Mac suggests taking another look, which leads them to smoke grass and rewatch the Afghani cartoon. When O’Hagan bursts in on the cartoon watching, he snaps, and then vents about Farva’s attack on the Dimpus Burger kid. We try to point out that our shenanigans are cheeky and fun, while Farva’s shenanigans are cruel and tragic. The word “shenanigans” gets said so much that O’Hagan declares that he will pistol-whip the next guy who says “shenanigans.”

  The dialogue in this scene is one of my favorite examples of Broken Lizard when we’re at our rhythmic best. I can’t 100 percent remember where the origin of the scene came from, but I’m 90 percent sure it came from Paul’s love of old-time comedy, and I think he wrote the first draft.

  I love when Mac asks, “Hey, Farva, what’s the name of that restaurant you like with all of the goofy shit on the walls and the mozzarella sticks?”

  Farva pops his head out. “You mean Shenanigans? You’re talking about Shenanigans, right?”

  We’re all proud to have been part of that. Since our characters are supposed to be high, two people in the scene (not me) might have taken mushrooms before shooting to achieve the right state of mind.

  BULLETPROOF CUP

  In the early drafts, this scene was purely informational, focusing on how we (the highway patrol) were going to foil the local cops. But the scene felt too dry, so we made an addition to spice it up.

  Under the guise of “testing his equipment,” Mac puts on a bulletproof cup and steps out onto the gun range so Thorny can shoot at him. In early drafts, there were blanks in the gun. But we wanted Mac to go flying, so, as filmmakers, we made the buy that Thorny was such a good shot that Mac would trust him not to miss. I was lucky to be a part of this exchange:

  MAC: “How’re you shootin’ today, Thorn?”

  THORNY: “Dead on, all morning!”

  Then Mac sees an errant bullet hole on Thorny’s target:

  MAC: “What about that little fella?”

  THORNY: “Oh, that little guy? I wouldn’t worry about that little guy!”

  MAC: “Good enough for me! You’re my man now!”

  I love that rhythm.

  We shot the scene on the gun range of the Green Haven Correctional Facility near Poughkeepsie. There was an outdoor caged hallway in the prison that overlooked the shooting range, where the prisoners gathered to watch. When Mac (Steve) walked out wearing only a jockstrap, the prisoners went crazy, hooting and hollering. We heard sentences like, “I’m gonna rape you!” and “I’m gonna fuck you, little man!” For Steve, that was disconcerting, but the rest of us loved it.

  GOVERNOR'S PARTY

  When Grady and the local cops trick the highway patrol and take credit for the grass found in the Winnebago, Grady gives a speech that has one of my favorite jokes in it. In talking about the identity of the dead female smuggler, he says, “She was a smuggler out of Louisville named Lucy Garfield, or as we like to call her down at the station, the Louisville Smuggler.” In the original script, no one laughed at Grady’s joke, so he tried another: “Okay, how about the Kentucky Doobie?” When no one laughs at that either, Grady moves on. When we screened the film, the theater audience reacted to Grady’s jokes with silence as well, which caused the energy in the room to nose-dive. To combat this, we added the sound of the crowd laughing at the “Louisville Smuggler” line (essentially, a laugh track), and the scene played better.

  Later in the scene, Farva goes to the bar to order six Schlitzes. The actor playing the bartender is our producer, Rich Perello. (He’s a bartender in all of our movies.) Later, when Mac punches Farva in the nuts, a tall white-haired guy walks by. That is our financier, Pete Lengyel. Without him, there would be no Super Troopers.

  THE REAL THING

  We were always bothered when characters in films used the pea soup trick to simulate vomit. So when our script called for Farva to get hammered at the governor’s party, we thought it would be a great opportunity to show people what real vomit looks like.

  We saved that scene for last, moving our lights and cameras into the bathroom. When the manager of the party hall heard that we were shooting a throw-up scene, he asked a crew member to stop us. When the crew member told us about the manager’s reluctance, we barricaded ourselves inside the bathroom and got to work. Kevin chugged one nonalcoholic beer after another, quickly working his way through five. Then he gobbled a full party-size bag of peanut M&M’S, thinking that the vomit might show up better if it had flecks of color in it. He looked at me and nodded. “I’m ready to roll.”

  We rolled camera. “Action!” Kevin transformed into Farva, downing one last beer. He looked like he was about to pop, which was what we wanted. So he pulled the trigger and fired off six large-volume pukes in succession. I’m not sure if the M&M’S helped or not, but we all agreed that it was a great success, and we were proud of our artistic authenticity. With the manager pressed up against the door, we cleaned up quickly and hightailed it out of there.

  HELL RIDE

  After the local cops pull a fast one on the highway patrol at the governor’s party, it’s clear that our goose is cooked. So we decide to go on one last hell ride, to have a little fun and seek a little vengeance on our enemies. We cuff the traitor, Farva, to the toilet, steal his local police car, and head to Dimpus Burger to torment the kid who may or may not have spit in Farva’s burger.

  Next, O’Hagan pulls someone over and urinates on the side of their car. While this pullover could be easily classified as mean, we knew that O’Hagan’s act was an expression of the highway patrol’s anger.

  Last, we headed to local police chief Grady’s house, where we drove through his mailbox. O’Hagan plans to fight Grady, but since he’s not home, he decides to trash his lawn instead.

  We “borrowed” the idea of the hell r
ide from the ending of Animal House. In that film, the Deltas get kicked out of school and their house is to be closed. They’re angry, so they go on one last hell ride, to exact revenge. At a Directors Guild dinner, I met John Landis and said, “Thanks for the hell-ride idea.”

  Landis laughed and said, “Oh, I know all about it! Thanks for admitting it.” I love John Landis’s movies. They’ve got dead-perfect tone and they’re as funny as hell.

  ST. ANKY BEER

  In the final scene of the film, Thorny and Rabbit are seen delivering a keg of beer to a high school party. We find out soon that they’re actually undercover local police who are looking to bust the underage party. The name of the fake beer company they “work” for is “St. Anky Beer.” Get rid of the space and it reads: “Stanky Beer.”

  This was a reshoot. In the Sundance cut, we go undercover as meat inspectors, inspecting a factory. When the factory manager tries to bribe us, we rip off our inspector costumes to reveal our local police uniforms beneath.

  The scene was fine, but it didn’t get a big enough laugh. So we brought back the stoner boys from the opening, and then the laughs really started rolling in.