By Kyle Smith
Saturday, August 05, 2017
To the entertainment industry, the McCarthy-era
blacklist, which led to unemployment for a few dozen Hollywood types, and
Communism, the international terror scheme that subjugated hundreds of
millions, have traditionally been treated as though they’re of roughly equal
historical interest. Rarely has Hollywood handled Communism with the antagonism
it deserved, and when it did so it was usually in crude Sylvester Stallone
parables.
Even more rarely did Communism’s multifarious
self-contradictions generate outright ridicule from top comedy writers. Comrade Detective, a wickedly funny new
half-hour show on the Amazon Prime streaming service, is an honorable exception
to the rule. It amounts to a comedy shooting range where ludicrous Communist
propositions repeatedly get targeted. WFB probably spent more time appearing on
television than watching it, but if he were with us today it’s hard to imagine
he wouldn’t get a chuckle out of Comrade
Detective.
The concept is a sort of triangulation between The Naked Gun and The Americans. According to an earnestly delivered prologue, what
we’re watching is found footage: An actual Romanian buddy-cop TV show from the
1980s. The look and feel of the show (which was actually shot last year) are
absolutely dead-on recreations, exactly what you’d expect if you happened to be
watching prime-time state TV in Bucharest circa 1988. The actors are Romanian,
the mustaches are thick, the art direction is lavishly gray. Everything is
played with a completely straight face, and the series was actually filmed in
Eastern Europe, which apparently still features lots of locations suffering
from Soviet Bloc hangover. If you turned off the sound, you’d swear you were
actually watching the Romanian Simon
& Simon.
What makes Comrade
Detective a comedy is the (intentionally ungainly) dubbing: Channing Tatum
and Joseph Gordon-Levitt provide the voices of the mismatched detectives,
Gregor Anghel and Iosif Baciu (played impeccably onscreen by Romanians Florin
Piersic Jr. and Corneliu Ulici), and such familiar actors as Chloë Sevigny,
Daniel Craig, Jake Johnson, Kim Basinger, Jenny Slate, and Mahershala Ali dub
supporting characters. Nick Offerman, voicing the crusty, no-nonsense police
chief, is especially fine.
You could call Comrade
Detective a one-joke affair, but that could also be said of Airplane. Inside that one joke, series
creators Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka have built a deep reservoir of
comedy. Occasionally the show merely gives a tweak to cop-show clichés — the
protagonists are constantly being needled by a rival pair of detectives at the
same precinct and they say things like, “The guy has a rap sheet a kilometer
long.” But for the most part the comedy is specifically and sharply anti-Communist.
Episodes begin with a fake approval certificate from the state censor:
“Ministerul de Divertisment Acceptabil.” At a hospital that looks like a
Victorian lunatic asylum, a doctor who looks like a hot-dog vendor says, “Of
course he’s going to recover. He’s receiving the best health care in the entire
world.” Cops keep passing along horror stories about Western capitalism: About
a Romanian who went to America and ran a car wash, one detective asks, “What
the [heck] is a car wash?” He is gravely told, “Americans are so lazy they
can’t be bothered to wash their own cars. They exploit the poor to do it for
them.”
Explaining the board game Monopoly, which plays a surprising role in the plot, devolves into
pained disbelief: “The more rent you get paid the more money you make,” says an
expert on the West. “You’re telling me that the purpose of this game is to
drive your fellow citizens into poverty so that you may get rich?” says one of
the cops. Black-market racketeers inspire a near-riot amid desperate demand for
their wares and protect themselves with machine guns . . . in the process of
selling Jordache jeans. Because we’re watching Iron Curtain propaganda, a visit
to the U.S. embassy reveals that average Americans are eating huge piles of
hamburgers at all times, even at the office. Looming offscreen like the Emperor
in Star Wars or Voldemort in Harry Potter, the ultimate source of
bone-chilling unease is . . . Ronald Reagan.
So many of the premises beloved by the Communist
propaganda machine satirized by Comrade
Detective are shared by the ordinary contemporary lefty that the show
amounts to giving today’s progs a vigorous little noogie. For supplementary
meta-comedy value I recommend watching Comrade
Detective with whatever Bernie Bros you may number among your
acquaintances. You may notice them squirming ever so slightly and asking, “Wait
a minute, what’s so hilarious about harboring an unreasoning hatred for Ronald
Reagan, Western institutions, and capitalism?”
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