The Quest for the Denslow Cup

The modern spoof can trace its lineage back to the collective of Zucker-Abrahams-ZuckerThis comedy collective, also known as ZAZ, consisted of two brothers and their best friend, and they went on to create some of the best parodies of their era.. This comedic trio made some of the absolute classics of the form, such as Airplane!, Top Secret!, and Police Squad! If you find a parody with an exclamation point at the end of it, you can be assured that at least one of the members of ZAZ were involved in it. After an early string of films together, each eventually went off to make their own movies, very often staying in the parody genre. Jim Abrahams, for example, wrote and directed Hot Shots! and its sequel, as well as Mafia!, before eventually working on Scary Movie 4 with fellow ZAZ member David Zucker. David, meanwhile, made a few comedies before handling the third through fifth Scary Movie films. These guys were fixtures of the parody genre (even if all of their later films, frankly, weren’t that great).

It was David who also worked on BASEketball, a comedy very much in the vein of the ZAZ works of yore. But the selling point for the film wasn’t really David Zucker (even if his name was attached to the film with a credit on posters of “From the director of Airplane!” No, for most people the draw of the film were the stars: Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the guys behind South Park. Released in 1998, the film came out just one year after South Park made its own debut on Comedy Central, and that series was already a massive hit. “The guys from South Park made a movie?!” was basically the selling point, and the film made as much hay as it could about it during its theatrical run.

Despite this, though, the film doesn’t really feel like a South Park film. It has its moments, and there are some line deliveries, songs, and jokes that feel like they were improvised by Parker and Stone, but the majority of the film fits perfectly in line with the comedic stylings of David Zucker, for better and worse. It’s great, because there are some jokes that are absolutely laugh-out-loud, moments that come out of nowhere and hit you when you least expect it. But you can also tell that Zucker, working on his own without his two partners handling comedic duties as well, is only working at one-third power. The constant jokes – foreground, background, deadpan line deliveries that layer on each other without giving the audience time to breathe – are missing here. The film is quite funny at times, but in comparison to Airplane! and the other classics ZAZ created, it struggles to measure up.

In the film. Trey Parker and Matt Stone star as Joe "Coop" Cooper and Doug Remer, respectively. While attending a party (that they weren’t invited to), these two slackers get challenged to a game of basketball. Seeing as they are generally unathletic and basically are only good at shooting free throws while drinking a beer, they improvise a “new” game using baseball rules. This resulting game catches on, and Coop, Remer, and their friend (really, person they make fun of all the time), Kenny "Squeak" Scolari (Dian Bachar), become the very first winners of the “World Series of Baseketball”.

After their win, Coop is approached by Ted Denslow (Ernest Borgnine) who wants to take Baseketball nationwide. He wants to make it controlled, to find a way to tap into the love of sports that most Americans have lost, to keep the sport from getting too greedy. Coop agrees, and the Baseketball League is set up. But five years later, when Denslow dies suddenly (choking on a hot dog), ownership of Denslow’s team, the Milwaukee Beers, is given to Coop… but with a catch. Coop has to lead his team to a win in the next Denslow Cup or control of the team reverts over to Denslow’s wife (of three months), Yvette (Jenny McCarthy). And with Yvette siding with corrupt team owner Baxter Cain (Robert Vaughn), who wants to monetize the league (and ruin the spirit of Baseketball), the fate of the sport rests in Coop’s hands.

BASEketball is a weird movie. On the one hand it really wants to be a classic parody in the vein of what Zucker used to make with the ZAZ collective. It does try, and there are some legitimately funny moments that clearly came from Zucker’s comedic skills. An early montage showing how sports have degenerated due to the greed of owners, has some solid laughs to it. There are also decent running gags in the film, like Yvette’s continued misunderstanding of Cain’s sexual euphemisms (“let’s lay some carpet, if you know what I mean,” and in the next scene she’s literally laying carpet). These moments make you think, “yeah, a ZAZ guy helped on this film.”

But at the same time there are plenty of jokes (like continued gay jokes) that just don’t land. And there’s a lot of dead time. If you compare this film to Airplane!, for instance, you’ll notice that where that 1980 film would layer jokes on jokes, and if there was something serious going on in the foreground, a gag would happen in the background to keep the audience entertained. That doesn’t happen here nearly as often, and it leaves the film feeling kind of empty. The good gags land, but there aren’t enough of them to truly fill the film like it needs.

The film also lacks that deadpan charm of classic ZAZ parodies. That tone was part of why it worked, with the characters spouting ridiculous lines (“I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley”) with a straight face. While Parker and Stone are certainly game, and can play dumb pretty often, they don’t have the deadpan reactions which means the antics going on in the film feel like just that: antics. Gags are overplayed instead of letting the jokes hang on their own, and that leaves them feeling less funny than if the film never actually commented on its own absurdity. It doesn’t feel like the film always understands how it can properly build a joke to really nail the delivery.

Some of the best gags, honestly, come from Parker and Stone’s own delivery. You get the vibe that they were relied on to try and punch up scenes that weren’t working, and they had their own ideas about what was funny. There’s a song that comes on the radio at one point while Coop is driving, and you can tell Parker wrote it. They do a few of the South Park voices, and those get some decent laughs. And there are some scenes (like the “dude” fight) that could only have come from workshopping and improv because something like that would never work on the page. Parker and Stone are, at times, assets here, helping to give the film needed laughs.

But, at the same time, they don’t feel like they always fit. The movie feels at odds with itself, trying to balance the comedic ideas of Zucker against the stylings of Parker and Stone. It can sometimes feel like two different writers battling it out, with neither actually winning. The worst moments happen when it seemed like neither side wanted to even bother putting in a joke, so a scene was played straight without a gag at all. It’s just dead air and padding. You wish someone could have come up with anything in these moments instead of letting it drag on.

Despite all this, I do think BASEketball has just enough amusing stuff going on that it’s worth watching every once in a great while. It’s not a fantastic movie, and it really does struggle to maintain the laughs as the film wears on, but when it hits its jokes it hits them hard. This is certainly a B- or even C-level effort from Zucker, but when you’re talking about someone that gave us some great comedy classics, C-level effort is still better than what most writers in the genre could do. I’ll take this over the likes of Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans any day of the week.

BASEketball is dumb fun. You just wish it could be a little dumber, and a little more fun, to really nail the ideas it was going for. It’s close… but not quite a home run.