American Pie

The Anatomy of Vulgar Teen Comedy

Bill Osgerby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781134814688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

American Pie represents the most commercially successful example of the vulgar teen comedy, and this book analyses the film's development, audience-appeal and cultural significance.

American Pie (1999) is a film that exemplifies that most disparaged of movie genres – the vulgar teen comedy. Largely aimed at young audiences, the vulgar teen comedy is characterised by a brazenly over-the-top humour rooted in the salacious, the scatological and the squirmingly tasteless.

In this book, consideration is given to the relationship between American Pie 's success and broad shifts within both the youth market and the film business. Attention is also given to the film's representations of youth, gender and sexuality, together with the distinctive character of its comedy and the enduring place of such humour in contemporary popular culture. While chiefly focusing on the original American Pie movie, the book also considers the development of the franchise, with discussion of the movie's three sequels and four direct-to-DVD releases. The book also charts the history, nature and appeal of vulgar teen comedy as a whole, providing the first concerted analysis of this generally overlooked category of youth film.

Clear, concise and comprehensive, the book is ideal for students, scholars and general readership worldwide.

1 Serving up American Pie

Youth, cinema and vulgar teen comedy

‘We will make a stand! We will succeed! We will get laid!’

American Pie is one of the foremost movies in the pantheon of vulgar teen comedy. Released by Universal Pictures in 1999, written by Adam Herz and the directorial debut for brothers Paul and Chris Weitz, the film stands as the epitome of vulgar teen comedy’s stock-in-trade – an indefatigable enthusiasm for the lewd, the crude and the excruciatingly ‘grossed out’.

The picture follows the knock-about antics and carnal misadventures of four high school buddies – the central character Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) and his friends Chris ‘Oz’ Ostreicher (Chris Klein), Kevin Myers (Thomas Ian Nicholas) and Paul Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) – who make a pact to defy their reputation as nerdy, sexual no-hopers by losing their virginity before graduation. As the foursome ruminate over their woeful lack of erotic experience, the challenge takes on the proportions of an intrepid quest. Momentarily shrugging off his dorky mantle, Kevin rouses his fellow adventurers with a speech worthy of an epic hero (See Figure 1.1). ‘No longer will our penises remain flaccid and unused!’, an indomitable Kevin avers:

From now on, we fight for every man out there who isn’t getting laid when he should be! This is our day! This is our time! And, by God, we’re not gonna let history condemn us to celibacy! We will make a stand! We will succeed! We will get laid!

Along the way, the hapless quartet get incitement and impediment in equal measure from their erstwhile pal – the compellingly obnoxious anti-hero Steve Stifler (Seann William Scott). Self-mythologised as ‘The Stifmeister’, Stifler is distinguished by his leviathan ego, his gift for inventive profanity and his relentless (and somewhat improbable) sexual braggadocio. ‘You’re a disgrace to men everywhere’, the Stifmeister lectures his lackluster classmates:

Figure 1.1 Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) rouses his fellow adventurers – ‘We will get laid!’

I mean, look at the Stifmeister. I got laid twenty-three times this year, and I’m not counting the hummer I got in the library stacks, baby.¹

The title of American Pie is, perhaps, deceptively homely. The name is taken from folk rocker Don McLean’s 1971 hit record, a bitter-sweet anthem to 1950s teen Americana, though screenwriter Herz has explained that it also refers to the quest of losing one’s virginity in high school which, he argues, is ‘as American as apple pie’.² But the title also nods towards one of the movie’s principal set-piece jokes. After being assured by his (marginally) more experienced friends that sexual intimacy with a girl ‘feels like warm apple pie’, the eager (but lamentably naïve) Jim decides to rehearse his technique with one of his mother’s freshly baked desserts. Sadly, as Jim’s coitus with the pastry approaches climax, his cheery dad enters the kitchen – and the extraordinary scene freezes father and son (and the audience) in jaw-dropping mortification (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Jim’s dad (Eugene Levy) freezes in jaw-dropping mortification.

‘The gross-out comedy that grossed large’

American Pie’s zeal for infantile humour and its knack for plumbing the depths of bad taste ensured the film received some less than glowing reviews. Writing for the New York Times, for example, Stephen Holden judged that, among the year’s ‘crop of shallow teen-age movies’, American Pie represented ‘the shallowest and the most prurient’ (Holden, 1999). In a similar vein, Robert Horten, for Film.com, warned that although American Pie had ‘a few amusing bits’, the audience should ‘strongly note that the movie is really awful’ and ‘not at all worthy of guilty pleasure status’ (Horten, 1999). Others, however, have been more positive. Film scholar Robin Wood, for instance, has saluted American Pie as his favourite high school film of the 1990s; Wood arguing in a neat (but possibly unintended) double entendre that American Pie represented ‘one of those rare films where “everything came together”’:

…one has the impression that the actors really enjoyed themselves, that there was a constant sense of fun and pleasure in the making of the film, a communal creative engagement more pronounced than in any of the other films… The film is very funny, but also very sweet, generous to its characters and with a sort of seductive innocence.

(Wood, 2003: 312)

Nor is Wood a voice in the wilderness. In 2000 readers of UK fan magazine Total Film voted American Pie sixth in a survey of ‘The Greatest Comedies Ever’ (Crook, 2000: 69). And in 2012 members of LoveFilm (a video streaming service subsequently subsumed into Amazon Prime) rated American Pie seventh in a poll of movies that had made them laugh the most, the film triggering an estimated 1.5 laughs per minute (Bender, 2012).³ American Pie’s box office returns are also testimony to its audience popularity. The movie’s domestic takings totaled a massive $102,561,004, while its foreign release garnered a further $132,922,000.⁴ American Pie was, as film theorist Mandy Merck wryly observes, ‘the gross-out comedy that grossed large’ (Merck, 2007: 259).

Such bankability ensured a succession of American Pie sequels across the following decade. All chronicle the central characters’ sexual mishaps and social humiliations in later life. In American Pie 2 (Rogers, 2001) the old high school crowd are reunited as Jim and his buddies organise a predictably libido-fuelled (and misfortune-laden) party at a summer beach house. American Wedding (Dylan, 2003) sees Jim propose to long-term love interest Michelle Flaherty (Alyson Hannigan); Jim entrusting the wedding arrangements to the Stifmeister, with inevitably cringe-making consequences. And, nearly ten years later, American Reunion (Hurwitz and Schlossberg, 2012) finds Jim and Michelle struggling with the drudgery of parenthood and attempting to re-ignite their relationship at a high school reunion – an occasion for the original gang to reminisce about (and get ill-fated inspiration from) the hormonal escapades of their youth. Overall, the film franchise was a major box office winner, grossing close to $1 billion worldwide.

It was a success that also spawned a series of direct-to-DVD spin-off films. The first, American Pie Presents: Band Camp (Rash, 2005), sold more than a million copies in its first week of release, and three sequels duly followed – American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile (Nussbaum, 2006), American Pie Presents: Beta House (Waller, 2007) and the finale, American Pie Presents: The Book of Love (Putch, 2009). And, as fans were hungry for even more, further helpings of American Pie came in the form of no less than three ‘making of’ documentaries. 2003 brought not only American Pie: Beneath the Crust Vol. 1 but also American Pie: Beneath the Crust Vol. 2 and American Pie Revealed, all directed by Dave and Scott McVeigh and bundled with various DVD releases of the theatrical movies.

American Pie and the vulgar teen comedy

American Pie and its progeny stand as consummate (and especially lucrative) examples of the wider genus of vulgar teen comedy. Sometimes known as ‘teen sex comedy’ or ‘teen gross-out comedy’, it is a category of film that parades the bawdy misadventures of goofball teenagers. Largely aimed at young audiences, it is characterised by a brazenly over-the-top humour rooted in the salacious, the scatological and the squirmingly tasteless. In the roll-call of vulgar teen comedies, American Pie is a key entry, but it was hardly the first. Released in 1978, National Lampoon’s Animal House (Landis) is usually credited as the godfather of teen gross-outs, and the 1980s were littered with similar fare, from Porky’s (Clark, 1981) and Screwballs (Zielinski, 1983) to Revenge of the Nerds (Kanew, 1984) and Bachelor Party (Israel, 1984). The 1990s, however, were a lean decade for the vulgar teen comedy, and its numbers waned as part of a more general decline in US teen cinema. The success of American Pie, however, heralded a resurgence.

The significance of American Pie lies in the way it breathed new life into the vulgar teen comedy, revising and reconfiguring the format for a new millennium. Indeed, American Pie’s reinvigoration of the formula was so successful it spawned a new era of low-to-medium budget vulgar teen comedies that all pushed determinedly at the boundaries of taste. Stretching across two decades, the roster boasts (if that’s the right word) such pictures as Road Trip (Philips, 2000), Dude, Where’s My Car? (Leiner, 2000), Whipped (Cohen, 2000), Old School (Philips, 2003), Barely Legal (Evans, 2003), EuroTrip (Schaffer, 2004), Dirty Deeds (Kendall, 2005), Superbad (Mottola, 2007), Sex Drive (Anders, 2008), Mardi Gras: Spring Break (Dornfeld, 2011) and Project X (Nourizadeh, 2012).

Whether the vulgar teen comedy represents a distinct film genre, however, is moot. Indeed, general debate surrounds how far, and in what ways, the concept of genre is applicable to ‘teen cinema’ or ‘youth films’ as a whole. Generally, scholars have viewed film genres as groupings of films that are distinguished by a common iconography – similar images, locations, historical contexts and so on. Alternatively, genres are seen as collections of films that share a similar narrative structure or a common set of visual codes and conventions.⁵ For some writers, however, ‘youth films’ cannot be classed as a distinct genre. Instead, they are distinguished by their commercial imperatives – that is to say, they are marked out mainly by the kind of audience they are aimed at. Thomas Doherty (2002), for example, chronicles the rise of the ‘teenpic’, a variety of movie that spanned a number of film genres, but which was essentially characterised by its appeal to the newly affluent teenage audience of the 1950s. And, in a similar fashion, Catherine Driscoll also sees the ‘teen film’ as being ‘determined most of all by its audience’ (2011: 1). At the same time, however, Driscoll acknowledges the way such movies are also often distinguished by recognisable ‘generic’ conventions:

…the youthfulness of central characters; content usually centred on young heterosexuality, frequently with a romance plot; intense age based relationships and conflict either within those relationships or with an older generation; the institutional management of adolescence by families, schools, and other institutions; and coming-of-age plots focused on motifs like virginity, graduation, and the makeover.

(Driscoll, 2011: 2)

In contrast, Timothy Shary opts for a more simple, straightforward approach. For Shary, ‘youth cinema’ represents a distinct film genre comprising movies ‘that are made about young adults’ (2014: 20), though Shary argues this category, itself, encompasses a variety of distinctive subgenres – for example, the ‘youth horror film’ and the ‘youth romance’.

American Pie and other vulgar teen comedies fit rather awkwardly among all these definitions. Certainly, they have been partly defined by their target audience. But, while teen cinemagoers certainly constituted their commercial base during the 1980s, by the 2000s such films were characterised by a strong cross-generational appeal. And, while many vulgar teen comedies were ‘made about young adults’, others also featured adults as central characters. Indeed, by the 2000s, films like American Reunion featured a cast full of adults, but still bore the familiar trademarks of the vulgar teen comedy. Moreover, American Pie and similar movies do not fit easily within Shary’s generic classification of ‘youth cinema’...