Lindsay Lohan’s Extremely R-Rated Comedy Successfully Offends Everybody

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 hour ago

As a kid, when you’re still learning how to carry yourself like a decent human being, there are expected detours along the way. You hear your first sexually or racially charged joke and decide whether that’s the kind of humor you want to adopt as you continue developing your personality. Some people will say there’s a time and a place for jokes relegated to internet edgelords, while others lean hard into shock value as a way to get attention, for better or worse.

2013’s InAPPropriate Comedy is that internet edgelord personality in movie form, but calling it a “movie” in the traditional sense is generous if I’m being honest. A loosely connected compilation of deliberately offensive material clocking in at 83 minutes, InAPPropriate Comedy plays like your teenage cousin who has an affinity for using gamer words in regular conversation and can’t quite find the off switch.

Here’s the thing about movies like InAPPropriate Comedy. Some of the bits on their own are hilarious in small doses. Since we’re dealing with a rapid-fire collection of sketches all hinging on generating the most extreme reactions possible, the jokes wear out their welcome almost as soon as you hear the first punchline. It’s exhausting, but there are standout moments that make for great, shareable clips you’ll want to send to the group chat with your old college friends that your wife doesn’t know about.

In Poor Taste And Bad Faith

Every single bit in InAPPropriate Comedy is meant to make you look over your shoulder, but you should also know better than to blare this one through your iPhone speakers in public. The framing device lets you know exactly what kind of humor you’re getting into when writer-director Vince Offer is found hiding beneath a sewer grate, looking up Lindsay Lohan’s skirt as she does her best Marilyn Monroe impersonation. From there, he opens his tablet and clicks through various offensive apps that lead into the film’s recurring sketches.

The sketches mostly occupy racial and sexual territory, with jokes relying on lowest-common-denominator humor you’d expect from a sixth-grade lunch table. We’re introduced to Flirty Harry (Adrien Brody), a hard-boiled detective in San Francisco who speaks exclusively in homoerotic puns. Everybody he encounters is baffled because there’s no way anyone could rattle off that many out-of-pocket non sequiturs without knowing exactly what they’re doing. 

Just as frequent in InAPPropriate Comedy is an urban-tinged Jackass parody called “Blackass.” No further explanation is really needed, but here’s the thing: if you’re parodying something that’s already funny on its own, there’s not much room left to escalate.

InAPPropriate Comedy also spends time on bits like “The Porno Review,” featuring J.D. (Rob Schneider), Harriet (Michelle Rodriguez), and Bob (Jonathan Spencer), who review adult films in the style of At the Movies. There are genuinely funny moments here, mostly because of how self-serious J.D. and Harriet are, while Bob silently admires the films in the background, in the filthiest way possible.

Most deliberately upsetting is Ari Shaffir’s recurring segment, “The Amazing Racist,” in which he walks around town being aggressively, you guessed it, racist. That’s the joke. Nobody is safe from Ari, who stages his own unsanctioned immigration sting operations and shows up unannounced at Jewish markets with anti-Semitic petitions, and that’s just the stuff I’m willing to repeat here.

Edgy For The Sake Of Being Edgy

InAPPropriate Comedy does exactly what it sets out to do across its segments, committing to as much shock value as it can cram into a single film. Personally, I’m not super offended by it because, like I said, these are the kinds of jokes you overhear on the schoolyard when you’re still figuring out how to carry yourself, or how not to. It also looks like a lot of fun was had during production, and everyone seems to be in on the joke, even those depicted as being punched down on.

Marketed as an “equal opportunity offender” upon release, InAPPropriate Comedy lives up to that promise, but the promise itself isn’t all that impressive.

Outside of the “Flirty Harry” sketches, which see Adrien Brody performing so far against type that you can’t help but appreciate the commitment, the humor is so relentlessly low-brow that you’re better off logging onto 4chan for your daily dose of crude humor. At least there, you can log off once you’ve had your fill of filth and move on with your day.

I’m not mad at InAPPropriate Comedy, I’m just disappointed. Offensive humor isn’t inherently bad, but films like this lack the cleverness needed to actually land in any meaningful way. You might let out a wry chuckle here and there, but it takes a special kind of person to really slap their knee and guffaw along with every bit.

As of this writing, InAPPropriate Comedy is streaming free on Tubi.