That Wilson Phillips joke. [UPDATED]

[Googled this before hitting "PUBLISH POST" and found it's already been covered. But what the hell.]

Oh, my God. I rewatched Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (yes), and it's true: the Wilson Phillips scene in Bridesmaids and the Wilson Phillips scene in Harold and Kumar? INADEQUATELY DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER. I mean, sure, you could make similar jokes about more or less the same thing, but what was funny about the thing in Bridesmaids is not substantively different from what is funny about the thing in Harold and Kumar: more than one of what you could call the intricate moving parts of what you could call this comedic mechanism are flat-out identical.



I want to be totally clear about this here: I am not saying any of this to shit on Bridesmaids, which I really think is an excellent and not-overrated comedy. Frankly, I've become slightly less of a purist about how OK it is for a comedian to do another version of something funny that another comedian has already done. Joke theft is not OK, but this is just short of that, I think—really it's no more and no less than just different excellent comedians doing a version of the same joke (minus part of the original, honestly)—and in fact all I really want here is for people who went nuts over how brilliant a comedy Bridesmaids is to respect Harold and Kumar and not treat it like comedy junk food. (Is that unfair? Am I wrong to think that a certain important kind of Bridesmaids triumphalist would view Bridesmaids as somehow superior to Harold and Kumar? I could be totally wrong about this.)

Anyway: Like the comedy in Bridesmaids? Respect the comedy in Harold and Kumar, because obviously the Bridesmaids people do. PEACE OUT.

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