Impractical Jokers: The Movie (2020)

(On Cable TV, December 2020) Considering that “Impractical Joker” is a TV show with eight seasons broadcast on a channel unavailable in Canada, watching Impractical Jokers: The Movie is doing it on hard mode, with no idea of the TV show’s premise, its creators or their comic style. Fortunately, there’s just enough hand-holding to set things straight, with an added (fictional narrative) about the four protagonists having a chance to impress Paula Abdul twenty-five years after a disastrous 1990s encounter. The main draw of Impractical Jokes is that it’s a set of candid camera comedy bits, albeit ones where the cast gets to act the fool more often than the audience, usually by doing crazy dumb dares under the bemused sight of civilians inside a solid scripted framework. That takes care of most of my issues with candid-camera-style comedy, but I was still surprised to realize that the film had me laughing a few times. Featuring Paula Abdul (one of my early-1990s celebrity crushes) helps a lot, but the comic energy of the lead quatuor does the rest: It’s not sophisticated comedy (and the low budget often shows), but it gets its laughs. As the group makes its way down the east coast from New York to Miami, the film has a basic road-movie narrative energy and manages to frame its candid challenges in a well-paced fashion. I would probably have a lot more to say about Impractical Jokers: The Movie if I was a fan of the show, but as an introduction it’s not too bad.