Surprise! Dicks: The Musical is actually a meta comedy masterpiece
The trailer for Dicks: The Musical is a difficult watch: a series of juvenile, faux-edgy jokes a giggling 13-year-old might make. But it turns out that the marketing lacks the context that makes the movie a gloriously silly inside joke, revealed even before its opening frames.
Brief on-screen text cards inform us that the film’s two writer-actors — Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp — are gay men playing straight men, and are brave for doing so, as the first gay people to write anything, ever. It’s a shot at a particular kind of movie conversation, where the optics of representation are paramount (see also: Disney’s numerous “first” gay characters). That’s just one of Dicks’ running gags, recurring and mutating alongside other jabs at modern cinema culture.
The movie as a whole is a campy, self-reflexive musical satire whose hilarity lies not only in its song and dialogue delivery, but in its filmmaking, courtesy of Borat and Curb Your Enthusiasm director Larry Charles. It’s a laugh riot, with the potential to go down as one of the decade’s smartest and funniest comedies.
The plot looks like a riff on the 1998 Lindsay Lohan version of The Parent Trap, a movie remake of a novel adaptation. But it’s really more just Parent Trap lifted wholesale and transposed to Wall Street, with a pair of rich, womanizing, homophobic sales executives, Trevor (Jackson) and Craig (Sharp), discovering they’re identical twins who were separated at birth and plotting to get their divorced parents back together by switching places.
Right from the word go, Dicks: The Musical foists its flimsy artifice on its audience by having Jackson and Sharp play the leads. The duo, who came up with the concept as a 30-minute stage musical at UCB (titled Fucking
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