A Welcome Diversion

Several months ago, when I returned home for Christmas break, my dad gave me a very important assignment. Calling from the operating room, he asked me the usual questions of what my plans were for the night. “Good, Marco,” he said in his thick, Polish accent when I told him I was free. “Go and rent two movies, one action and one stupid comedy.” Before hanging up, he added one more detail: “Marco,” he said, “the stupider the better.”

The stupid comedy is a curious sub-genre. Most often, movies of this type involve a character who undergoes a great deal of absurd physical tribulations as a result of his or her own stupidity. The character is usually completely unaware of how stupid they are. Example: Lloyd Christmas telling the jetway attendant “It’s okay—I’m a limo driver” when told he can’t run down the jetway because the plane’s gone. He does, and falls onto the asphalt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad laugh as hard.

Here’s the problem: for every brilliant stupid comedy, there are five really, really stupid ones. These are the kinds of movies I watched during weekly screenings at summer camp—the ones I remember playing in the background on the main cabin screen of a Delta flight as I adjusted my plastic stethoscope earphones and spread Ken’s dressing on a few dry leaves of salad and think “Oh, oh no...”

Left to his own devices, these are the movies my dad usually picks. Several years ago, he returned home with “Wild Hogs,” apparently sold by the storyline pitch of “let’s throw together some crazy guys who go on a crazy adventure and have crazy times!”  Sirs, you are not crazy, nor are you going on a crazy adventure. Please do not ever refer to yourself again as “wild hogs.”  After this incident, my sister was commissioned to accompany my dad on all future rental trips to provide guidance and screen his selections.

Things went fine until another traumatic rental changed everything. In one instant, my whole family’s approach to movie rentals was turned upside down, and my dad lost any remaining credibility. That moment was “Daddy Day Care.”

The sight of my father—a serious neurosurgeon who sometimes used the word “mofo” before I told him what it meant—going to the checkout counter at Blockbuster with a movie entitled “Daddy Day Care” is beyond description. I’ve watched this happen before, and the nonchalance with which both my dad and the checkout person complete the transaction amazes me. And every time I rent a movie, I’m reminded that I qualify for two free rentals just because my dad was probably one of only 10 people who rented “I’m Gonna Get You Sucka” (no joke) and “Land of the Lost.”

I once spent three whole minutes watching him flip through the channels and stop on Country Music Television and watch an entire Brad Paisley music video in which a girl was crying about how either her boyfriend, truck, tractor, father, or American flag (I can’t remember which) left her at prom. It took my dad three minutes to decipher what was going on before he moved to MTV, completely oblivious as to what “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and “Run’s House” are about.

At a certain point, I thought to myself: seriously, what the hell am I doing? I’m watching a TV show with my dad called “Rob and Big” in which two men fly a private jet to buy a baby bulldog that they outfit with bejewelled sweaters. This is ludicrous. I literally cannot believe this.

Last summer, I sat with my grandmother in Poland one afternoon as she watched episode number 3,944 of her favorite show, “The Bold and the Beautiful.” After the episode, she made several phone calls to her friends in which they discussed the philosophical, ontological, sociological, neurobiological, and probably even dermatological implications of who said what during the episode. This is a major part of my grandmother’s life, and when I’m with her, I too need to establish a baseline knowledge of the show’s dynamics just to talk with her and keep her going. And so, while she cooks, I read the tabloids she’s assembled so we can discuss who got eliminated from “Dancing with the Stars” or why she thinks that Beth, and not Stephanie, was Eric’s first love.

These are completely absurd realities. And so are the ones in which we find ourselves at Harvard. I’ve spent the past year writing a hundred-page thesis on Heidegger and architectural theory which is, in reality, nothing greater than my grandmother’s own diversions.

If you take a look around this place you begin to realize how absurd many things are. Sir, you aren’t old enough to buy a drink; why are you starting a hedge fund? I receive e-mails over lists all the time in which the authors have signatures that are more than five lines long, listing a cell phone number in Barcelona, Shanghai, and Cambridge and, as if anyone else cares, the fact that they are an “A.B. Degree Candidate in History and Literature.”

What I’ve realized, though, is that thinking about how absurd these realities might sound shouldn’t spoil them for you, and shouldn’t spoil them for anyone else. For some reason, my dad picks out stupid comedies, my grandmother still watches “The Bold and the Beautiful,” and Harvard is full of a bunch of delusional wannabe 30-year-olds. A lot of the things we do are actually pretty stupid and pretty comedic, but only if we think about them.

Trust me, thinking is not how I got through both “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolos,” or all of the “Police Academy” films. Yes, all seven of them.

Mark A. Pacult ’10 is a Social Studies concentrator in Adams House. He can tell you all about Swarovski-encrusted canines.