Whore Next Door: From Superbad to Worse

by Siouxsie Q May 25, 2016

“What’s it like having a gun?” a young Christopher Charles Mintz-Plasse, as McLovin, asks the cringe-inducing cops played by screenwriter Seth Rogen and Saturday Night Live veteran Bill Hader.

“It’s like having two dicks, if one of them could kill someone,” Hader replies, without the slightest flicker of irony.

I recently re-watched Superbad, the 2009 teen stoner comedy that I believe took dick jokes and bromance to the next level. But the storyline featuring the two cop characters just isn’t quite as funny or comfortable to a 2016 audience.

Rogen and Hader take nerdy Mintz-Plasse under their wing for the night and show him how awesome it is to be a cop. They run red lights, do target practice with their guns, and ultimately destroy their own squad car, placing the blame on an imagined “crackhead,” thus avoiding any negative consequences from their superiors.

The reality of corrupt cops isn’t and never has been funny, but now that police misconduct is finally front and center in the national conversation, the ironic glorification of these two characters feels insufficiently satirical to avoid squirming in one’s seat — especially lately after the epidemic of police violence reached its breaking point locally.

The Bay Area’s reputation as a bubble of liberalism, sex positivity, and innovation is crumbling. A string of killings of black and brown San Franciscans at the hands of the police has…