'FUBAR' Has a Really Dumb Joke That Made Me Laugh Really Hard
Does Clancy love Mondays and hate lasagna?
Arnold Schwarzenegger's action comedy series FUBAR isn’t a great show or anything, but there’s a moment in the second episode of Season 2, which is now streaming on Netflix, that makes me laugh every time I think about it.
Season 2 features a character named Theodore Chips, played by Guy Burnet, a sort of spy/henchman-for-hire who’s working with Carrie-Ann Moss’s character. Chips is a very strange person. He has a haircut that looks like the “my hair is a bird” meme, a preternatural pain tolerance, and a bunch of weird ideas about all kinds of stuff. He falls in love at first sight with Monica Barbaro’s character Emma Brunner, a CIA agent and Arnold’s character Luke’s daughter. His attempts at flirting with her are some of the show’s best moments overall, and there’s one in particular that I loved.
In Episode 2, he keeps Emma away from helping her father by pointing a sniper rifle at her from a rooftop across the street from her hotel lobby. While she sits in a chair with a laser sight trained on her chest, he has a waiter bring her an envelope. She opens the note, which contains a drawing of Garfield the cat saying “let’s talk.” Taped to his paw is a comms earpiece, which Emma reluctantly inserts with a sigh.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Chips says.
“Garfield?” Emma says, in a tone of “really?”
“His name is Clancy,” Chips replies.
“This is Garfield,” she says. She insists that he’s a popular cartoon character with a float in the Thanksgiving parade and everything, but Chips won’t hear of it.
“No, no, no,” he says. “I made him up.”
And that’s the end of the exchange about Clancy. No further explanation, because over-explaining it would kill the joke.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit how funny I find this, because it’s so stupid. But I’m not actually embarrassed, because what’s funny about it is how stupid it is. And I’m not ashamed to say I love stupid shit. FUBAR’s humor is raunchy and juvenile in a way that intentionally hearkens back to R-rated comedies of the ‘80s, ‘90s and ‘00s, because it’s an homage to Schwarzenegger movies of that era.
FUBAR’s setup, where a spy father and a spy daughter each find out that the other is a CIA agent, is a variation on the spy family premise of True Lies. It’s like if Eliza Dushku in True Lies grew up to also be a spy. Tom Arnold, who played Arnold’s sidekick in that action comedy classic, has a supporting role on FUBAR. The show is not shy about its True Lies influence.
Arnold is older now. “Sometimes I kill a guy and I cannot even come up with a funny line anymore,” he complains. He can still come up with those signature goofy one-liners, though. He strangles a guy with a firehose and says “You got hosed.” At one point, as he’s getting ready to leave a room, the camera pushes in on him, and he says “I’ll be back…in around two hours or so, depending on traffic.” FUBAR is almost a parody. It’s dumb as hell, but in a fun, self-aware way. I could see someone finding its lack of depth annoying, but I find it hard to hate anything that knows what it is as much as FUBAR does. One of my problems with The Last of Us is that it’s a dumb show that takes itself totally seriously. FUBAR knows it’s dumb, and has fun with it. It’s a rare action comedy that actually tries to be funny.
There’s plenty on FUBAR that’s bad. There are too many characters with too many subplots. A lot of the jokes don’t land. There are dance sequences in three of the four Season 2 episodes I’ve watched. When I see dance scenes in a Netflix show, I suspect that they’re desperate attempts to get clipped on TikTok. (Not that I’m complaining about Monica Barbaro’s in Episode 3, though.) But I can forgive a lot of FUBAR’s bad dumbness, because its good dumbness makes the 12-year-old in me laugh.
I interviewed Cross star Aldis Hodge kind of a while ago at this point, and the interview is finally live. I really liked Hodge’s performance on one of the biggest Dad Shows of last year, and I enjoyed our conversation about the show, which you can read on Gold Derby or watch on YouTube right here.
Monica Barbaro is in FUBAR???