Are you ready for Zohan versus Guru? American comedians Adam Sandler (You Don't Mess With the Zohan) and Mike Myers (The Love Guru) will put out new movies - pieces of funny business that will open with much fanfare and then fade away, before returning on DVD, soon to be condemned to the discount store sale bins.
It's not just Zohan versus Guru, though. It's Sandler (41) up against Myers, who has just turned 45.
They are fellow '90s comedy brands who now betray a certain negative creep on their ability to stay relevant, if not also funny, to the 14- to 18-year-old crowd. (Ageism hits comedians, too, as it does actresses.)
Actually, I wish these two movies were going head-to-head on opening weekend, like contestants on American Idol, instead of opening two weeks apart, like divorced parents with shared and amicable visitation rights to the summer box office.
But the parents, Sony and Paramount, apparently have decided to give each other some space, and Zohan opens earlier than The Love Guru.
Here's why Zohan, I feel, will trump Guru: It's got kickboxing. Funny, hyper-realised kickboxing. And ultimate fighting and terrorism, which are so popular these days.
In the screwball Zohan, Sandler plays a counterterrorist assassin for the Israeli Government who fakes his death so he won't have to kill any more Palestinian militants and can realise his dream of becoming a hairstylist in America.
If Zohan has kickboxing, Guru has yoga.
Based on the preview I saw, it is another in a series of Myers' lovey-dovey characters - from Wayne of Wayne's World to Austin Powers to now, the peace-loving, love-making, wisdom-spreading Guru Pitka.
It might be fun, but are US audiences really in a Guru Pitka mood, when gas is over four bucks a gallon, job security is low and the nation is bogged down in a foreign war? Is it any wonder people are lining up to buy the video game Grand Theft Auto IV?
This is bad luck for Myers, whose career could stand the boost. It's a weird thing to say about a guy who voices Shrek and whose last two Austin Powers comedies grossed more than $200 million each.
But Austin Powers in Goldmember, the third in that series, came out in 2002, which feels like a very long time ago. That's because it was - seven Will Ferrell movies ago, three Steve Carells, five Sandlers, three Chris Rocks and one very important one: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" took the foreigner-as-funny-outsider comedy to a level heretofore unknown, adding the degree-of-difficulty factor: Instead of Rob Schneider, or Rob Lowe, he used actual people as foils, experimenting with the results.
His was a commitment to character, and moment, reminiscent of The Party, the Blake Edwards comedy in which Peter Sellers played a bumbling movie extra of Indian extraction who wreaks sly havoc at a studio mogul's Hollywood dinner party.
Borat was a mainstream hit. (And was it, on some level, a wake-up call for Sandler and Myers that a new Zen master had arrived?)
Myers' last star turn was 2003's Dr Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, where he summoned his best facial moves for a kids' movie and was still upstaged by comedy genius Alec Baldwin.
Sandler, meanwhile, has had a career of so many ups and downs that it's almost impossible to keep track.
You have to go back to Little Nicky, in 2000, to find the last Sandler comedy that didn't gross at least $100 million. But can you name the five movies since that did?
Thus are Sandler and Myers facing a dilemma that has afflicted no less a figure than Eddie Murphy: What is the shelf life these days of a movie-star comedian?
Comedian contrast
It's a question that seems of particular relevance to Myers, who exists outside any comedy posse I know of.
The posse is a vital part of the filmmaking process for comedy stars like Rock, Ferrell and Carell, who all share associations or friendships on the industry axis of managers, producers, comics and writer-buddies.
The writing credits on Zohan are one such trio - Sandler, the star; Judd Apatow, the star producer; and Robert Smigel, the writer friend. Further, the movie was directed by Dennis Dugan, who goes back to the Happy Gilmore days.
The Love Guru, which was written by Myers and Graham Gordy, was directed by first-timer Marco Schnabel (a second-unit director on Goldmember).
If The Love Guru smells like the Austin Powers series - sketch comedy strung together like sausages - it's because Myers loves playing the sausage master.
Austin Powers, you'll remember, was cryogenically frozen in London's swinging '60s; the guru Pitka is likewise time-warped, raised on an ashram in India.
Of course, in comedy, timing is everything. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery came out in 1997, towards the end of an era in which we'd grown a little weary of having the weight of the world on Bruce Willis' shoulders. (Die hard? Die already.)
Whether or not Myers sensed it, Austin was just the antidote we needed - a James Bond hero with truly disgusting chest hair and teeth who nevertheless thought he was as sexy and dangerous as a young Sean Connery.
It was all built on a foundation of Myers' prodigious talents as a quick-change artist when it comes to characters (those Dr Evil scenes are, in a word, priceless).
But the trailer for The Love Guru fails to convey a funny villain, just a midget who gets bonked on the head with a slap shot.
Meanwhile, riffing on New Age mystics in 2008 feels kind of hoary. Aren't the words of the Dalai Lama on a Starbucks cup?
Still, I have faith in Myers' ability to make me laugh, just as I feel in no particular hurry to catch The Love Guru.
Make no mistake, the Pitka outfit is funny - Myers in paisley robes, with a handlebar moustache and Doug Henning hair, eyebrows arching in deadpan humour (no comedian since Groucho Marx has said more with his eyebrows than Myers).
How long can he stay in caricature? His Austin Powers movies featured a flurry of inspired topical jokes, a la the Airplane movies of the 1980s.
But that kind of humour tends to move now at the warp speed of the Internet, or at least The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
This is why it appears Myers is refusing to recognise he might need to branch out. Unlike Sandler, he is not personal in his work, or has decided not to be; we haven't really seen on screen the mix of influences that made him want to be a comedian in the first place.
The most vulnerable and complex performance he has ever given - and it is worth looking up - was as the gay, drug-addled Studio 54 impresario Steve Rubell in the 1998 movie 54.
Transition to pathos
In his early days, Sandler always appeared to be insisting that whatever he was doing should not be mistaken as craft.
He would smirk through his characters like Harvey Korman not keeping a straight face during a Carol Burnett Show sketch.
This spirit continued into his early comedies (Billy Madison, The Waterboy), but seemed to stop abruptly when Paul Thomas Anderson wrote him into the starring role of Punch-Drunk Love.
Suddenly, he was Chaplin-esque - clad in a shimmering blue suit in a Valley warehouse, broken and alone and obsessed with pudding coupons. Amazingly, we believed it - and so, too, did he.
Sandler went on to do the very sober Reign Over Me, the underrated 2007 movie in which he was a September 11 widower in a fugue of grief, and, the year before, the highly sentimental Click, which begins as a comedy (guy discovers magic remote control, flips past interpersonal connection) only to become It's a Wonderful Life (guy tearfully realises family comes first).
For comedians, the transition into pathos - and it's one Sandler is continuing to make - is hardly easy. And if you're a star comedian, the stakes are that much higher, making the result that much more chastening.
Assuming The Love Guru makes money (or even if it tanks), Myers can always do another Mike Myers movie, and another one after that.
So why does it feel as if he's holding on to the reins of his image for dear life? There's something kind of classy these days about a guy who makes a comedy only once every five years, if it also means he risks extinction.
After all, the others keep coming and coming. Will Ferrell has yet another comedy imminent, Step Brothers, hard on the heels of the disappointing Semi-Pro, which came hot on the skates of Blades of Glory.
Steve Carell is back on the big screen soon with Get Smart. You get the point: It's hard out there for a Guru. - Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
