When I was in the 7th grade my parents rented the film Napoleon Dynamite on a Friday night. That next Saturday morning, my mother told me to bring my bowl of Frosted Flakes into the living room so that I could watch the movie. 82 minutes later I had laughed harder than I could ever remember, and by the time I went back to school on Monday I had watched the movie two more times. My family had immediately fallen in love with the film and was so obsessed that I could already quote a good deal of it from memory. Over the next few weeks the movie really caught on. There was scarcely a conversation in the halls of Grayslake Middle School that was not punctuated with soon to be worn out quotes like “Your mom goes to college” and “Tina, you fat lard.” Indeed, Napoleon Dynamite swept across the entire country. A very short time after the film’s release, you could buy a “Vote for Pedro” shirt at Target.
Everyone I knew was laughing at the adventures of Napoleon, Pedro, and Deb, but, strangely enough, no one could seem to point out why we were laughing. Napoleon Dynamite was not like anything I had ever experienced before. The film was certainly treated as a comedy, and my peers and I had responded to it as such, but I could not put my finger on any distinguishable jokes. What I eventually had to accept was that there weren’t any. Napoleon never delivered a punch line, but still managed to be one of the funniest characters of the last decade. The sheer absurdity of his actions –trying to feed a Llama ham, doing elaborate hand dances, asking a girl to a dance by giving her a grotesque portrait- were the basis of our laughter. The film was my first brush with absurdist comedy, and is one of the better examples of its effectiveness. It is for this reason that I defend the film against those who deride it as being simply “stupid.” Napoleon Dynamite is a supremely self aware film which is not crippled by its strange and irrational plot and characters, but rather is propelled by them.
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