Someday, some ambitious graduate student in film studies will write a doctoral dissertation about the hair on Will Ferrell’s chest and stomach. In virtually every movie in which he has ever appeared it has been on display at some point, and it is a visual wonder on par with a car wreck—you just can’t make yourself look away, no matter how horrifying it is. In the Chest Hair Hall of Fame, it has to be somewhere between Sean Connery and Austin Powers. It is somehow simultaneously sparse and uniform in its coverage, and its constant display speaks directly to Ferrell’s greatest asset as a comedian: his complete lack of inhibition.

This is not Chris Farley-style inhibition that involves throwing one’s body around physically and bashing into things. Rather, it is Ferrell’s willingness to constantly contradict the braggadocio of the characters he plays with his goofy physicality. Ferrell carries his big, lumpy, hairy body with a sense of wanton bravado that’s infectious. Strutting around in a pair of red underoos and a shorty robe at a party in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, he’s hilarious because he’s utterly and completely unaware of just how supremely silly he looks. That joke doesn’t extend within the world of the movie, though; as the lead anchor of the number one news station in San Diego, Ron Burgundy is hot stuff and he knows it. As he awkwardly tells a woman he’s trying to pick up at a party, “I don’t know how to say this, but I’m kind of a big deal. People know me.”

Anchorman, a frequently hilarious parody of gender relations and everything that was ugly in the early 1970s (including the gender relations), was Ferrell’s successful bid to cement his comedic leading man status after the enormous success of Elf (2003). He cowrote the script with first-time director Adam McKay, a veteran of Saturday Night Live who has gone on to director Ferrell in Step Brothers (2008), The Other Guys (2010), and Anchorman 2 (2013) before winning an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for The Big Short (2016) and being nominated for a bunch more for Vice (2018), a biopic about Dick Cheney.

Ferrell clearly understands his own comic appeal, and it is testament to the thoroughness of both how his character is written and how he plays him that he makes Ron’s strange verbal outbursts—“By Zeus’ beard!”—almost completely believable. One of Ferrell’s strengths is the way in which he can get the audience to sympathize with a character who is largely unsympathetic (just look at his hilarious impersonation of President George W. Bush on SNL, who he portrayed as a child in a man’s overgrown body). Ron Burgundy is a self-centered, thick-headed, sexist pig, but Ferrell manages to suggest that, deep underneath all that well-coiffed, self-deluded slime, he is really a decent, sensitive guy.

Of course, Ron looks pretty good when compared to the other members of the news team. The sports reporter, Champ Kind (David Koechner), is an overzealous urban cowboy with an annoying catchphrase (“Whammy!”). The roving reporter is a lounge lizard named Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) whose choice in cologne is, shall we say, a little misguided. And then there’s the poor weatherman, the aptly named Brick Tamland (Steve Carrell), whose clear lack of mental capacity is overlooked by everyone because he smiles a lot, is polite, and is rarely late. They’re a rock-solid team of grinning incompetence who succeed only because they are employed in an era when covering the pregnancy of a zoo panda counted as hard journalism.

All of this is challenged by the arrival of Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), who is less of a threat because she takes journalism seriously than because she is a woman. “It’s anchorman, not anchorlady!” Champ bellows when Veronica is named co-anchor. Ron likes her, though, and his inappropriate attempts at hitting on her are the equivalent of a schoolyard boy pulling a girl’s pigtails to disguise his fascination. For her part, Veronica likes Ron despite his sexism and thick-headedness. They have an affair (which Ron subsequently announces on the next night’s newscast), but everything goes horribly wrong when Ron senses Veronica encroaching on his position of power.

Anchorman balances its social satire with some outlandish visual gags and moments of surreal hilarity, such as when all the competing San Diego news teams (including the public-access and Spanish-language channels) face off in a street brawl worthy of a ’50s juvenile delinquency movie (each news team is led by a well-known actor in a throwaway cameo). There are times when the movie threatens to become a one-note parody of outdated masculine bravado and bad taste in clothes, but Ferrell constantly anchors the movie by making Ron a joke and a hero at the same time. He’s the kind of guy who is thoughtless enough to throw a half-eaten burrito out the window of a moving car, but sensitive enough to stop and get out when he hits a motorcycle rider in the face with it. It is Ferrell’s ability to mine this gold between sympathy and silliness that has given him such a long and rich career.

Copyright © 2024 James Kendrick

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