The Best Celebrity That I Don't Want To Get Sick Of So Will He Please Just Stop Doing Things That Will Make Me Get Sick of Him?

This is a horse race between two guys: Will Ferrell


and Steve Carell.



Steve Carell first made me laugh when he did an expose on beating the heat on The Daily Show. That was only a couple of years ago. He made 4 movies while still with that show. Since 2005, he has made or is making 10 movies, including voice-overs for cartoons, and has also appeared on Saturday Night Live a lot and of course stars in The Office. Now, he's remaking Get Smart and has listed the unpromising-sounding "High T" movie in the works. I have never heard of it before but from the title alone I am going to guess that it's about a rapper who becomes an English gentleman of some sort, and Steve has to help teach him how to behave.

Now, I just went and Googled it, and found that I was not even kind of close. Here's the exact description:

Up and coming star Steve Carell has signed on to star in new comedy "High T", the story of a weedy guy who takes testosterone shots to become more macho. Unfortunately he takes so much that it produces gigantic mood swings that take him from being full on aggressive to a crybaby within minutes.

Aw, man.

Then there's Will Ferrell, who left Saturday Night Live


and began making the same exact movie over and over and over. Not that it's not a funny movie, but how many times can we see "Frank The Tank Tries A Sport?"

And the entire pantheon of celebrities that I like and don't want to get sick of boils down to those two guys, because those two guys are really really funny. Not fake funny like Robin Williams was (note: was, not is. Robin Williams is not even fake funny anymore. While in a more innocent time funny voices and suspenders were hilarious (?), 30 years in, it's all getting a little old, isn't it?) Not funny-for-a-short-burst, like Jim Carrey, who can be hilarious but who is so over the top that my own personal image of hell is 10 minutes in a room with Jim Carrey. I think it might kill him if you made eye contact and looked away.

No, Will and Steve are genuinely funny and smart and talented-- at least from what I can observe. Will Ferrell was for long time the only funny thing left on Saturday Night Live, and when he left I stopped watching that show forever. But he was brilliant there, as a spelling bee moderator who forgot the word list, as the cheerleader guy, whatever he did was funny, even that stupid store skit where he rode a rascal, and he was the only funny thing about that.

Then he started making movies, and those movies ranged from that awful Butabi Brothers thing to some very good ones (Stranger Than Fiction) to some that were likeable and funny (Anchorman), but somewhere along the way, Will Ferrell stopped trying and started being everywhere. It was probably around the time he made Bewitched -- that moment when he said "Okay, it's all about the paycheck now."



And, coincidentally, Steve Carell was in Bewitched, too, only his career arc was much faster, going from Nobody knows who I am to Please keep paying me faster than anyone I can think of. Steve Carell was even funnier, and smarter, it seemed, than Will, and he turned that into schlock like The 40-year-old Virgin and Dan In Real Life and the overrated Little Miss Sunshine, and now... another TV show remake, just like Will. I actually groaned when I saw the preview.



I am all for people getting paid. I seriously am; I plaster ads all over this blog and I demand a paycheck and I love getting paid and I want Will and Steve to make lots of money -- even though my own personal stance is that nobody needs to make more than $200,000 per year and if you earn more than that you have a moral duty to give most of it to people who aren't as well off as you-- but at the same time, I want them to not beat me over the head with their existence and I want them to continue to amuse and amaze me. Is that so much to ask?

I know they can just keep remaking the same movie and make lots of money, and I know it's easier for 'writers' to simply 'write' a movie by stealing ideas from old TV shows. But I don't want them to do that. And I know I'm alone in that, because everyone in the world will go see Frank The Tank Plays Basketball and everyone in the world will go see Michael Scott The Spy, and they'll keep doing things like that, and so I'll keep having to see pictures of Will Ferrell in funny outfits in my Entertainment Weekly, and I'll keep seeing Steve Carell cock his head that certain, hilarious way, and I'll have to keep hearing about Funny or Die or whatever it is they're up to this week.

And I'll keep being sad because they're both moving into Robin & Jim territory where in the future I won't be able to re-watch my The Office DVDs without hating them.

I try to stay positive here, though, so let me go back to celebrating talent. Out of these two guys, I have to pick one as The Best Celebrity That I Don't Want To Get Sick Of So Will He Please Just Stop Doing Things That Will Make Me Get Sick of Him? I'm going to pretend that I can save one of them. And that one is...

Steve Carell.

There's no hope for Will, frankly. On a personal level, Will spent 20 years or something like that trying desperately to make SNL funny again, and watched as costar after costar left and made crappy movies, and now he gets to do that and make $25 million dollars a minute. And I think he can't overcome that gnawing feeling inside that he should have had this 20 years ago. So while Will Ferrell is funny and a good actor and seems to be a really nice guy, he's done, I'm sure, and he's also sunk too far into Frank The Tank for anything to pull him back.

With Steve, though, you have an equal amount of talent, but not the years of striving. And, maybe, well, yeah, you have more talent. I think that; I think Steve has a little more talent (none of which is on display in Evan Almighty), and here's why: Because Steve can make Michael Scott be both a caricature and a real person, and I don't know how he does that. You want to hate Michael Scott as a character, and as a sitcom role, because he's so dumb and such a jerk, and he could be so over the top and in fact he is over the top, but he's also humanized. It's like he's a real person that recognizes how terrible of a person he is and so he alternates between trying to make us laugh by exaggerating his own bad qualities while also hating those bad qualities.

Somehow, Steve Carell puts all that into a sitcom character, making me laugh at someone who in lesser hands would simply be annoying or fake. The Office rests on the ability to make us believe that Michael Scott could exist but doesn't, and Steve does that.

Which makes it a shame he doesn't do more of that. So, Steve Carell, I name you The Best Celebrity That I Don't Want To Get Sick Of So Will He Please Just Stop Doing Things That Will Make Me Get Sick of Him?