Butts Below the Border

Growing up in Southern California in the late seventies with a single mom (although in regular contact with a dad who was an accomplished musician), he played sports, made crank calls, and gravitated to comics like Steve Martin. “Putting an arrow through his head and playing the banjo and always going for the non sequitur, that’s what I loved,” Ferrell says. “He obviously became gigantic, but I’m sure there was a big portion of that audience that was, like, ‘What is he doing? I don’t get it—it’s not a setup, punch line, or storytelling.’ ”


Ferrell actually strives to produce that disorientation. “I’ve never been afraid of silence,” he says. “Silence and listening in comedy are big things that are overlooked.” If you don’t get the joke, he can wait. Like a musician (it’s no accident his films are filled with musical numbers), he thrives on changing the beat and riffing on a theme, letting the gag go on “and on and on and on and start to dip, but then because it’s going on so long it starts to get funny again.”


The approach goes back to his long stint on Saturday Night Live, where he’d double down on sketches that were dying in front of the audience—unlike some of his plainly miserable co-stars. “If something wasn’t working, the tendency would be to speed up and get through it,” he says. “But I would slow way down, and I would have this thing—I don’t know why, I love the audience, I want them to laugh, and yet something would kick in like, ‘Okay, you don’t like it, I’m going to make sure you really hate it,’ so I would just take my time. I don’t know, it was like a perverse joy in the agony of it being so painful. I can’t explain that.”


Butts Below the Border / David Edelstein / New York Magazine March 2012