Superbad - What It Takes To Make A Teen Comedy

For whatever reason, it’s become borderline impossible to create a good teen movie. I mean you risk either incredibly bad acting, pacing that makes you want to walk out of the theatre, themes that are just not accurate to actual teen life-style and culture, or dialogue that just makes you want to punch a baby?

Superbad avoids these problems. It will be my generation’s classic movie, I can already tell. The millennial version of Swingers, another film I hope to review soon.

I find this film highly underrated. It’s talked about, but it’s also talked down about because the “acting-level” wasn’t quality enough. Well I got something to say about that: it doesn’t matter.

It’s still an enjoyable film. The movie Clerks didn’t have high-quality acting, but I still love it to this day.

Superbad had comedy when it was appropriate. This film didn’t include throwaway lines, it just included back-and-forth comedic dialogue that actually introduced characters, introduced the small plot that it had, and set the tone for this to be a much more packed movie than face value would give it.

This is mostly due to the dialogue of the film actually resembling how actual high school seniors talk to each other. I highly doubt high schoolers talk to each other the way they do in other teenage-targeted films (looking at you Mean Girls, Sixteen Candles, hell even Back To The Future). The dialogue of this film was written by high schoolers and I think that largely contributes to the film’s natural flow. It also helps that Michael Cera and Jonah Hill offset each other in such a way that their friendship dynamic in the film, while mildly embarrassing and doomed-to-fail, was very realistic. The characters in Superbad are people I can directly picture walking around my high school hallways.

What I particularly like about Superbad is the fact that it gave the audience what it wanted - which was a hilarious comedy in tandem with a relatable story.

The other comedies of my generation don't exactly do it for me.

The Hangover was great, but unless you live in Vegas, you’re an eccentric rich guy, or just plain stupid, you probably don’t relate to it.

17 Again was fine, but no one ever actually gets the chance to be 17 again.

Napoleon Dynamite was just a giant “WTF?”

Yet Superbad was oddly relatable. Maybe not hugely relatable to some of you, but the dialogue in class, between Seth and Evan, between Becca and her friends, between Fogell and anybody is 9 times out of 10 relatable dialogue. How most of those convos go down in the awkward party scenes, the teacher pairing students for class projects, the convenience store run-ins, is just teenage life as it is. The scene where Evan is confused for a singer in a room full of adults he doesn't know is a brilliantly awkward level of comedy. You don’t know what you’re doing or how you got there, and all you want to do is leave. That’s quite honestly what teenage parties felt like.

Its rare I find movies where watching the same scenes every time makes me crack up, but there's no way I can't laugh when Seth gets rear-ended in the ass by a random driver or when Fogell introduces his fake ID as McLovin.

Now, this is all widely subjective, but Superbad, to me, to your typical average guy reminiscing his typical average teenager years, I found the film highly entertaining, highly quotable, and highly memorable, which is all it takes to be an iconic film. It was the film for my generation at least, for what it was worth growing up in the 2000s. It wouldn’t surprise me if this film becomes timeless come a few decades from now.