Cabin Boy

Chris Elliott’s humor is an acquired taste.

Unfortunately, lots of people have trouble acquiring it. After all, his TV series, Get a Life, was canceled because of low ratings – and this was on the Fox Network for crying out loud.

He has earned a cult following, however, as a result of the Fox show and, first, because of the success he scored as a comic-writer and performer on David Letterman’s show. His new movie, Cabin Boy, is banking on the questionable size of his admiring audience.

The plot to this sucker isn’t intended to make much sense in print. It doesn’t even make much sense on the screen. Elliott plays an arrogant, condescending nitwit who’s just graduated from the Stephenwood Finishing School. He’s such a jerk that he gets bounced out of his own limo by an angry chauffeur.

Left on his own, he successfully screws up and lands on the S.S. Filthy Whore, a fishing boat that’s so grubby, even its drunken crew can’t stand it. They also can’t stand Elliott. Especially after he shanghais the ship into Hell’s Bucket – a realm populated by mansharks, six-armed sirens and colossus-sized hardware salesmen with bad attitudes.

Despite all of this, Elliott is actually good at what he does. But his shtick is based on smirks and weird ironies piled higher that the ship’s foremast. Even the funniest bits in Cabin Boy are such an uneven mixture of conceptual comedy and old-fashioned stupidity that it’s hard to know where the punchline is. And every time you laugh, you want to slap yourself for having done so. (But I have to admit that I slapped myself quite a few times during the movie.)

Cabin Boy, essentially, is a Pee Wee’s Playhouse for jaded and immature men. Not surprisingly, the movie was co-produced by Tim Burton. What is surprising is David Letterman’s cameo. He’s even more condescending than Elliott – and that takes some doing.