The Advertising Industry Has Unlocked The Power Of Comedy Statham

I’ve been trying, man.

I’ve been at it for years now.

I’ve been telling anyone who will listen.

Jason Statham is freaking incredible at comedy.

I suspect you know this, too, on some level, if you’ve seen the 2015 film Spy, the one where he plays a kind of bozo version of every Jason Statham character you’ve ever seen. I suspect you might know this even if you haven’t seen the movie, just because I haven’t shut up about it once in the decade or so since it debuted. I would apologize for this if I were sorry about it, but I’m not, so I won’t.

In that movie, he played another agent at the agency Melissa McCarthy’s character worked at, a kind of super-intense guy who thinks he can solve any problem himself. He basically took 20 years of very serious and violent action roles in movies and figured out how to turn it like 30-40 degrees on its side to spill the humor out. I really can’t stress in strong enough terms how good he was at this. He didn’t wink at the camera and he didn’t try to ham it up for laughs the way some actors do when they dip their toes into comedy, maybe because they don’t have confidence that they can land a joke. He played it dead straight and never broke and it worked the whole way through.

I have been pleading — begging, on my knees — for someone to give us more Comedy Statham ever since then. I appreciate a movie like The Beekeeper and do not in any way want him to stop making those, ever, even if we need to start cloning him, but come on. Give me a little taste. It’s one of the reasons I shouted a little when I saw that he’s attached to an upcoming film called Jason Statham Stole My Bike, from David Leitch, director of Deadpool and the criminally underrated remake of The Fall Guy, who says the film will serve as “a meta-commentary on Statham.” Hmm. Yes.

But also: No, because that movie is not scheduled to release until August 2027, which is an entire goddamn year from now. I’m not made of time. I want Comedy Statham now. Which is why I was so excited to see this pop up between innings of a baseball game I was watching recently.

Yes.

Yes.

YES.

This is part of a new series of ads for Discover Card to promote its Cash Back feature. (I have no opinion on this as a product and I promise I will never try to tell you what credit card to use.) (Nor should you listen if I do.) The whole point of it is to give Statham an excuse to lean in and deliver a menacing line reading of “It’s payback time.” Watch the video up there. It’s a good bit.

Not as good as the bit in this second commercial in the series...

This is, with zero hyperbole, one of the funniest celebrity-focused commercials I’ve ever seen. Some of that is me being almost exactly the target audience for it, as someone who could watch a Jason Statham movie on basic cable almost any weeknight of the year. I’ll cop to that. But, like, come on. This is funny, right from the opening “Surprise…” straight through to the cupcake bit at the end. Again, he plays it completely straight, zero cracks or winks, letting his long history as a tough guy in movies do the heavy lifting of delivering the laugh. Again, the bit works.

I’m going to make a comparison here and you’re going to think I’m crazy, but please think about it a bit. He reminds me a little of Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun movies. It’s not an exact 1:1 kind of deal, if only because they take different paths to the same destination, but the gist is the same: a serious actor using the gravitas earned over a career of dramatic/action roles as a tool to deliver what would otherwise be a really dumb joke. Like I said, think about it.

Think about Comedy Statham in general, too. And maybe go watch Spy again. Do it for yourself, mostly, but also do it so more people start getting the joke when I say this every time I’m asked where I got a new piece of clothing.

Help me out here, guys.

This is the thing where I pitch you on subscribing and especially upgrading. I really enjoy doing this newsletter. I hope you enjoy reading it. If you do, please consider smashing the button below and supporting me so I can keep doing it.

A paid subscription does get you some extras, too, not just the joy of giving me money. You’ll get access to the Friday newsletter and you’ll get to contribute to our periodic mailbags and reverse mailbags. Maybe there will be other benefits coming soon. All that for $5/month or $50/year. Basically a buck a week. A buck a week! Wow! What a deal!

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— my House of the Dragon Scorecard for the Season 3 finale, which features what I can best describe as a drunken dragon-related triple-cross

— “The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos”

— yes, I immediately did a ctrl+f for Detroiters and Lodge 49 on this really solid list of underappreciated shows of the 21st century

— Mike Ryan with a great blog about the beauty of a movie that runs repeatedly on basic cable

— cool thing on how Jeopardy has modernized recently to try to stay relevant 

— this is a long video but it’s really kind of incredible, just a tribute to an eccentric dude who leaned into his strengths to make the weirdest supermarket you’ve ever seen

— very excited about the concept of a television show based on Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy of books

— every decade or two we get a big search for the next James Bond and that’s what happening now 

— Warner Bros. is straight up scrambling to try to get a Barbie sequel together

— John Oliver’s next soap opera guest arc starts this week on Days of Our Lives 

— John Wilson's big weird documentary about concrete has a teaser

— Usher would like everyone to know he has not been cloned, which really does sound like something a clone would say

— a guy won an auction to do play-by-play at a Phillies game and he freakin’ crushed it

— sometimes being a wiener-drawing rascal gets things done

— “'Unlock my f--king anime': Houston man arrested after threatening governor's office”

— “Marmots facing money troubles turn to OnlyFans”

— “Italian con artist jailed for building 'world's oldest and largest amphitheatre' 20-years ago”

— lol Timothy Olyphant is such a good talk show guest

Okay, that's it for this week. Please share and subscribe and, now that I think about it, put Statham in a comedy that co-stars Timothy Olyphant.