The title of Fabian Stumm’s Sad Jokes is key. Its gentle humor is sneaky and genuine as if it comes from within its characters and not read on the page of a script, and it reminds us of how essential it is to sustain oneself as dark moments in our lives threaten to take hold. Stumm’s film is unlike anything we have seen before in terms of queer parenthood as we see our hero try to keep everything above water–with a smile on his face.
Stumm opens the film with people telling jokes to the camera. It’s a clever device to ease the audience, but you can’t help but remember that everyone loves to laugh–why not help us relax before the story actually unfolds? We then learn that Joseph (also Stumm) is a filmmaker trying to select his next project, so this jokey prologue could also be an experimentation for his character. Joseph is raising Pino with his friend Sonya, an arrangement that sometimes needs clarification since some don’t often see a queer man sharing duties with a straight woman that he isn’t in a relationship with. Sonya was spending time in a clinic to help battle her post-partum depression, and an early scene settles us into her frustrations when her family is surprised to see her return home.
Joseph is eager to start his next film project, and his producer is curious when the director reveals that he is looking to make a comedy. Is Joseph hungry to make something lighter or is he subconsciously trying to create some levity in his life by ways of his work? It’s a question that pervades throughout Stumm’s film as it explores what is naturally funny to us as individuals. When Joseph gets his hand stuck in a vending machine, a kind woman stops by to help him. He suggests that she put money into the machine, and she, without hesitation, says, ‘What should I pick?’ That innate, undeniable funniness is underneath almost interaction in Stumm’s film, and that naturalism is refreshing to see.
Even as Joseph tries his hand at new comedic material (it doesn’t go well with his producer…), his loneliness begins to creep in. He has not dated anyone since he broke up with his ex, Marc, and Stumm gives Joseph a growing need to fix his loneliness. When Joseph goes on a date with a model, his impatient horniness trips up the words out of his mouth, and one of the best scenes of Sad Jokes shows a feuding couple at an intimate film premiere afterparty. What could have been a simple comedy also explores how the creative process is influenced and formed by our own experiences. At its center, Stumm’s Joseph tried to juggle everything with an affable, willing attitude, and his film thrums with a warm and humane pulse.
Some of us have to use humor to keep ourselves going, but sometimes we don’t realize that “the funny” is ever-present–no matter who is watching. We just have to find it.
