‘Windy City Heat’: the cruellest joke in Hollywood history
There’s a strain of American comedy that seems to have grown beyond the need for actual comedy. Being a smug cunt is just enough for some people, I guess.
Now, those familiar with the work of Ricky Gervais will know that trying to mine comedy out of being a smug cunt isn’t a phenomenon restricted to our colonial chums. However, he at least tries to work in a punchline of some kind.
The strain of alternative comedy I’m talking about is comfortable getting as far as humiliating someone, then sitting back and laughing about it. The best example of this I’m aware of came from an Opie and Antony Show bit that also involved famed (and literal) wanker Louis CK.
The “joke” was the hosts’ promise of Foo Fighters tickets to the next caller. When the caller came in, they strung her along for five minutes before saying “there’s no Foo Fighters tickets, you dumb bitch” then prolapsing from sheer laughter. Comedy gold, I’m sure you’ll agree. It’s very telling that Rick Alverson made the Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim vehicle The Comedy as an unflinching satire on the exact kind of people who find this kind of “ironic” bullying funny.
The problem was that it was a film that was considered profoundly on the pulse for its time, yet it still hits just as hard today as it did on release in 2012. The best you can hope for is that whatever poor sap you find to be the victim of your pranks deserves it, and at the very least, the “star” of Windy City Heat did. It’s still not a fate that you’d wish on your worst enemy, and the perpetrators of Windy City Heat certainly didn’t do it to teach him a lesson. They just found someone desperate, and found humiliating him funny.
What was ‘Windy City Heat’?
Windy City Heat was a scam. One played on delusional “stand up comedy star” Perry Caravello.
After being discovered by fellow comic Don Barris in the early 1990s, Barris teamed up with actor Tony Barbieri, who took on the role of Walter ‘Mole’ Molinski in 1995 as part of their next project. Barris and Barbieri would spend the next decade or so documenting a series of elaborate pranks on Caravello, culminating in Windy City Heat, where they convinced Caravello that he had been cast as the lead in a Hollywood movie, then filmed said movie as one giant prank on him.
If you feel bad for Caravello, don’t. He’s an arrogant, delusional, bigoted man-baby convinced of his own God-like genius. It should be satisfying to see him dive into a dumpster full of manure over and over again, but it’s not. Because Barris and Barbieri aren’t doing it because Caravello’s a piece of shit. They’re doing it because he’s clearly got a screw loose and is easily led. If Caravello weren’t an unrepentant narcissist and virulent homophobe, they’d find it just as funny.
Are there some funny parts? Sure. Bobcat Goldthwaite turning up in a set of jodhpurs and only talking through a megaphone raises a smile. The whole thing is just exhausting, though, and if you thought it was bad that The Comedy was made in 2012 and still resonates today, Windy City Heat was released in 2003 and basically provided a blueprint for most “prank” content on social media today. This sort of humour isn’t alternative anymore, it’s the mainstream. Yay.