How Did Cocaine Become The Drug Of Choice In Hard-R Comedies?

In the red band trailer for Rough Night, arriving in theaters this weekend, all the hallmarks of a raucous funny movie party are present and accounted for: A group of actors walking in slow motion while wearing going out clothes, strippers, alcohol guzzled straight from the bottle, physically awkward dance moves, woo-ing, stumbling SNL cast members, light vomiting, and of course, one of your favorite comedians yelling at someone to do cocaine.

Whether it’s Ilana Glazer shouting unprintable things at Scarlett Johansson in Rough Night, TJ Miller accidentally dosing Courtney B. Vance in Office Christmas Party, Jillian Bell giving an illegal stocking stuffer to Seth Rogen in The Night Before, or everything that happens in every second of Hot Tub Time Machine, coke seems to be the new cool movie drug that definitely everyone wants to do very much. It’s also the thing that, in real life, collapsed Stevie Nicks’ nasal passages, but no one on screen seems much concerned with that.

How did modern film comedy fall head over heels for blow?

I hate to point the finger here, but I have to say that the (at least partial) culprit for cocaine’s rise in party movie popularity — the gateway drug, if you will — is pot.

A few years ago, a little bit of marijuana was all a movie needed to prove it was cool: Pineapple Express, Superbad, Knocked Up, really anything in the Apatow universe. In these movies, people who casually took cocaine were never the films heroes — if they appeared at all, the drug was usually a sign that the characters were a bunch of inveterate douchebags.

But since pot has been legalized in a few states, allowed for medical use in more, decriminalized in still others, and accepted by pretty much everyone but the DOJ, movies needed a new drug. If Glazer was cussing out Johannson over a little toke or two, audiences would roll their eyes and go back to hitting their vapes. It wouldn’t make any sense.

The most obvious answer about why every hard-R comedy is hopping on the last train to Railsville —an Occam’s Razorblade, if you will— is pretty simple: the drug’s joke potential. The effects of taking cocaine lend themselves to comedy, assuming your comedy calls for talking really fast, being a jerk, and making poor decisions, like Gilmore Girls but worse (Rory, Dean was married!).

And the hilarity of teeth-grinding and nervous pacing aside, that fact that it takes the form of a powder means a couple of tropes can show up again and again. We’ve known since Annie Hall that a large, accidentally-created cloud of cocaine is one of the funniest kinds of clouds, way more comical than cumulus, so in recent years we’ve seen this same joke in Horrible Bosses, Harold and Kumar: The Third One About Christmas I Think?, Office Christmas Party, etc. Points for originality all around. But these movies are all in competition with the classic “hey, you don’t know there’s coke on your face!” seen in god, everything, but notably in Ted, because a child’s toy bear with Bolivian marching powder coating its snout is box office gold.

Still: aren’t all intoxicants kind of funny when ingested? Molly makes people think everything is amazing, which is clearly hilarious because it isn’t. Acid’s close association with purple elephants should be embraced in the age of CGI. And pills are the most commonly ingested drug in America, which… okay, that just depressing, I see why that’s not a thing. But why this dangerous and illegal drug when there are so many to choose from?

A helluva drug is a super convenient shortcut for lazy screenwriters. When the yayo shows up, the movie is telling you, hey, things are about to get CAH-RAZY. Watch out, girl! And don’t worry about things like a film’s internal logic!

Without cocaine, how could we see previously uptight Courtney B. Vance jump off a balcony at the Office Christmas Party? How could Bobby Moynihan win the love of a beautiful Asian stereotype played with as much grace as humanly possible by Greta Lee in Sisters? How could the Hot Tub Time Machine crew explain time travel mechanics that… seem like they were conceived of on cocaine? Anything can happen! Sometimes characters on coke experience a facsimile of death followed by super strength, like Ken Jeong in Hangover 2. Sometimes, they get a nose bleed and make an impromptu vlog about their fear of being a dad, like Seth Rogen in The Night Before. Whatever the plot needs! It’s a deus coke machina. Even though in real life all signs point to users being nothing more complicated than chatty a-holes focused on getting more of the drug, movies believe that in cocaine, all plots are possible.

So, cocaine alters and allows for absurd human behavior in a way that can be amusing if you don’t think about the perils of addiction, the human cost of the drug business, and the fact that people on coke probably lean more towards some specific behaviors and less toward whatever the screenwriter needs a character to do to ensure the movie ends with Jonah Hill driving a Oscar Meyer Wienermobile into the Eiffel Tower.

I guess the only way to end this tired trope is to legalize it. (Just kidding, don’t do that, think of Stevie Nicks!)

Meredith Haggerty is a Senior Editor at Racked, and she just wants good things for Stevie Nicks. Follow her on Twitter: @manymanywords