# The Man You Cannot Throw Out

Zach Galifianakis is funniest when the person he is bothering cannot quite throw him out.

*What About Bob?* is the older Bill Murray version of that joke.

Bob Wiley should be unbearable. He meets a psychiatrist, attaches himself to the man, and follows him on vacation. The situation is wrong before the movie has to explain anything. A patient should not show up at the family lake house. A doctor should not have to spend his holiday managing a patient. The family should look at Bob and say, no, absolutely not, go home.

Instead, everyone starts liking him.

Murray keeps Bob from becoming only a pest. Bob annoys everyone because he is scared. He is needy. He is grateful for every tiny kindness. When he repeats "baby steps," it is funny because it is pathetic and useful at the same time. He has turned therapy language into a life raft.

Richard Dreyfuss, as Leo Marvin, has the easier moral case. Bob really has crossed a line. Leo really does deserve his vacation. But the more Leo insists on being right, the worse he looks. His anger starts to seem larger than Bob's offense. He wants his house back, his family back, his dignity back, his role as the impressive doctor back. Bob is a problem. Leo becomes a worse problem.

The movie works because it does not ask us to decide that Bob behaved well. He did not. It asks us to notice that the man defending normal behavior has become colder than the man violating it.

Galifianakis takes that shape and makes it uglier.

Alan in *The Hangover* is rougher than Bob. He is bossy, strange, selfish, and dangerous to any ordinary plan. But he has the same useful disadvantage: he does not look like someone who can cash out the damage as power. He wants to belong so badly that he barges into belonging before anyone has invited him. The group can hate him, and often should, but the movie keeps making full rejection feel crueler than endurance.

Todd Phillips once called this type a "loser alpha male." That is a good phrase because both halves matter. Alan pushes like an alpha. He occupies space. He makes demands. He does not ask the room whether it is ready for him. But he does it from the bottom. He is too socially broken to become a clean bully. His confidence is ridiculous before it is threatening.

*Between Two Ferns* strips the same joke down even further.

The host is rude to celebrities. He asks bad questions. He mispronounces names. He treats famous people as if they have wandered into a miserable local-access show by mistake. On paper, that sounds like plain insult comedy.

The set saves it.

The ferns are sad. The lighting is bad. The host looks trapped in his own failed show. He sits below the guest, in a chair that makes the celebrity's fame look even shinier. So when he insults them, the insult travels upward. The guest can play along and look generous, or bristle and look precious. Either way, the cheap room has done its job.

Here is the Murray resemblance. Galifianakis gives the setup a harsher body: put an unwanted man in the room, make it hard to remove him, then let the respectable people reveal themselves while trying.

The joke depends on weakness. Bob has panic. Alan has social helplessness. The fern host has humiliation built into the furniture. Each one gets away with behavior that would be ugly from a smoother, stronger person.

That also means the trick can die.

When the intruder starts to look powerful, the audience stops protecting him. A famous comic cannot simply put on a bad suit, ask rude questions, and expect the old permission to hold forever. The shabby room has to keep feeling real. The embarrassment has to stay on him first. If the audience starts to feel that he owns the room, the joke changes category.

Galifianakis' discomfort with being loved belongs inside the act. Too much love threatens the joke. The loser alpha needs both words. Lose the loser and he is just another man taking over the room.

Bob Wiley is the clean version. He enters where he does not belong, and the family cannot stop loving him. Galifianakis' best characters are the dirtier version. They enter where they do not belong, and the room cannot reject them without looking worse than they do.

That is the whole trick.

The man has to be wrong.

Then he has to be loved anyway.