In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Matt Singer is the editor and film critic of ScreenCrush.com and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. The author of Marvel’s Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular and Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever, his new book Funny Business: The Old-School Wedding Crashers and Knocked-Up Virgins Who Changed Comedy Forever charts the rise and fall of the iconic movie comedy era of the early 2000s.
In this interview, Matt talks about his most formative movie comedies, his most intriguing what-ifs of this period, his Mount Rushmore of Early ‘00s Comedy Characters, the most and least enjoyable parts of writing a book, and more!
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
1. What’s the Matt Singer origin story?
My parents went to high school together and their first date was going to see Mel Brooks’ The Producers in the movie theater. I’ve always felt like that somehow makes sense, that I’m the person who would emerge from a union forged by two people who thought The Producers was a good first date movie.
2. The book does a great job establishing the history and connective issue of this loose collective of comedians and performers. What was the most rewarding chapter to write?
I guess the thing that was the most rewarding was connecting the dots between this period and today. One of the big reasons I wanted to write it was not only that I love this specific period of comedy, and comedy movies have always been among my favorite movies, but just feeling like in the last few years the comedy movie has almost gone extinct and I was trying to figure out why. When you go backwards from where we are now looking for the last point when the movie comedy was a big deal, this early 2000s period was really the last time that Hollywood gave a crap about comedies and treated them as theatrical movies. We’ll still get a movie here or there that’s a comedy, but almost none of them appear in movie theaters. It’s all stuff for streaming. So trying to trace the history and figure out what happened and why was the part I found the most rewarding.
3. I was in high school when the peak Frat Pack era hit, which was probably the perfect age to experience them. Specifically the one-two punch of Dodgeball and Anchorman in 2004 was deeply formative for my comedic sensibility and references that I still quote to this day. Which movie or movies did that for you?
I’m a little bit older than you, so I was in college when the first couple of these were coming out and then right after college when Anchorman was coming out. So for me, the really formative comedies would have been things like Spaceballs, which I surely watched more than I watched Star Wars. I always preferred Spaceballs—it’s Star Wars with jokes. So that was one. The Naked Gun came out at the perfect time for me. All the Naked Gun movies I definitely saw in the theater. But the one in particular that hit me at just the right age to really make a big impression was Wayne’s World. I remember seeing it in the theater and laughing so hard, almost where I didn’t quite realize a movie comedy could be that funny. I remember the product placement scene, where they’re making fun of product placement in the movie by including a lot of it, like suddenly Garth’s wearing a Reebok sweatsuit and his head hurts and they’re encouraging him to take Nuprin. I remember laughing so hard I fell out of my seat. That was a very formative comedy memory. I guess the throughline in all of those is that they’re very meta, and they’re all from that same school of picking apart the cliches of moviemaking in a fun way. So maybe something about that really spoke to me.
4. There’s a video essay by Every Frame A Painting about visual comedy that contrasts the filmmaking style of Edgar Wright with what they call the “lightly edited improv” of the Frat Pack movies. Roger Ebert was notoriously scathing about them generally. I’m curious how you assess these movies by their cinematic style—is there one you’d hold up as not only funny but also well-crafted generally?
They’re certainly a different thing than something like an Edgar Wright movie, which is very visual, and I would agree that the visual component of most of these movies was not at the forefront of what they were doing, with some exceptions. The really improv-heavy ones like Anchorman and Step Brothers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin do make it harder to really pin down the visual side of a movie. To make a movie look like Edgar Wright makes it look, you have to have a really intense game plan. You have to have storyboards. You have to go in knowing “I need this shot and that shot and this shot and that shot.” And when you’re doing improv, you’re setting up multiple cameras and you’re just kind of letting it rip and seeing what emerges. Sometimes the improvs are happening before the cameras are rolling, but you’re still doing a lot of coverage. It’s not the right environment for visual dynamism. But on the other hand, a guy like Ben Stiller, who’s covered extensively in the book and who’s very good at improv comedy, he also grew up wanting to be more of a filmmaker than a comedian. He was making 8mm films when he was a kid and he was very obsessed with the look of the things he liked, like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. I think you can see in the movies he directed like Zoolander and Tropic Thunder and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty that he definitely has a visual eye. They were made by a visual filmmaker. Maybe he sometimes downplays that aspect for the sake of improv or for jokes, but Tropic Thunder has some incredible visual effects in it and some really good visual gags. The way the opening sequence with the fake trailers hilariously parodies the look of real movie trailers—I would hold that kind of stuff up against the movies of Edgar Wright in terms of a guy who knows how to tell a story with a camera or to use a camera to get the precise psychological effects he’s looking for.
5. Was there a specific movie or more general perception you had that you changed your mind about after researching and writing this book?
I’m not sure if there were any perceptions I completely came around on. I think it was more just doing a lot of research, going to the library, reading old clippings and just seeing how this group came together and how they sort of fell apart. It’s an interesting group to look at, this so-called Frat Pack, because they hated that name. They never wanted to be associated with it. They mostly didn’t want to be known as a group at all. And yet there is this period where they were absolutely this kind of unofficial comedy team or collective. They were working on each other’s projects and appearing together in movies. When they weren’t appearing together in each other’s movies, they were often working together behind the scenes. They would hold table reads for projects. And they would call their friends and have them come and read with them or give script notes. So they were very much a thing.
There was a very famous article in USA Today that coined that term Frat Pack, and there were several other articles in that same period that wrote about them that way. It seemed like as soon as that happened, they almost started to drift apart. It’s interesting to look at in hindsight because we still kind of think of them in that way, but they didn’t have a very long period of working together as a group. When you think back, you go, “Oh, it must have been a longer period.” Then you look at how quickly and how much came out in a very short span of time, and then maybe because they didn’t like this Frat Pack name and didn’t want to be a group—or they became so successful that they were getting paid so much money that studios couldn’t afford to hire three of them at a time—they almost immediately began to diffuse, which is sort of an interesting phenomenon to examine as well.
6. There are a lot of sliding-door moments during this era in terms of casting and which movies got made and when. What’s your biggest or most intriguing what-if?
That’s a good question. One is kind of a broader one, which is what if Adam McKay and Will Ferrell hadn’t had a falling out? They were the most magical team of all the comedians I cover in this book. They were my favorites at the time. And looking at their work now, it has a very special quality even compared to the other very funny and very interesting and enjoyable comedies I’m writing about in this book. Their movies, when they were at their best, were on another level of sublime, bizarre absurdity. They had this really rough falling out, and you just wonder if they had made the Winning Time HBO show together, maybe that would have been the thing that brought them back together. Who knows? The other one that comes to mind is that Owen Wilson was supposed to play the agent in Tropic Thunder, and of course he was not in that movie. Matthew McConaughey was the one who replaced him. And while I don’t think that’s a huge sliding-doors moment in Hollywood history, when you talk about roles that people were supposed to play, that’s one that immediately comes to mind.
7. Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of Frat Pack Movie Characters?
I think you gotta put Ron Burgundy on there. Just as a character he is a pretty singular creation, very quotable, very mustachioed, very memorable. He is truly a character. I would probably throw Zoolander in there as well. Similarly another very dynamic character, very striking, very memorable, very quotable. Where do you go from there? There’s so many other options that it becomes kind of tricky. Maybe I would toss in Cal Naughton Jr., John C. Reilly’s character from Talladega Nights, who is such an amazing comic creation. His scene where he visits Will Ferrell in the hospital and tells him about his past as Mike Concho, who did Playgirl spreads—I mean, one of the most amazing improv runs in all of movie comedy. For the last slot, my book is guided by the notion of the Frat Pack in this period, but I do write about other movies that are kind of connected to this group, one of which is Bridesmaids. That might be my favorite of all the movies in the book, or it’s certainly up there. But I don’t know about Melissa McCarthy’s character Megan, who is more in the mold of a Zoolander or a Ron Burgundy just because she’s so big and broad. I think I ultimately might pick Annie, Kristen Wiig’s character. That’s such a great performance. It’s hilarious and it has big set pieces, like when she’s on the airplane and gets stoned on the medication she takes to calm herself down and kind of loses her mind. And there’s the sequence where she’s destroying the cake and the chocolate fountain and all that at the shower. The pure physical comedy from Kristen Wiig is so incredible. So maybe that’s my surprise fourth pick. I feel bad because I don’t have an Owen Wilson and I don’t have a Vince Vaughn, but I think throwing her on there as the fourth person might be the way to do it.
8. The market for theatrical comedies is a lot smaller today, but which of the movies you covered do you think could still get made and released today?
That’s a good question. I think a lot of them could get made. The question is would they be made in the same way? And I think in a lot of cases, the answer is no. I think odds are they would go straight to Netflix or Hulu or something. And even more than that, they probably would be TV shows. Because when you look at what these guys are up to now, they’re all still working, but with very few exceptions mostly what they do is make TV. Will Ferrell just put out a new comedy series on Netflix called The Hawk, where he’s playing a classic Will Ferrell type who’s a down-on-his-luck golfer. And this is like a year after Owen Wilson made his own down-on-his-luck golfer TV show called Stick. So could these movies still be made? Yes. Would they still be made in the same way? I’m pretty skeptical. I mean, let’s say that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell bury the hatchet tomorrow, would Paramount want to make Anchorman 3 if they wanted to do it? Probably. I think that’s the way one of these things gets made, because now so much of what gets put in movie theaters is IP. It’s about brands. It’s about name recognition. So maybe if you could put all of these guys in one movie and could make an unofficial, spiritual sequel to this whole movement in comedy, maybe that could be the way to get an original movie with these guys in it back into theaters.
When you look at what these guys are up to now, they’re all still working, but with very few exceptions mostly what they do is make TV.
9. What are the most overrated and underrated aspects of writing a book?
Writing is overrated, generally. It’s certainly the hardest aspect of writing a book. It’s a grind. You have to be willing to dedicate a long amount of time, day after day, night after night, to sit back down and write another couple thousand words. Even when you love the material and you’re really interested in the subject matter, like I am here. You put your kids to bed and then you go do a second shift of work writing or researching, and that can be tough. I would say the underrated part is all the work going up to that point. I love research. Maybe other people would hate research, but I’ve always loved the research phase because at that point the book could be anything. It’s almost like a sculptor starting with a big block that could turn into anything depending on how you chip it away. At a certain point, you’ve chipped away certain pieces and the possibilities begin to narrow. So when it’s just the block and you could take it in any direction and make anything out of it and get to spend hours in the library, that’s the fun part. I recognize some people might be like, “That sounds horrible.” But I love going to the library and I love just looking at old newspapers and magazines, and I spent a lot of time doing that in this book. The research also includes watching all of these movies, watching old TV shows, and watching old interviews where people appear on Conan O’Brien and things like that. It was really fun tracking down random little bits of detritus from this period, DVD commentaries that have been forgotten or old podcast interviews and all that sort of stuff. I’ll never be Indiana Jones, but I imagine the feeling of discovering some cool tidbit or some forgotten article or finding exactly the quote you needed that really hits home an idea you already had but kind of proves a theory you had—that’s always an exciting part of the process.
10. I really loved your last book Opposable Thumbs. And now with Funny Business you’re now two-for-two with A+ titles. I read some of the alternatives you had for Opposable Thumbs—what about for Funny Business?
Oh man, I had a lot. There was a lot of discussion about this title. Once Opposable Thumbs came to me, I was like, “Well, that has to be the title.” There was no more discussion. For this one, I really liked Funny Business when I came up with it, but there was a while where I thought maybe there is a better title than that out there. The one I remember that did get a lot of discussion was The Last Laugh, because of the idea that this is the last period of great Hollywood comedies, and so there was a certain amount of logic to that. And some of the editors and people at the company liked that title too. But we eventually decided it makes it sound a little too depressing, and this book is not depressing. Certainly we’re looking back at this last great era, but it’s a little more upbeat than that title might imply. And I agree with that. So we eventually decided Funny Business is even better.
11. You’re knee-deep in the streaming world for Filmspotting SVU. What’s an underreported trend you’re seeing in that space, either on the business side or creative side?
I have had my own personal Netflix account as long as Netflix has had streaming. I don’t think I’ve not been a subscriber for a single month in all that time. We restarted Filmspotting SVU just a couple of months ago, so I’m paying more attention again and we’re reviewing new movies every week. Not all on Netflix, though it’s the service we’ve covered the most so far. People joke about algorithms determining the movies, and sometimes you do feel that way when you’re watching a lot of them, especially given how many of them are just depressing, dystopian sci-fi movies. A good one of those can definitely hit the spot, I suppose, but how many of these do we need? They crank out both movies and TV shows like that all the time. And not just Netflix. At what point have we exhausted our interest in dirty people scrounging for food in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Maybe it’s the book, but don’t people want to laugh occasionally? Maybe it’s just that a lot of them are really crummy. We’ve reviewed a couple of them on the show so far, and most of them are pretty bad. I just don’t get the appeal of so many of them. So I guess that’s the trend I’m still trying to wrap my head around. I would love for someone to explain it to me. If someone could write that trend piece, I would be the first person to read it.
12. What’s your movie of 2026 at the moment?
I’ve seen a lot of really, really good movies. I haven’t seen a lot of movies that I’m like, “That was a masterpiece.” All the movies that everybody likes, I like a lot too. But the only movie I’ve seen that really gave me that sort of feeling was Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which is a comedy, so maybe I’m typecasting myself. I was only vaguely aware of the show and I’d barely seen any of it, if at all. So I didn’t go into it as a fan or anything like that. And if anything that maybe made it better because I was so pleasantly surprised and delighted by the film, which was not at all what I expected. The places it went were so unexpected and so charming and hilarious. It really was the movie comedy in theaters I haven’t gotten a lot of lately, and was so in love with movies in general and the possibility of making something with your friend that’s kind of lo-fi but also incredibly ambitious at the same time. Right now, I think that’s still my favorite thing that I have seen this year.
+1. What’s your question for us?
What’s your favorite movie of the year so far?
Chad: The one that actually really hit me hard was If I Go Will They Miss Me from Walter Thompson-Hernández. Just a beautiful, poetic, magical realist take on fatherhood. Especially as a dad of young kids, I would highly recommend it. It really forces some self-examination and is just so beautifully done. One of those movies that snuck under the radar, so I hope people will discover it.
