Jack Black: In His Case, Maybe it is a Matter of Rocket Science

Jack Black: In His Case, Maybe it is a Matter of Rocket Science by Roxanne McDonald

“I really wish that we had secret headquarters where there was a batcave in the Hollywood Hills mountain, like inside the Hollywood sign, where we would drive in and talk about domination of world comedy. We’d have superpowers and drive out in our super-comedy mobiles. But it doesn’t exist.” Jack Black, on the subject of the Frat Pack, quoted in Sports Illustrated and on The Frat Pack Tribute

What? That’s the look on any one of Jack Black’s character’s face. It’s not the “What?” of the gypsy thug in his “take a picture it lasts longer” mode. It’s not the “Wha?” of a Vinnie Barbarino. It’s more of a combined self-effacing and scampish “What? What did I do?” look.

Maybe he always had the look and just uses it to enhance his funny. Maybe he cultivated it hanging with (as a member of) the Frat Pack–with Steve Carell, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson—or working his comic-rock shtick with the other half of Tenacio D, Kyle Gass. Maybe he learned it growing up in a household (for the first ten years of his life, anyway) with rocket scientists for parents. After all, it does take some smarts to deliver quality comedy.

And jumping around from parent to parent (after their attempts to save the marriage with the polyamory of Family Synergy and after divorce), place to place (Culver City to Europe), and school to school (traditional to nontraditional) likely contributed to the comical coming out of this straight man, funny man, comic foil, stooge.

That is, as he has done so for over seventy television shows, mainstream movies, and Indie films—from earliest roles in mockumentaries such as Bob Roberts (playing Roger Davis) to featured roles in sketch comedies such as HBO’s Mr. Show to award-winning starring roles in High Fidelity, School of Rock, and Shallow Hal to leading production positions in The Pick of Destiny and the latest and greatest “Acceptable TV”–Jack Black plays what one Wikipedia writer, Kevin Crossman at Frat Pack Tribute, and others determine is “both sides of the traditional double act.”

With a technique of impeccable (imperative) timing, Black balances the serious and reasonable and orthodox with the silly, the reason in absentia, the unorthodox…to deliver to us that culminated, culminating, exaggeration, “What?”

More on Jack Black in TV Robot’s Acceptable TV category

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