“You just ruined my perfect season, Señor You-Just-Ruined-My-Perfect-Seasòn!”

I’ve avoided posts like this in the past because once upon a time I found it too granular, a concept thatwallows too deeply in minutiae; but with the existence of a sites like Get Yarn which helps people clip the tiniest most obscure lines in cinema and on television, a short post about why one particular line-reading is perfect along with a video example is not that outlandish.

Not Another Teen Movie is one of many comedies my brother and I have been obsessed with for years that I’ve noticed has picked up a cult following after coming and going without fanfare during its initial release. This was crystallized for me for this film when I saw David Ehrlich wrote a piece on it about a decade ago.

Much of the dialogue sticks with me from this parody of teen movies from the ‘80s to the early 00s, but the line in question especially. 

To understand why, first the set-up (if you’ve not seen this moview yet reading this won’t spoil anything; the film is so outlandish one can’t really “spoil it”). Austin (Eric Christian Olsen) and Jake (Chris Evans) are high school rivals. They have a standard teen-movie bet going (I bet you can’t turn so-and-so into prom queen) and in this scene Austin is mad because they’re both quarterbacks on their high school football team, Austin left the final game of the season injured, Jake subbed him and lost it.

The only other thing that adds humor to the line I’ll examine is that Jake’s redundant putdown format was introduced earlier in the film…

The introduction of the format

The callback and the aforementioned perfect line-reading

I realized recently this dialogue kills me and the line reading is so perfect for the following reasons:

1. Eric Christian Olsen’s delivery of this, like many of his character’s idiotic dialogue in this movie is perfect.

2. He dips into Spanish (with the honorific) and French (with the accent). Whether that was scripted or his contributionthe confusion on the accent is brilliant.

3. The redundancy of these putdowns works in the film because he’s playing them dead-serious, not even approaching tongue-in-cheek which makes more subtle joke like that in a film with all manner of humor (many of them broad or crass) slide by most viewers.

4. Olsen’s commitment to this preposterous greeting also acts as a microcosm of the perfect confluence of intelligently crafted stupidity and instinctual ridiculousness that make this film what is. 

While it’s true explaining a joke kills it, but that’s if you didn’t get it in the first place. If you love or loath one it’s worth examining why. It was a sudden epiphany that had me realize this silly, practically a throwaway joke, really encapsulated what works for me about this film.

I hope to write up more of these types of lines, not just in comedies but first I had to kick the topic off at long last.