
Speaking of comedy, stand up comic Doug Benson issued a feature length documentary a few years back, aping roughly the same premise as the similarly titled Super Size Me. His film, Super High Me, though, replaces fast food nonsense, with delicious, delicious weed.
To get this out of the way, the premise of the film is easily more entertaining than the hour and forty minutes actually constituting the feature. But that’s how it goes. Good ideas seldom make it out of whatever insular environment their hatched. So at least there’s that.
Anyway, since Benson is a self professed pot enthusiast, prior to his month’s long journey through total oblivion, he took thirty days off from smoking. During that time the comedian undergoes a battery of tests – both physical as well as mental. The results are proffered and made light of. But what isn’t amusing is the fact that there are times when Benson genuinely appears to want a plume of smoke to be coming from his lungs. But there’s not. Bummer.
During his month of sobriety – he eschews drinking as well – a number of comics weigh in on the effect, or lack there of, on his or her career. There’s nothing revelatory leveled on viewers. Some comics like to get wasted and some don’t. It’s just like any other occupation.
What really isn’t discussed, though, is that comics who enjoy the abuse of substances and those that don’t can still be adept at their craft. It was a tremendous missed opportunity. Of course, anyone already watching the film will probably be of the opinion that one can be stoned and do just about anything, but the discussion could have offered a unique caveat to a movie otherwise given over to brief snippets of stand up sets and guys getting high in the morning.
With all of that being said, it’s still pretty amusing to watch Benson go through the same set of tests a second time – but stone, of course. Discoursing with a shrink is often times utterly ridiculous, but moves towards unimaginable heights of lunacy while Benson’s sitting on a doc’s office, kinda baked.
Again, there’s no grand point to the film, although, the legality of weed is addressed with an accompanying storyline touching on the raid of a dispensary in California. Unfortunately, the attempt to insert some political awareness doesn’t really jive with a feature sporting imagery of a comic with a mouthful of joints on its DVD jacket.
