Creating that sense of community with “Up in Smoke” was Cheech & Chong’s secret weapon to success. It’s a movie that you can watch stoned with your friends, about the wild things that might happen when you get stoned with your friends. The film acted as a blueprint for other entries in the stoner buddy comedy subgenre, one that could be refined and built upon in the years to follow. By the time Cheech & Chong’s next movie, aptly titled “Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie,” rolled around in 1980, it didn’t matter that critics panned the film as an unfunny clone of its predecessor; the stoner buddy comedy was alive and kicking. Most importantly, it was profitable.
(Todd Plitt/Getty Images) Kal Penn and John Cho pose for a portrait while promoting their movie “Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle” at Pop’s Burger in downtown New York City on July 19, 2004
My introduction to these movies was tense. The fervent anti-drug counseling of my elementary school days was almost too effective on me. The stoner buddy comedies of my generation, like “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” felt like drug ads that would lure me into a life of immorality. For a very long time, my personal rhetoric around pot was a lot like the sex ed scene in “Mean Girls”: If I smoke weed, I will get high . . . and die. Furthermore, weed was largely inaccessible to me until I moved to New York, and even then, I’d have to seek it out. I tried it here and there at the behest of friends, but procuring it on my own felt like it would be an “Up in Smoke”-level epic. I wouldn’t even know where to start.
It wasn’t until marijuana was legalized in the state during my late 20s that I began to purchase it for myself, using the opportunity to work my way back through buddy comedy blind spots. I was shocked to find that “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” isn’t nearly as ridiculous or fratty as I believed it to be for so long. On its face, it’s even more subversive than “Up in Smoke,” though it clearly owes its existence to Cheech & Chong’s film — even the ampersand in “Harold & Kumar” reads like an ode to the comedy duo’s influence. Like Pedro and Anthony, Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) are a pair of stoners in their early 20s, thrust into an unexpected odyssey when an ad for White Castle points their munchies toward a franchise location in suburban New Jersey. The two are so hyperfixated on the idea of sliders, fries and a couple of soft drinks that they’ll stop at nothing to get their hands on the perfect fast food. No substitute will do. Along the way, they cross a band of racist, homophobic punks who taunt and terrorize them, a farmer straight out of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” a rabid raccoon, Neil Patrick Harris and local police intent on busting them for possession. It’s a Homeric voyage, if Homer were familiar with the complicated system of roadways and toll stations that is the New Jersey Turnpike.
The film is certainly outrageous and off-color. But for every poorly aged joke, there’s a gag or a bit of veiled social commentary that’s surprisingly progressive for its time. The first “Harold & Kumar” film frequently lampoons police brutality and sticks up for its marginalized characters at every turn. Compared to “Up in Smoke” — a buddy comedy where the buddies were still getting to know each other — “Harold & Kumar” is a stoner movie that celebrates the strength of best friendship. The titular duo work together to get themselves out of every snag, and when they finally do get their hands on their sliders, it’s as satisfying as remembering you have an unopened bag of chips in the pantry, just as the edible is peaking.
It’s no coincidence that so many stoner buddy comedies are also sprawling adventures. In writing “Up in Smoke,” Cheech & Chong brilliantly understood that watching an afternoon get weirder as the high gets stronger is a perfect way to keep up narrative pacing. It also portrays the feeling of the mind falling into a drug-induced rabbit hole, where each layer — or, in a film’s case, each new scene — is another revelation. And aside from how well weed lends itself to cinema, it’s also just plain fun to watch things go increasingly haywire for stoned pals. When “Dude, Where’s My Car?” or “Pineapple Express” pushes the insanity to its limit, the films feel like testaments to close friendship. Being stoned out of your gourd all by yourself is no fun, and as a bumbling, bewildered Anna Faris proves in Gregg Araki’s hysterical solo stoner film “Smiley Face,” trips are better with friends.
But if weed is increasingly legal around the country, and so much of the stoner buddy comedy hinges on trying to remain unscathed by the law, where does that leave these types of films? It’s been a minute since we’ve had a proper entry into the subgenre, and one might argue that means legality has dulled the stoner buddy comedy’s once prosperous high. But I’d say that these films were never about avoiding arrest so much as they were using weed as a springboard for all sorts of social commentary. Even if weed is legal, filmmakers can still push the boundaries with stoner comedies. The joy of weed is in its ability to open the user’s mind, and there’s no shortage of trouble for stoner friends to get up to on screen. Despite Cheech & Chong’s recent declaration that “pot is over,” it’s only just begun. Maybe Harold & Kumar can go to the White House to teach us a thing or two.
