'This may have been the hardest I’ve ever laughed'

Alec Jones-Trujillo - aka Old God - picks his comedy favourites

Alec Jones-Trujillo will be heading to the Edinburgh Fringe next week in the guise of Old God, ‘a foppish, irreverent oracle’ and ‘a being so old they have forgotten their own name’. Here he shares his Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites… all from the 1990s.

The Birdcage

This is just so good. The ensemble cast of it is incredible. Mike Nichols and Elaine May directed and wrote it (adapted it) so it’s just tight. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane have fantastic chemistry. Gene Hackman’s portrayal of a conservative US Senator and his wife Diane Wiest are perfect. Hank Azaria kills it with so many memorable moments. For the 1990s, this was a wild mainstreaming of queer content.

A friend from a very extreme Christian church family came over once and perused my family’s sparse VHS collection. He saw The Birdcage and proudly informed me that his father had told him that this movie was ‘gay porn’ and that it would ‘brainwash’ me. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. We stopped hanging out a few months later after I refused to join his Christian punk band.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

I saw this movie in some summer camp outing. I remember walking into the theatre with all these unknown summer camp kids and feeling self-conscious and strange still trying to navigate the social arrangement of it all.

But when we walked out it was like I suddenly had 65 new friends. I felt reborn. The whole world was brighter.

We were all quoting and laughing and just feeling so high from watching Austin Powers II in a packed theatre. I’m sure the camp counsellors were driven absolutely insane by our relentless renditions of Fat Bastard talking about ‘get in my belly’ in that Scottish accent.

Clerks

My mom was a high school teacher. When I was still in elementary school I’d sometimes walk to the high school to get a ride home.

One day when waiting for my mom I met an extremely cool high school guy named Mike. He had dyed hair and knew about Marilyn Manson and all sorts of edgy stuff. He asked me if I had seen Clerks. I had never even heard of Clerks.

In one of the biggest meetings of my life we arranged to meet the next day on Main Street around 4pm so he could lend me his copy. I was there early just sort of hanging around drinking a Snapple when I saw Mike walking up in extremely baggy pants, bowling shoes he had stolen, and a back pack hanging really low – soooo coooool.

We talked for a few minutes and parted ways. That night I watched Clerks and loved it. Black and white but not boring like that old junk I’d seen a few times with my parents. Hitchcock or whatever that was. This was hilarious. So 90s. So slacker. So edgy (the man died during sex and kept his erection!?).

To be honest I was prepared to love whatever Mike had lent me. Clerks already had a leg up due to the coolness of the source. But it was also hilarious and strange and I couldn’t wait to run to the nearest city to find some slacker job and a bunch of strange, funny friends.

Groundhog Day

Pure classic. A grumpy Bill Murray redemption story. Full of tiny little gems from the supporting cast: Needle Nose Ned, the brain doctor blinking too much when saying there were no visible brain tumours on the scan ‘at least none that I can see’, the sweet old lady running the BnB ‘would you like some… toast?’ as Murray hauls the toaster away from the breakfast spread to go electrocute himself in the bathtub. It’s the kind of movie you can just wear out and the appreciation gets deeper and deeper.

As a drinking game it can get pretty out of hand: Every new day take a drink, when Phil drinks take a drink, whenever someone says ‘weather’, ‘Punxsutawney’, ‘Doozy’ or ‘Groundhog’ take a drink. Make sure to keep these ‘drinks’ to sips of beer.

There’s Something About Mary

Me and two friends went to the town next to ours to see it. We pooled our money together to get a giant popcorn and a giant fountain Coke. I sat in the middle holding the bucket of popcorn. The other guys would reach in and haul out fistfuls the of the stuff while we passed the soda around making sure no one drank too much, too quickly.

At one point I was slurping down some soda and a joke hit so hard I laughed, choked, and all this coke came spraying out of my nose and into the bucket of popcorn in my lap. My friends were so mad! I ruined the popcorn! They were laughing and punching my arms. I laughed even harder and fell out of the seat. Popcorn all over the ground.

This may have been the hardest I’ve ever laughed and likely ever will. The perfect storm – teenage friends, a summer comedy, sugar and ruined popcorn.

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

While not a 90s movie at all…I didn’t see in until around 1994 and it therefore makes up one of MY comedy essentials from the 90s.

We didn’t have any TV reception growing up. We lived too far in the mountains and my parents refused to buy a satellite. So we often rented and even bought a few VHS tapes. One day I came home from school and was alone at home. I saw a VHS tape in the VCR that we didn’t own. My dad had rented it. Strange because I generally knew when anyone was renting movies. What was this secret movie??

He had stopped it somewhere in the middle. So I just started it up right there where it was. It was the begging of that scene where the giant fat man, Mr Creosote, arrives at a restaurant and all the waiters are scared to death. He eats. And eats. And then orders a bucket and projectile vomits into the bucket. Then has one more ‘wafer thin’ bite and proceeded to blow up.

What was I watching?! It made sense my dad was hiding this from me. This was well beyond anything I had ever seen. A few vignettes later (including the man who got to choose the manner of his own execution and was chased off a cliff by topless women) my dad pulled up to the house. Frantically I rewound the video to roughly where it had been.

Later at dinner I casually asked ‘What’s that video in the VCR? I didn’t watch it. But what is it?’ And my dad got to formally introduce his son to Monty Python.