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Storytelling (USA 2001, 87 min, dir: Todd Solondz cast: Selma Blair, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber, John Goodman, Noah Fleiss).

Explaining Tood Solondz’s humor is like trying to parse a sick joke that everyone laughs at so hard they pee in their pants; at least if they are stoned. Storytelling should be up there with The Big Lebowski as one of the all time, never-get-tired-of-it stoner comedies.

Where else can you take gleeful satisfaction in the white suburban high school girl hanging with her black lit professor as he commands her to strip naked in his apartment and fucks her from behind while making her scream “fuck me hard nigger.” (I watched the R-rated version from Netflix). When she writes an essay about the fucking in her lit class, the other girls criticize it mercilessly until it becomes obvious they have all done the same deed with Mr. Teacher.

At the family dinner table, her slacker brother Scooby announces that if Hitler hadn’t ordered the Holocaust, the Jews wouldn’t have fled to American, and neither he, his sister, nor his parent would have been born. So, he reasons, they should all thank Adolph Hitler for their good fortune. Stuff like this doesn’t come out of a normal mind. It comes out of Todd Solodnz’s inspired mental process. No psychiatrist on the planet is up to explaining it. But any one of us who has suffered through American high school will have no comprehension problem.

Todd Solodnz has only given us too few films. Some are easy to see, some are tougher to fathom (like Palindromes). The big money in Hollywood abandoned him as he got more weird and kinky. But if he lived in Austin, Texas, he would be a national hero. Alas, there is no place for slacker heroism in Newark, NJ (his home town). It is not the place where a yearly Todd Solodnz film orgy will every be held. It will more likely play some college town theater with broken seats. Maybe Madison, WI, during exams, so all those students who find studying to be personally repressive can have an alternative. I’d fly there and bring my own beer.