Cheech & Chong vs. Harold & Kumar

I had C&C down as a topic, but once I saw “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guatanomo Bay”, I knew I had to compare the two.


Cheech & Chong. Richard “Cheech” Marin & Tommy Chong. The lovable stoners from the 70s and 80s, though now long mutually alienated. Last I saw Cheech he was on “Nash Bridges” as a cop with Don Johnson (who drives a ’71 Plymouth Hemi Cuda convertible – one of 7! – as his daily driver, give me a break. What’s his gun, a .45 Luger?). Chong has been basically doing his Chong bit as Leo on “That 70’s Show”.

I haven’t seen all their movies, just “Up in Smoke”, “Nice Dreams”, “Cheech’n’Chong’s Next Movie”, “Things are Tough All Over”, and “Still Smokin’” – nonetheless, their classics. Cheech plays up the East L.A. Mexican dude who almost never actually speaks in Spanish (except “pendejo”!). Chong is white, but otherwise unclear what his ethnicity is (beyond Canadian, which he is – is “Canadian” an ethnic group?). They never seem to have real jobs. They’re either ON drugs or trying to score them, most often marijuana but also shrooms (esp. in Amsterdam), LSD, and various other substances (e.g. horse turd – “this is not peyote!”) – whatever they can do to get high. They often unwittingly “dose” other people with the drugs, e.g. CHP motorcycle patrolman following their smoking van who ends up completely stoned. A subplot is Cheech trying to get laid, which for some reason always screws up at the very last minute. The movies are somewhat raunchy at times with some nudity, but never as much sex as the typical R rated drama, i.e. more of a tease than anything else. Timothy Leary shows up in “Nice Dreams” as an asylum doctor who prescribes LSD (what else?) to Cheech; Pee Wee Herman shows up a few times. And Stacy Keach is amusing as the corrupt narc chief who “busts their knees and steals their weed”. The movies rarely have anything close to a coherent plot, they’re more like a loosely strung series of independently wacked out misadventures of varying amusement. I do find their on-stage comedy, though, to be tedious and dull, the crazy adventures to be much more entertaining.


They put up an invisible wall: either you’re with them, the stoners, dopers, etc., and laughing WITH them and AT the various authority figures; or on the outside looking in, the straight non-drug-using crowd, laughing AT them and WITH the authority figures. Oddly, the police detective, Stacy Keach, is himself quite baked on the marijuana he so often seizes from various dopers. It’s a crazy, fucked-up world, and these two simply stumble through it, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, in one misadventure after another, giving mainstream society a subtle middle finger along the way. In an sense, it’s a live action version of The Freak Brothers, the famous underground cartoon.


Harold & Kumar. Considerably more intelligent and less socially dysfunctional. Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) are a Korean and an Indian guy who (A) attempt to secure White Castle burgers somewhere in New Jersey (“Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle”) and (B) escape from Guantanamo Bay and try to crash an ex-GF’s wedding (“Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay”). Neil Patrick Harris has a charmingly disturbing cameo in both films, going out of his way to completely annihilate the squeaky clean image he inherited from “Doogie Howser, MD”. On a deeper level, they’re trying to escape the racial stereotypes, which is why they’re Indian and Korean and not simply WASPs. For that matter, whites tend to get a bad rap: Rob Corddry’s FBI agent in “Guatanamo Bay” (violent yet clueless about EVERYTHING), the redneck brother-sister couple in the second movie, the Klan members and skinheads; and authority figures tend to be portrayed here as ignorant bullies, though I doubt that, in real life, someone like Corddry’s character would have been accepted into the FBI in the first place, much less earned a position of responsibility like his – but hey, it’s a movie. Even the two Jewish hippies are a bit off the wall. Put in perspective, Harold and Kumar seem to be the most normal and well-adjusted guys in the films. Even George W Bush turns out to be a stoner, as we might have suspected anyway (shades of Stacy Keach!).


As with Cheech & Chong, the H&K films are a latter day smack at so-called normal, mainstream society, each fulfilling a similar role in a new context, separated by 20-30 years. Plus ça change, plus c’est le meme chose! Yet again.