Inspired by This Is the End – where five of Hollywood’s A-List comedy faces, Danny McBride, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill and Craig Robinson, wake up to find themselves high and dry with a front seat to the end of the world – VICE is spending a whole week exploring the hilarious side of the Apocalypse. If this is the end, it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom.
For most people, taking a week off from real life to spend it with close friends and decent drugs is the apex of fun. That’s why every gang of potheads takes a yearly Hajj to Amsterdam together. But how do you think you’d hold up if you were together with your best friends, high as shit and facing a biblical Armageddon?
In This Is the End, which you should go see because it’s out in theatres now, a group of friends are forced to live together in prolonged confinement as the world around them crashes and burns. In any group facing a deadly scenario, what usually happens is the good friends survive and the crappy ones die. It’s a pretty predictable formula, and one you should learn if you ever find yourself in an apocalyptic stoner comedy.
The Arrogant Friend
There’s always that one guy, isn’t there? The friend who’s good-looking and successful yet constantly sports an inexplicably huge chip on his perfectly sculpted shoulders? Even when sinkholes are opening up everywhere, he’s somehow still squinting at the mirror and arranging his hair with the pained diligence of a monk tending a Zen garden – as if any girl wouldn’t have sex with him because the back right quadrant of his scalp didn’t look naturally ruffled enough.
The arrogant friend sucks because he will have charmed your other friends while they were all out being successful together and you were still living at home with your parents. More than one member of your fraternal friendship group will probably have a crush on the arrogant friend, and when you stir this up in a big pot of jealousy and insecurities exacerbated due to the fact that a) everyone's high and b) the world is ending, chances are someone will end up dying (and that you’ll end up hating this guy more than you end up hating yourself for secretly still liking him). While the arrogant friend is too handsome to kill off immediately, his bigheadedness will likely cause him to die near the beginning. Vanity is a cardinal sin, after all.
The Annoying Friend
Being trapped with this guy in any situation is shitty, but being trapped with him in an apocalypse situation is enough to make you welcome the end of the world with open arms. In Dante’s Inferno, sinners on the second level of hell are punished by being immersed in a river of human excrement for eternity. But after being placed directly beneath the waterfall of shit that pours forth from the Annoying Friend’s mouth for eternity, I’d take Dante’s poop-river any day.
The annoying friend is frequently vying for your friends’ attention and inexplicably surpassing you in gaining their favour. Why the hell anyone invites this guy anywhere is beyond you. Chances are, instead of seeing the apocalypse as a terrifying inconvenience, the annoying friend treats it as an opportunity to force people to hang out with him and score cool points. Cool points he doesn’t deserve. Cool points he took from you and was only able to take from you because it is the end of the world.
The Old Friend
This will be the guy you’ve known since high school. You lit your first spliff together, suffocated on your first bong together, and – weirdly – hotboxed your first Porta Potty together. The Old Friend is kind of like a stoner dad – he’s the one who always buys munchies and ruffles your hair when you’re feeling paranoid. When the river of human excrement hits the fan, it’s this bro you’re going to want to be next to. Not because you both have some weird fetish for being sprayed with fan-chopped faeces, but because facing tough situations without a long-standing buddy is no one’s idea of fun. The longer you spend trapped with the Old Friend, the more you’ll grow to realise how much you need him. At the end of the day, he does like you more than the Arrogant Friend and the Annoying Friend, and he’s less arrogant and annoying than either. If you stick with this guy, you may be lucky enough to be one of the few survivors of whatever shitty situation befalls you. I’m not naming any names, but I guess it also helps if this whole thing’s actually a movie and you’re the one who wrote it.
© 2013 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.Previously:The Beginning of the EndJames Franco Plays A Parody of Himself in His Latest FilmSeth Rogen and Evan Goldberg Are Friends so they Made a Film About itLong Live the New Brat PackApocalypkitHow to Party to the End of the World
There’s always that one guy, isn’t there? The friend who’s good-looking and successful yet constantly sports an inexplicably huge chip on his perfectly sculpted shoulders? Even when sinkholes are opening up everywhere, he’s somehow still squinting at the mirror and arranging his hair with the pained diligence of a monk tending a Zen garden – as if any girl wouldn’t have sex with him because the back right quadrant of his scalp didn’t look naturally ruffled enough.
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Being trapped with this guy in any situation is shitty, but being trapped with him in an apocalypse situation is enough to make you welcome the end of the world with open arms. In Dante’s Inferno, sinners on the second level of hell are punished by being immersed in a river of human excrement for eternity. But after being placed directly beneath the waterfall of shit that pours forth from the Annoying Friend’s mouth for eternity, I’d take Dante’s poop-river any day.
This will be the guy you’ve known since high school. You lit your first spliff together, suffocated on your first bong together, and – weirdly – hotboxed your first Porta Potty together. The Old Friend is kind of like a stoner dad – he’s the one who always buys munchies and ruffles your hair when you’re feeling paranoid. When the river of human excrement hits the fan, it’s this bro you’re going to want to be next to. Not because you both have some weird fetish for being sprayed with fan-chopped faeces, but because facing tough situations without a long-standing buddy is no one’s idea of fun. The longer you spend trapped with the Old Friend, the more you’ll grow to realise how much you need him. At the end of the day, he does like you more than the Arrogant Friend and the Annoying Friend, and he’s less arrogant and annoying than either. If you stick with this guy, you may be lucky enough to be one of the few survivors of whatever shitty situation befalls you. I’m not naming any names, but I guess it also helps if this whole thing’s actually a movie and you’re the one who wrote it.
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