I Used to Be Funny explained

What is I Used to Be Funny about?

I Used to be Funny is about recovering from trauma and PTSD. But not in the hyperbolized, dramatized way that Hollywood usually depicts. Ally Pankiw wanted to tell a story that was closer to what she had experienced. It’s a refreshing take on a topic that’s often difficult to discuss. Meaning I Used to Be Funny will be an important, instructive film for a lot of people. 

Cast

• Sam – Rachel Sennott
• Brooke – Olga Petsa
• Philip – Caleb Hearon
• Paige – Sabrina Jalees
• Noah – Ennis Esmer
• Cameron – Jason Jones
• Office Conrad Lawrence – Miguel Rivas
• Written by – Ally Pankiw
• Directed by – Ally Pankiw

Sam saving Brooke is saving herself

I Used to Be Funny is a great example of a story that understands externalization. What does that mean? 

Movies are such a powerful artistic medium because artists can use them to visualize internal experiences. For instance, imagine a parent grieving the loss of a child. If you tell a grounded, literal story, you might just show classic examples of grief. Not going to work. Staying home. Crying over photos. Then they go to therapy. And resume work, resume a social life, and can look at the photos and smile. All that story does is demonstrate someone going through the grieving process but it doesn’t externalize it. 

How do you externalize it? Say the parent is an astronaut and their ship malfunctions and they end up adrift in space. The loneliness, emptiness, and vastness of space becomes symbolic of the immense grief the parent feels over their child’s passing. Part of them wants to float into infinity, never to return. Give over to the terrible void they feel. Instead, they fight to make it back to the ship, to an emergency pod, to Earth. And making it back to Earth ends up as a metaphor for working through their trauma and being ready to move forward in life. You can watch this movie, it’s called Gravity. 

Here at Film Colossus, we call that type of externalization “defamiliarization”. Because the story takes something familiar—grieving—and makes it feel unfamiliar. Sci-fi, horror, and fantasy defamiliarize by their very nature. It’s one of the reasons those genres are so popular and powerful. The shock of seeing what we know presented in a way we’ve never thought of can help us understand it much better. 

I Used to Be Funny is a very grounded movie. So it’s not defamiliarizing the trauma recovery process. But it does externalize it. “Wait, Chris, you said not going to work, staying home, and crying over photos isn’t externalizing. Isn’t that what happens in I Used to Be Funny?” Great question! 

The important thing Ally Pankiw did in I Used to Be Funny is include the subplot between Sam and Brooke. Brooke becomes the external representation of the innocence Sam lost after the sexual assault. She embodies all the pain, anger, and loathing that Sam feels. By finding and saving Brooke, Sam reclaims and renews part of herself. Which is why, afterwards, we see her able to return to comedy. And, once again, be funny. 

I’d compare I Used to Be Funny to something like Aftersun. In Aftersun, a 31-year-old woman, Sophie, watches footage from a trip she took with her father, 20 years ago, when she was 11. Soon after that trip, the father ended his own life. Watching the footage causes Sophie to confront the difference in perspective she had then versus now. Back then, she couldn’t see or understand everything her father was dealing with or the signs of his depression. And for the last 20 years, that confusion has stayed with her. But watching the footage allows her to bridge that gap. 

Writer-director Charlotte Wells managed to externalize this confusion and catharsis by including scenes that show adult Sophie in the midst of a rave lit only by the flash of strobe-lights. It’s extremely disorienting for both the character and the viewer. But Sophie sees her father, as he was during their vacation, in the midst of everyone, dancing and dancing, and she can’t reach him. Until the end. Once she has watched the footage and recontextualized that time, she suddenly feels connected to him in a way that had eluded her for decades. And we catch the briefest glimpses of her finally, finally seizing him and hugging him and holding onto him. [And now I’m sobbing just writing about it]. She can give the memory of him the sympathy, compassion, and understanding that had previously eluded her, and, once again, see him through the eyes of her childhood self who just f***ing loved him so much. 

Aftersun would still be a powerful movie without the club subplot. But it would lose an important dimensionality that allows it to hit on a visceral level. I Used to Be Funny gains a similar degree of depth and catharsis thanks to Pankiw wisely finding a way to externalize Sam’s emotional journey and not just show us the symptoms of it. That could still be an effective story but it would be a lesser one. 

I would 100% use I Used to Be Funny in a writing class, that’s how great and clean its use of externalization is. 

Sam claims her story

One of I Used to Be Funny’s main subplots is Sam’s inability to get on stage and perform. Plot-wise, this is because Cameron had used what she said in her performances to justify assaulting her. She made a joke about liking cops? She must like him. She made jokes about liking it rough? She must want him to overtake her. He didn’t understand the line between performance and reality, between the performer and the person. So Sam doesn’t want to get on stage and say something that someone else might one day use against her—emotionally, physically, etc. 

Thematically, you can view this as Sam losing her voice or Cameron taking her voice, or however else, but the point is fear stops her from expressing herself. And the result is that other people start telling and shaping the story. That’s demonstrated through moments like when Sam searches her own name on Twitter and sees what others have written about her and what happened. It’s also present in everything with Noah. 

While the film doesn’t spend a lot of time with the demise of Sam and Noah, we get that conversation at the party, on the patio. 

Her eventual return to standup isn’t just about feeling happy enough to get back on stage. It’s about ownership. Which is why she starts her set by saying, “Hi, everybody. I’m Sam. And tonight, I’m going to tell a r**e joke. So, my ex-boyfriend will not stop making my r**e about him. He has an identical hour. Same material. Right after this. He’s like, ‘Please tell them to stay for the next show.’ So if you’re, like, ‘I kind of need this but from a male perspective,’ hang out.”

She’s finally in a place where she can claim her story. It’s not for others online to tell. It’s not for her ex-boyfriend to tell. It’s hers. And she will tell it through her art. 

Pankiw told Forbes: There’s no cure for trauma, but joy and connection are antidotes for it. I think that there are a lot of parallels between my own process making the film and the character’s process, returning to her art and trying to reclaim her voice and an outlet that was taken from her.” 

The male perspective

In the same interview with Forbes, Pankiw said: To me, things like retribution and winning, justice, even winning a court case and getting revenge in that way, those are very male,  patriarchal narrative arcs. To say that the end of the story, the resolution, healing, winning, that it is the end of the story—that’s just not the case. Healing from trauma is a lifelong process and it is two steps forward and one step back.

She said in another interview, with them, quote: I saw the way this type of storyline was handled a lot as an audience member and from the outside going like, “Huh, that’s not what it is like for me and the people I love and care about.” Recovery doesn’t hinge on revenge with an ax.

So you can view I Used to Be Funny as having a bit of a meta-element to it, being a direct response to the trauma genre and other films within that genre. That also means that you could view Sam’s story through the lens of the entertainment industry, as well. A similar thing happened with The Menu. As much as that movie seemed to be commenting on the restaurant industry, it was actually very much about the film industry. The small stand-up community in Funny operates similarly to the restaurant in The Menu, being a microcosm of the larger entertainment world. A world that has been, for a very long time, dominated by the male perspective. 

Sam and Brooke go to Niagara Falls

Water is commonly associated with renewal and rebirth. That idea of washing clean. So it’s meaningful when Sam and Brooke end up at the Falls. It symbolizes a restoration of their relationship as well as new beginnings for them as individuals. 

If you wanted to you could take the association a bit further. It’s not simply jumping in a pool or standing in the rain. Niagara Falls is a powerful force. The water plunges more than 160 feet. It crashes down. Then flows on. You could make a case that it encapsulates the traumatic experience. The lead up, the fall, and the move forward. 

Even if that wasn’t intended by Pankiw, it does tie back to something said in the film. Sam ends up in the bookstore and reads from a book called Tapping Back In: Healing Your Creative You by Breann Smordin. It is not a real book. Breann is a real person and was one of the producers of I Used to Be Funny. The part Sam reads says, “We keep moving in the same circles in the same way that neurons circle atoms. We must become straight lines.” 

You can think about a traumatic experience as the atom. And our minds as the neuron that keeps circling and circling and circling, unable to escape from the gravity of the event. So you get stuck and wallow and wither and wail. If you’re a straight line, you gain distance from an event. Think about a timeline and how each year extends the timeline further in one direction, away from anything that came before. When you do that, trauma can become something that, even if it never disappears, recedes. 

The water that pours over Niagara Falls doesn’t keep going round and round. It runs on.

“I Know the End” by Phoebe Bridgers

At the very end, as Sam returns to the stage, we hear “I Know the End” by Phoebe Bridgers. Bridgers described the songs as, quote, Just kind of being at peace with the end of the world. And I don’t mean in, like, an apathetic way. I just mean, like, instead of waking up every day during the apocalypse, like right now, and being heartbroken, you’re just kinda like, “Okay, what can I do today? Like taking it kind of a day at a time instead of giving up.

That’s essentially Sam’s arc in the film. She starts as someone who is apathetic and heartbroken about the end of the world. But she winds up in that place where she can take it a day at a time and make the best of things. 

When you look at the lyrics to a song, a few lines jump out. When the sirens sound, You’ll hide under the floor/But I’m not gonna go down with my hometown in a tornado/I’m gonna chase it

There’s also: Over the coast, everyone’s convinced/it’s a government drone or an alien spaceship/either way, we’re not alone/I’ll find a new place to be from

Chasing the tornado rather than hiding from it embodies that two-path view of action versus passivity. Same with the arrival of aliens. Rather than let that get her down, Bridgers announces she’ll find a new place to be from. Meaning she’ll embrace the change. 

You can view this as Pankiw’s aspirations for people who watch the movie. Obviously, it’s not easy to be so go-with-the-flow. Living with trauma is, as Pankiw said, two steps forward, one back. But having an ideal in mind can go a long way. Whether that’s Bridgers’ song or Pankiw’s film. When we have these messages in our life that we can be better, it helps us be better, a least a little more often. 

What does Sam write on her hand?

In the opening of the film, before Sam goes on stage, she writes something on her hand. It can be hard to make out but it’s just topics for her set. 

• Hypocritical youth pastor
• Teens in crocs
• Lotion??
• Old babysitter

Is I Used to Be Funny based on a true story?

Sam is not a real person. And Ally Pankiw was not a stand-up comedian. So the movie isn’t literally based on a true story in the sense that I can share a link to an exact situation. But it’s true in spirit. What it depicts is, unfortunately, very much the reality for far too many women. There are over 400,000 sexual assault victims in the United States each year. Over 34,000 per year in Canada. Each year. It’s as insane as it is horrifying and saddening. Which is why a movie like I Used to Be Funny is important. Because it will serve as a way through for more than one survivor who has felt caught in a spiral.