Jack Black, starring as Jack Black

Jack is back, and no one's really happy about it.

As I was writing my previous article about influencers, I spoke at length about what appears to me as a massive shift in public opinions when it comes to these figures. Without repeating myself too much, it can be neatly surmised by stating that an increasing amount of the internet laity has run out of patience for them. As I ruminated on the decline of the article’s case study, JoJo Siwa, I began to wonder how much she really had in common with some of the other examples of influencers I cited. While I think there is a uniting factor between Siwa and individuals like MrBeast, Pokimane, and Jake Paul - that common denominator being the mass production of meaningless slop - I realized that these three characters were perhaps not the most choice influencers to juxtapose her against. While Jake Paul, MrBeast, and Pokimane could be considered celebrities in their own right, they are definitively products of the internet; their success and subsequent profit has been inherently tied to new media such as live-streaming, video sharing sites, and social media.

JoJo Siwa’s climb to stardom, on the other hand, was much more conventional. She was not molded by the internet, but rather adapted to it after following the tried-and-true upward trajectory of a television star.

I will give the caveat that Jake Paul and his brother, Logan, were similarly blessed with success as juvenile actors on Disney Channel at relatively young ages, but I’d make the argument that the two only truly made names for themselves from the content they produced on the now defunct predecessor to TikTok, the short-form video sharing platform, Vine. They were, first and foremost, known as Vine Stars - which, believe it or not, was a thing when the platform was still active - more than they were considered television stars.

Jake and Logan Paul, in their Disney Days.

This isn’t to say that they weren’t doing well for themselves or were completely unknown to the public, because they weren’t, but I firmly believe that if Vine had not existed, they would have never been able to build their brand the way they did. Their brand is inexorably tied to the rise and subsequent fall of Vine.

Or maybe I should say brands, given that Jake Paul alone has about a dozen he’s launched. Energy drinks, clothing, crypto-coins, a podcasting network - as of this typing, it appears as if he’s just launched his own line of hygiene products, simply titled W.

W for what? I’m not sure. Probably Winning, if I had to guess. Or maybe it’s Wumbo.

If it’s as successful as his energy drink, Prime, has been, elementary schoolers are going to start bullying each other over whether or not they bathe with Paul’s body wash.

Conversely, JoJo Siwa as a brand was already firmly established through her presence on television. By the time she set up shop on TikTok and Instagram and dove head-first into the influencer game, she was already a celebrity in the most conventional sense. She didn’t need to internet to ride her way to fame.

In this way, I believe that JoJo Siwa’s decline in the eyes of the public may be best paralleled to a similar dip in stock of two other conventional celebrities who, over the past several years, I’d argue have made the transition into grotesque, Kronenbergian hybrid of celebrity and influencer, and in the processes shifting from beloved Hollywood star to… tolerated. At best.

I know comparing a young upstart like Siwa to these individuals may sound a bit farfetched at first, but bear with me. When we’re finished, here, I think you’ll see what I’m seeing. You’ll feel what I’m putting down, ya dig?

So, I have to politely ask that you refrain from rolling your eyes or clicking off this article to go doomscroll on Substack’s note features when I say that JoJo Siwa’s decline is, in many ways, similar to that of Jack Black.

Remember when Jack Black looked like that? Young. Scruffy. Rough around the edges, but simultaneously boasting a roguish charm. For most of his career, Jack Black has been adored by audiences as a quirky, eccentric goof, and Hollywood’s go-to guy when a film needed the role of a lovable oaf filled. For a lot of folks, he was the type of guy you could see yourself having a good time with at a dive bar. He’s the prototypical fat funny friend. When Chris Farley died in 1997, I truly believe it triggered some sort of shift in the natural balance in the cosmos, and the hands of fate began to manipulate unseen threads in order to elevate Jack Black into the position as Hollywood’s de facto wacky, zany big guy; it was a hole that simply could not be left vacant.

These days, however, he comes off more like that one weird burn-out uncle who you kind of just wish would be quiet and settle down. Whenever he shows up, he starts spouting off the same crass jokes he always has, and though they were hilarious when you were ten, he doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that you’re a grown adult and screaming fuck doesn’t quite cut the mustard anymore.

This isn’t to say that a man can’t let his freak flag fly into his silver years - personally, I think more people need to retain that spark of youthful eccentricity and hold onto it for dear life rather than let the rigors of adult life sand off all their edges until they’re just another joyless stiff that thinks Bud Light tastes good and finds those ugly comics published in magazines like The Economist humorous.

It’s a fate worse than death. A true end of the soul.

Once you hit the stage where you start thinking jokes about how much you hate your wife and kids are peak comedy, there’s no coming back from that; it is imperative to do everything you can to forestall it.

But Jack Black’s specific brand of quirky and eccentric… it hasn’t aged well. These days, it comes off as less comedic and more grating. I suppose for a not-insignificant amount of people out there, his loud, crude, hyper-animated schtick was always annoying, but if his success as an actor is any indication, a larger percentage of the population found it endearing.

For a while.

You can only tell the same joke so many times before it gets stale. Twenty years after the debut of Jack Black’s first hit, School of Rock¹, I think it’s safe to say we’ve long passed the sell-by date. It doesn’t help that there’s a distinct quality to Black’s style that I can only describe as… Reddit. What exactly makes a thing Reddit is difficult to articulate, but, kind of like porn, you know it when you see it.

This is no better exemplified than it Black’s musical repitoire with his band, Tenacious D. Just look at some of the titles of their songs - They Fucked Our Asses. The Government Totally Sucks. Fuck Yo-Yo Ma.

Get it, guys? It’s funny because it’s profane! And you aren’t supposed to say dirty no-no words like that (it’s naughty). Now, this isn’t to say I disapprove of swearing - you guys know that my vocabulary is quite FUCKING colorful - but, when it comes to comedy, profanity alone does not humor make. Unless your twelve. Or your sense of humor stopped developing around that age, which I can only assume most of Tenacious D’s avid fans did.

Now, there was a time, not all that long ago, when this kind of material did push boundaries. These days, however, as our culture has become increasingly debased and profane, Tenacious D’s comedic sensibilities come off as tepid. It’s tired. There was a time where watching Jack Black thrash around on stage like he’s having a grand mal seizure and howling like a madman was novel, but when I see it now, I just think, Yes, yes. Jesus, we get it. You’re wacky. Can you be quiet, now?

I think Black’s schtick reached its natural apotheosis when, in 2023, he was tapped to star as the arch-nemisis of the world’s most famous Italian plumber, Bowser, in Illumination Entertainment’s animated Super Mario Brothers movie.

I love this picture because I think you can actually see a glimmer of regret in his eyes.

For as butt-hurt as many were that Chris Pratt was, in their opinion, unfairly and unjustly shoe-horned into yet another starring film role to play the mustachioed plumber, they were equally excited by Black’s casting as Bowser. To be fair, he was almost tailor-made for the part - his flamboyant, aggressive brand of noisy bombast was perfectly suited to a villainous character like Bowser, who tends to be more goofy than intimidating.

That was all fine and good.

And then Peaches happened.

No - not that song called Peaches. That song is funny, but in a way that doesn’t rub against my brain like sandpaper.

If you haven’t seen the Super Mario Brothers movie - which I can only really recommend if you have kids, because they’re really gonna love it but there won’t be all that much for anyone over the age of thirteen - there’s a scene where Bowser professes his love for Mario’s perennially kidnapped princess, Peach. In song. Because it’s Jack Black, and he loves to sing.

Now, I don’t know if the song was always intended to be in the film, or it was something that was added in after Jack Black was signed the cast, but it would not have been in the film if any other actor had played Bowser. The song - and I hesitate to even call it a song because it’s really just Black wailing the word Peach in his distinct, growling timbre - is perhaps the single most quintessential Jack Black-coded thing in existence.

It is, in a word, annoying. Dreadfully so. It’s fine to hear it once in the movie. It would have been fine if it had stayed in the movie. But, of course, it didn’t. You see, the song was grating and annoying, which meant a lot of people on TikTok thought it was the pinnacle of comedy.

This fucking song charted at Number 56 on the Billboard Top 100. It charted globally at number 48 on the Global 200. It charted in seven countries. Nothing to me suggests that the Dutch are a deeply unwell people more than the fact this hit number four on the charts in the Netherlands.

Peaches was the second coming of Let It Go, from the Disney movie Frozen; if you have kids, or have friends with kids that you spend any amount of time with, you’ve probably heard this song more than you ever wanted to, or ever should have.

And, look - I’m not some grumpy old curmudgeon that… okay, well, maybe I am, but I’m not the type to shout at kids and say, STOP HAVING FUN, YOU LITTLE BASTARDS! Fuck, I don’t even care that adults got a laugh out of the song.

But it did not take long after this song went viral for me and, apparently, a whole lot of others to begin wondering if we really needed as much Jack Black in our lives as we were getting. And we were getting a lot of him. Kung Fu Panda was getting another sequel in 2024. He was going to be in the movie adaptation of Borderlands the same year, befittingly cast as the annoying robot companion. He was even turning up in a galaxy far, far away.

Yes, they really got the now disgraced singer, Lizzo, to be in this episode, too.

Given that the Venn Diagram between Redditors and what remains of the Star Wars fandom is almost a perfect circle, this was met with cries of jubilation by the skeleton crew of true believers that still actually care about the series. There was no real reason for him to be there. Nothing he really added to a lackluster season of The Mandalorian besides giving bugmen Star Wars fans a reason to soyjak.

This was compounded by the fact that, by 2023, Jack Black had long been in the influencer game as a content creator. He dipped his toes into the pool all the way back in 2018, when he started a YouTube page simply called Jablinsky Games. I remember this was a big deal when it happened - there were news sites across the internet reporting on it as if the Pope had set up shop on YouTube. In one month, the channel accrued over a million subscribers.

Though the channel was ostensibly one on which he would post videos of himself playing video games as a means of bonding with his young son, who served as the editor of the content posted, the large portion of his uploads consist of him doing quite literally anything but playing video games. I can’t imagine his son got to do much because the videos didn’t really require editing; mostly because it was usually Black just kind of… dicking around, really. He really, really seemed to have a thing for the horror game franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s. Not playing it - just kind of… talking about it. Or singing about it.

There’s probably dozens of bite-sized videos floating around TikTok of Jack Black just staring at the camera and muttering Five Nights and Freddy’s.

@jackblackFNAF at Freddie’s

Tiktok failed to load.

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Needless to say, the hype around Jablinsky Games cooled once it became apparent that Black was basically using the channel to upload low effort shitposts rather than gaming. He’d later transition to posting on TikTok once that platform blew up, leaving the Jablinsky Games channel abandoned as of present. Hell, he only really used the channel regularly for two years, if that.

Given the fact that he was constantly churning out viral clips on TikTok of him in uncomfortably tight (or little) clothing, shucking and jiving to songs for children, it would be easy to make the claim that Black was not acting like your typical influencer. He didn’t seem to be trying to influence much of anything on his social media platforms. His videos were, by and large, low effort, quick little snippets of Black acting either silly or bizarre.

Well - let’s revisit what I said about influencers in my prior article, shall we?

It’s tasteless, it’s bland, it’s disposable, and the only way they can get you to engage with it is by slathering it in eye-catching colors, acting like fools, and grabbing your attention by force rather than intrigue. In Siwa’s case, her music is quickly and brainlessly produced on the cheap, bereft of any real merit or quality, made less to serve as legitimate art and more as a piece of noise to clog up the airwaves in between better, more substantial things that people actually care about. It’s meaningless sounds and colors to keep you distracted and, more importantly, consuming.

In my opinion, that’s what slop is; it’s just there.

So - you have a very popular and influential celebrity on social media, uploading whatever the fuck comes to his mind at any given moment on a whim, filling up the For You pages of perhaps millions of users, for seemingly no good reason. Oh, and peppering in little snippets in between reminding people to go see the newest movie he was in. And see his live performances with Tenacious D. In fact, if you look at the Jablinsky Games channel, you’ll find more videos of him hawking his film projects than, y’know, actually playing games. Judging from the thumbnails, you wouldn’t be able to tell, but if you watch them you’ll quickly find that he spends a suspicious amount of time talking about his music and film projects in between rambling about nothing in particular.

Oh, Jack… so, so clever. You can pretend that you aren’t using your platform to push yourself, your products, your image, your brand by suffusing your page with videos of you dancing to The Living Tombstone’s Five Nights At Freddy’s songs.

But I see right through you.

I think it’s safe to say that, at least for my generation, Jack Black was long considered to be a beloved, if not iconic figure in Hollywood. I think a lot of people were still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt around this time, even as the varnish was rubbing off his image. School of Rock doesn’t come up in conversation all that often, but when it does, it’s universally agreed that it was one of those early 2000’s comedy flicks that seemingly everyone watched and holds some fondness for. That nostalgia can gloss over a lot of blemishes for a long, long time.

I couldn’t agree more.

And then 2024 happened.

Black suffered three back to back blows to his reputation that, at present, he’s still grappling with. I suspect most of you already know what they are.

On July 13th of that year, Donald Trump came within centimeters of having his brain liberated from his skull by a 5.56 round in Butler, Pennsylvania.

You might have heard about it.

On July 14th, Black was in Sydney, Australia, performing a Tenacious D gig. It also just so happened to be the 64th birthday of his long-time bandmate and best friend, comedian and musician Kyle Gass, who always looked to me like a guy who should be sitting in a double-wide somewhere in Kansas drinking Bud Light and chasing cow-tipping teens with a 12 gauge than playing in rock concerts.

Well, to celebrate his good buddy’s birthday, Black brought out a man in a robot suit - because that’s so XD RANDOM, right? - to present Gass with a cake while they were performing. Sweet, isn’t it? Black asked Gass to make a wish.

Gass’s reponse?

Don’t miss Trump next time.

Though the audience seems to have gotten a chuckle out of the quip, a whole lot of people did not find it so amusing. Looking through comments on the matter, you’ll see some witless morons saying that bro, they’re edgy, they make dark jokes, that’s what they do. Others said that they were championing free speech.

I will say that, sure - they’re allowed to make whatever jokes they wish. I have no problem with that.

But that doesn’t mean that the joke was not in exceedingly poor taste, given the fact that A) a presidential candidate had nearly been JFK’d on live television and B) if Trump hadn’t turned his head the second the gunman pulled the trigger, the country would have devolved into a shitshow I don’t think anyone would have been laughing about it. The statute of free speech also doesn’t prevent Gass from looking like a gormless tit, joking about an attempted assassination attempt that had happened less than twenty-four hours prior.

The blow-back was immediate. Tenacious D and Jack Black’s social media pages were flooded with comments from former fans disavowing the band and the actor. Even though Black had not made the comments himself, he began to hemorrhage followers on his various accounts. The remainder of Tenacious D’s world tour - much of it sold out - was unceremoniously cancelled the following day. This also brought a premature end to their next tour, called Rock D Vote; a string of shows they were holding in support of the non-profit organization, Rock the Vote.

Rock D Vote, like the organization it’s named after and funding, is ostensibly a politically neutral affair intended to get young people off their lazy asses and go vote. However, in my experience being bothered and pestered by clipboard-wielding Rock the Vote personnel after staggering out of bars on Austin’s Sixth Street, they may not explicitly tell you who they want you should vote for… but they do say to vote with your conscious, which, by their estimation, always sounds suspiciously Blue-coded.

Ironically, Rock D Vote was intended to conclude in Pennsylvania.

Two days after Gass’s poorly thought out gag, Australian senator Ralph Babet for Black and Gass to be deported from the country, stating, There is no place in Australia for those who wish for the assassination of others. Elon Musk similarly weighed in with a comment on X, stating simply, Evil.

That same day, Gass himself would issue an apology that goes as follows:

“The line I improvised onstage Sunday night in Sydney was highly inappropriate, dangerous and a terrible mistake. I don’t condone violence of any kind, in any form, against anyone,” his statement continued. “What happened was a tragedy, and I’m incredibly sorry for my severe lack of judgment. I profoundly apologize to those I’ve let down and truly regret any pain I’ve caused.”

I’d link to the source, but he soon deleted the statement. I suppose to show just how sincere it really was.

Black disavowed the comment via Instagram and announced that all future creative plans were on hold for the band². When speaking to a reporter weeks after the fact, he confirmed that the band was now on hiatus. Indefinitely. He was also careful to mention that he and Gass were still friends. I believe that’s mostly likely true. Black is a long-time supporter of the Democrat party and vocal critic of Trump, but I also can’t imagine that Black was very pleased with his friend’s little gaff. If you watch the video, you can see him seize up, visibly uncomfortable. From a better angle, you’d have been able to see his eyes go as wide as dinner plates in that Oh, shit moment as he processed what his band mate had just said and, consequently, the Category 5 Hurricane of Shit they were both about to get.

When he, in his statement, said he was blindsided, I believe him. I mean, we’ve all been out with some friends somewhere or another, having a good time, rubbing elbows with strangers and socializing, when one of your buddies, completely unprompted, blurts out the out-of-pocket shit you’ve ever heard in your life that brings all the merriment to a screeching halt. Usually at the single least opportune moment to do so, too. It makes them look like a total fucking idiot, and, by proxy, you as well for hanging out with them. It’s what the Zoomers would call Hoe Scaring Behavior.

The second blow to Black’s public image came hot on the heels of the first. With the fallout from Gass’s jab and Tenacious D’s quote-unquote hiatus still settling, Black’s next cinematic project released on August 6th. This movie was the aforementioned film adaptation of the looter-shooter video game franchise, Borderlands.

Absolutely no one wanted this movie to materialize. For one, the Borderlands games had largely fallen out of favor with the gaming community after the second installment. Much like Black and Tenacious D, Borderlands’ distinctive style of potty-mouthed, nihilistic, and overly sarcastic comedy had grown wearisome after each sequel doubled down on the foul language, excessive violence, and snark until future installments became veritable self-parodies of the first. It got to the point where Gearbox Writing, named after the game’s developer Gearbox, became short-hand to describe insufferably snarky, verbose, and miserably smug and meta-referential humor.

It’s also known as “Reddit comedy’. Because, yes - it is very popular with Reddit. Are you seeing a pattern?

Even the fans of Borderlands didn’t want the movie to happen; the film began production in 2011 and languished in development Hell for over a decade, which is never a good sign. That, and they cast 5’2 Kevin Hart as the hulking giga-chad character from the game, cast a 55 year old Cate Blanchett as the game’s token young hot chick³, and they shoe-horned in the character of Tiny Tina, who’s not a part of the game’s core cast and every bit as annoying as the name implies she is. They even got gore porn auteur Eli Roth to direct and then told him, Hey, you know all the bloody hyper-violence that you’re known for? Don’t do any of that.

Predictably, Jack Black was set to play the grating robot assistant that never shuts up; while Black had been in talks for the role since production began, if people were growing tired of Black’s yappy gimmick and had already given up on Borderland’s comedic stylings… well, what began as apropos casting when one was an actor held in higher regard and the other was a video game series people actually liked, had aged into a match made in Hell.

You can watch the trailer and just see how badly they wanted to cash in on Guardians of the Galaxy; the mismatched party of colorful, incongruous personalities. The bright, garish, cosmic colors. They even used an Electric Light Orchestra track in the trailer to ape GotG’s classic rock soundtrack.

The movie was practically doomed from the word go.

To no one’s surprise, the movie cratered at the box office. Even with stiff competition in a year of historic box office flops - Coppola’s messy passion project, Megalopolis, the God awful Joker 2, and ancillary capeshit crap Madame Web - Borderlands was still widely considered one of the worst movies of the 2024 by critics and audiences alike. On a $120 million dollar budget, it only grossed a paltry $33 million. And that budget doesn’t include the money they dumped into the aggressive marketing campaign.

In all the reviews I’ve read of Borderlands, Black’s role as the annoying robot is never specifically cited as the worst part of the movie, but no one speaks of it as a redeeming quality, either. Simply having his name attached to such a trash fire did nothing to boost his flagging stock.

Black wouldn’t even have time to catch his breath; the third and final kick in the nuts 2024 for would have for him would come on September 4th when trailer for his next film would drop - A Minecraft Movie.

There are many similarities between A Minecraft Movie and Borderlands, so much so that it’s one of those things that makes you believe Jung was on to something with his theory of synchronicity.

Both movies went into production around the same time, in 2011 and 2012, when both series were at their zenith of popularity. Both were promising prospects at the time they were conceived. Both spent over a decade grinding through development Hell, with directors, writers, and stars entering and exiting through a constantly revolving door. By the time they were finally finished, public interest in both properties had waned considerably. Even devoted fans of the franchises were less than thrilled about the prospect of a film adaptation of their game of choice. Both star Jack Black. And, when the trailers dropped, the public reaction was almost identical:

This, I think, signaled the apogee of public antipathy towards Black. It didn’t help that the trailer just… didn’t make the movie look very good. Not does it really look like, y’know - Minecraft. There is no other game that engenders creativity quite like Minecraft. In the hands of competent creatives, I think that the possibilities for what the film could have been were endless. I mean, look at The Lego Movie.

I really cannot stress just how much everyone thought this movie was going to suck before it actually came out.

It’s another kid’s movie based on a property that revolves around building blocks that absolutely no one thought was going to be any good, but Chris Lord and Phil Miller - a directing duo that have a track record of taking dubious ideas and making gold out of them - stretched their imaginations and made what could have been a feature-length toy ad into one of the most creative and high-quality family films of the last decade, spawning a handful of sequels and spin-offs in the process.

The original director for A Minecraft Movie was a rather unorthodox pick; Rob McElhenny of Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame.

Pictured: Rob and his wife, Always Sunny co-star Kaitlin Oslon celebrating the Eagles dub at the 2025 Super Bowl. Love the Wawa shirt.

Given what he’s said about his vision for the film, I think it’s safe to say that we were robbed of what could have been a much more unique take on the property (and one starring Steve Carrell instead of Jack Black).

Now, it may sound unfair to judge the film before it releases, but the trailer does nothing to suggest that A Minecraft Movie will be anything other than another unenthused kid’s movie that’s been written by a committee of Hollywood office stiffs, replete with an over-reliance on heinous CGI visuals⁴ -

A Jumanji⁵-esque plot where an eclectic cast of misfits are inexplicably isekai’d into Minecraft -

And generic, tepid, over-played jokes. There’s literally a It’s right behind me, isn’t it? moment in the trailer.

The damage Joss Whedon has done to the art of the screenplay cannot be overstated.

Now, I’m not mad. I don’t care enough to be angry over a lackluster kid’s movie. But… I am disappointed.

How does Jack Black fit into this? Well, Black had long been attached to A Minecraft Movie, as well, it was unknown what role he would play. The trailer revealed that Black would be playing the iconic blue-shirted mute Steve - the name given to the game’s default player character. And when this epiphany was made to audiences…

No one was really happy. The response was a collective sigh, followed by, Oh, look. Jack Black starring in another video game movie, where he’s just going to be… Jack Black. Wonderful.

As the months have passed and more trailers have been dropped, there’s been nothing presented to disabuse anyone of these presumptions. Black has been clowned on the whole way through. I can’t find the Tweet now, but I remember when the first trailer was revealed that someone took this picture and said, If you look closely, you can see the exact moment where Jack Black realizes he’s doomed to be cast in shitty video game adaptations for the rest of his career.

“This really is my life now.”

Also, this doesn’t have much to do with anything, but I thought this more recent tweet about the A Minecraft Movie merchandise was too funny not to share.

Is it wrong I kind of want one? Just to say that I have it.

As of this writing, we have another two weeks before A Minecraft Movie premiers. There’s a chance that it could surprise us all and turn out to be another The Lego Movie-like flash of brilliance that we all wrongly maligned before giving it a proper chance. I doubt it. I could see A Minecraft Movie making a decent haul, if only because Minecraft is still popular with children. I could also see it crashing and burning in spectacular fashion, which wouldn’t do much to rehabilitate Jack Black’s reputation as anything more than the silly fat dude who acts like… well, Jack Black, but in bad video game movies.

Now, if it sounds as if I’ve been harsh on Black throughout this article, I have been. But it’s not because I dislike Black as an actor. Actually, the opposite is true - I like Jack Black. I don’t even hate his over-the-top histrionics… in doses.

The thing is that Jack Black is actually not a one trick pony. He’s capable of more than just shouting and being loud and flopping around on camera. Personally, I think his older films like School of Rock and Nacho Libre hold up pretty well.

Underrated 2000’s comedy kino, in my humble opinion.

Even in those movies, he doesn’t Jack Black as much as we might remember. Same with Richard Linklater’s Bernie, which is a lot more grounded than a lot of his other comedies, and probably the best role he’s ever taken in his career. Shallow Hal, despite being critically panned, is one of my favorite movies in his filmography, if only because I have fond memories of watching it with my family on television as one of the first adult comedies I was allowed to see.

The Kung Fu Panda movies? They’re surprisingly good as far as animated movies for babies go. At least the first two, which were the only ones I saw. If reviews are anything to go by, the tread is apparently running off the wheels of that series, though. Even his more recent turns in the Jumanji movies prove that he’s more than capable of being funny in comedic roles outside of his usual typecasting as, again, Jack Black.

He’s not just good at being funny, either. People seem to forget about his more serious roles in movies like Peter Jackson’s King Kong and the romantic comedy The Holiday (you know, that one movie your girlfriend always makes you watch around Christmas time at least once); Black is completely adept at playing more grounded, down-to-earth parts when given the opportunity.

In that regard, Jack Black reminds of the late, great John Candy.

There’s a reason that Candy has developed a posthumous reputation as a cinematic legend; the guy was supremely funny, but more importantly, he was able to give every character he played so much heart that you can’t help but like the guy. Black, with his irascible charm, was much the same in his earlier filmography. Both are able to project a sense of human pathos, even in their goofiest roles. Candy was also able to turn in great performances in more serious roles, and it’s a true shame that most of the less overtly comedic movies he headlined were flops and have been largely forgotten⁶. Candy struggled with being type-cast as the fat funny guy throughout the entirety of his career. He fought to establish himself as a serious actor and break the niche he’d been pigeon-holed into by studios.

Unfortunately, just as he was beginning to win that fight with roles like those he had in JFK and Cool Runnings, Candy’s attempts to establish himself as the versatile actor he was were brought to an untimely end by his death at only forty-three years old. Had he survived, I think he had the chops to pull off the career renaissance he was in the beginnings of at the time of his death.

Currently, Jack Black is fifty-five.

Perhaps he feels the same way that John Candy did about his career. Maybe, under all the layers of noise, irony, and crude humor, he harbors some inner desire to be taken seriously as an actor rather than just be the go-to guy for lukewarm video game movies. He (probably) still has time to do so. Yet, it seems as if rather than fighting for roles that could help him shed his image of Jack Black playing Jack Black, as John Candy did, he’s doubling down on the bit. If the rising antipathy towards him is anything to go by, I don’t think this is the right choice for the long term prospects of his career.

I think it’s both funny and oddly prophetic that one of Black’s better remembered roles is his turn in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder; in the movie, Black portrays a drug-addled television star who can only find work in crass comedies that largely rely on fart jokes and toilet humor who knows that he’s a disrespected laughing stock and, despite his insistence to the contrary, is deeply insure about it.

But, who knows - maybe Black is happy just being the fat, noisy funny guy. Perhaps he has tried to break out of that mold and just gave up on making any further attempts. Like Candy found out, whether or not you get the roles you want is mostly out of your control. It’s very likely that Black does what he does regardless because it keeps paying dividends; I’d never fault the guy for doing what he needs to do to make a buck. A man’s gotta eat.

Ultimately, whether Jack Black chooses to reinvent himself with more respectable work than 90-minute time-wasters for children or opts to beat the already dead horse that is the Jack Black schtick into glue is a question that will be answered in due time. It won’t really matter to me either way - I don’t know the guy and my life isn’t staked on his future success. But, everything I’ve ever read or heard from those who have interacted with them indicates that he’s a friendly and genuinely nice guy; with that being the case, I wish him no ill will, and I hope whichever way he chooses to go, he’ll be satisfied with the choice he makes.

Though, I will say if he takes the latter path, and I see him turn up as Professor Oak in an adaptation of Pokemon getting vine-whipped in the ass by an ugly CGI bulbasaur… well, as I said about A Minecraft Movie: I won’t be mad. Just disappointed.

I mentioned before that the internet’s turn on JoJo Siwa reminded me of Jack Black’s own fall from grace, as well as another figure that straddles the line between celebrity and influencer. I’d originally intended to cover them in this article, as well, but it turns out I had more to say about Jack Black than I thought. So, we’ll have to talk about them… next time.

But, if you’re wondering who it is, here’s a hint - can you smell what they’re cooking?

If you know, you know.

1. Yes, yes, I know - I feel old, too.

2. Unlike Gass, he did not delete this statement. Draw from that what you will.

3. This is not to say Cate Blanchett is a hideous old crone, because I personally think she looks quite good for her age, but the character she’s playing is supposed to be, like, thirty at most.

4. What gets me is that The Lego Movie was made to look like a stop-action animation made with actual legos. Why could the Minecraft movie not have a similar aesthetic in which the world actually looks like the game?

5. I’m refering to the newer Jumanji films, which also star Jack Black. Not the Robin Williams Jumanji from the 90’s.

6. For instance, I highly recommend you watch his romantic comedy, Only the Lonely. Finding it is something of a challenge, but it’s a great movie that showcases what Candy could do with a more grounded role.