The programmers at South by Southwest know that Austin audiences are in the mood for fun, so they tend to schedule a lot of comedies. But they take it a step further: They also schedule a lot of movies about comedy. Past fests have included a road-trip documentary with Ray Romano, an account of Jeffrey Ross entertaining the troops in the Middle East, and comedian Doug Benson experimenting with a month of marijuana withdrawal.

This year, the inner workings of comedy are explored in two films, American: The Bill Hicks Story, a biopic of the late comedian, and Saturday Night, a behind-the-scenes documentary about Saturday Night Live. Both movies, predictably, are funny, but they’re also insightful with regard to how humor is created and why it’s effective.

Bill Hicks struggled with drugs and alcohol before finally getting clean and starting to enjoy life — and that’s when he got cancer and died, in 1994, at the age of 32. It’s the kind of cruel irony the comedian would have appreciated. American uses interviews with friends and family, plus an abundance of home videos and still photos, to tell Hicks’ life story from beginning to end.

He started doing stand-up as a teenager in Houston, known for his perceptive character-driven routines and his PG-rated material. Later, he started to dabble in booze and drugs, and his stand-up act changed accordingly. He became vulgar. His routine got angrier — and, in the audience’s view, a lot funnier. He was less restrained, more outrageous, more of a spectacle. Then, of course, he started to drink TOO much, and he went from “outrageous” to “unreliable.”

If the clips in the film are any indication, Hicks became more strident and passionate after he sobered up, and less funny. Most of his post-teenage career was marked by a willingness to address serious subjects that most comedians skip. When he was on his game, he did a terrific job breaking things down to their basic, absurd elements. He could get laughs — not just shock laughs, but legitimate laughs — even when talking about things like social injustice and consumerism. But the later performances are short on laughs, long on haranguing: He seems to have become a “message” comedian. Or, at any rate, that’s the impression we get from the snippets included in the movie. It’s still a fascinating doc, though, well put together and continuously entertaining.

The current cast of SNL apparently is not quite as tormented as Hicks was (or as past SNL casts were), but that doesn’t change the fact that comedy ain’t easy. Saturday Night, directed by James Franco, has cameras documenting nearly every aspect of a typical show week, in this case the week of Dec. 6, 2008, when John Malkovich was the host. (Franco himself had hosted once and has since hosted again.) And if it sounds exhausting just to put on a live 90-minute show late on a Saturday night, wait till you see what the writing process looks like.

The comedy sausage factory is fascinating to watch. Given almost unlimited access, Franco takes us into the offices where the writers and cast members work on their material. With a premise established, they’ll shoot possible jokes back and forth, trying to find the one that will be funniest not just now, in the moment, but later, when it’s written down and rehearsed and televised. We see sketches practiced and then abandoned. We see a complete failure at the table read, a sketch that goes up in flames and is never heard from again.

As a big fan of SNL and TV production in general, I don’t know if there’s anything in Saturday Night that I hadn’t already learned from the various books that people have written on the subject. But it’s very cool to see a typical show from the pitch meeting to the live performance, if only to stand in awe at the sheer volume of physical and mental energy that goes into it.

Speaking of SNL, cast members Will Forte, Kristen Wiig, and Seth Meyers were in Austin for the premiere screening of MacGruber, based on Forte’s MacGyver parody from the show. (Forte and Wiig star in the film; Meyers was there for moral support.) You hear they’ve made another movie based on an SNL sketch and you think, “Good heavens, what have we done to deserve this?” For many of us, the memory of Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World has faded, while the scars of A Night at the Roxbury and The Ladies Man linger. But MacGruber is actually a really funny spoof of 1980s action comedies, expanding the SNL character enough to sustain a feature film — it’s not just 90 minutes of MacGruber blowing things up — without completely abandoning his roots.

Forte has always struck me as a fearless comedian, willing to go to any length necessary to get the laugh. I’ve often admired his SNL sketches, as well as his movie, The Brothers Solomon, for having the guts to keep doing a joke, over and over again, past the point where it’s funny, to the point where it becomes annoying, to the point where it becomes hilarious again. A lot of comics lose their nerve halfway through, but not Forte. MacGruber is based on the premise that the character himself is incompetent, craven, imbecilic, petty, and belligerent … and yet someone has made a movie about him anyway. The very idea goes against the basic rules of comedy — the main character usually needs to have some redeeming qualities — but MacGruber, while not brilliant by any means, succeeds anyway.

* * * *

Eric D. Snider (website) is live, but not from New York.

Tags: macgruber, sxsw film festival