Movies

“This Is Just So Sh**ty, We Gotta Watch”: The Beautiful, Inspirational Disaster of ‘Cabin Boy,’ 25 Years Later

How the film turned Chris Elliott and Adam Resnick into Hollywood pariahs … and comedy legends

Movies

“This Is Just So Sh**ty, We Gotta Watch”: The Beautiful, Inspirational Disaster of ‘Cabin Boy,’ 25 Years Later

How the film turned Chris Elliott and Adam Resnick into Hollywood pariahs … and comedy legends

By Michael TedderDec. 5, 2018, 1:39 pm UTC • 32 min

It had been a tough couple of years for Chris Elliott and Adam Resnick when they sat down at the Fox office. As far as they knew, no one even watched their show, Get a Life. But, somehow, the meeting went better than expected.

“We pitched some show for me, and they bought it in the room,” remembers Elliott. “We were like, ‘OK, we’re back where we belong, which is on the small screen.’”

Elliott and Resnick are great at writing punch lines that you didn’t see coming. The kind that hit you square in the gut. Life is also good at those.

“By the time we got to the parking lot, Adam’s agent had gotten a call. There was one person who wasn’t in the meeting. They went and told this person that it was Adam and me pitching the show,” Elliott says. “And she said, ‘No.’ There’s absolutely no way they would do a show with us.” Apparently, she’d seen Cabin Boy.

The men behind Cabin Boy have no shortage of stories about how the once reviled and now — in some circles — beloved comedy brought joy to a very few people upon release but much professional and personal heartache to its makers. A self-described glutton for punishment, Resnick often sought the pain out, grabbing magazines just to see how many worst-of-the-year lists his film would hit, wincing inside as Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers noted that for all the cinematic delights 1994 offered, it was still the year that gave the world Cabin Boy. Other times, the drubbings would come even when he wasn’t seeking them out. He remembers once reading an article about how director’s cuts were becoming popular on the then-burgeoning LaserDisc format. “It was an interesting article,” Resnick says, “and the last line — while I’m just minding my own business — [was] ‘What’s next — a director’s cut of Cabin Boy?’”

Well, maybe not a director’s cut, but this fall a new Blu-Ray edition, stuffed with making-of commentary and deleted scenes, was issued by the art-house imprint Kino Lorber. The re-release—which features the coverline “The Contentious Classic That Angered a Nation”—is surprising but welcome proof that the film that America used to kick around has been rehabilitated into something close to canon.

Cabin Boy opened on the first weekend of January 1994, a dumping ground if there ever was one. A story about a privileged prep school nitwit named Nathanial Mayweather who accidentally falls in with a group of drunken sailors and their ship, The Filthy Whore, and proceeds to lose his virginity to a blue-skinned, six-armed mythological goddess named Calli and befriend a half-man-half-shark named Chocki, Cabin Boy earned less money in its opening weekend than you spent on lunch, eventually recouping only a third of its paltry $10 million budget. What it failed to generate in profits, the film reaped in scabrous critical sentiment; in his D+ pan, former Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman opined, “Elliott wears his loathsomeness like a cardboard crown. Few comedies have worked this hard to make everyone on screen look this dumb.” Elliott would go on to earn a nomination for the Razzie Award for Worst New Star, and the film would go on to become, as Resnick puts it, “shorthand for a bad movie.”

But these brickbats mean little to the film’s admirers and the devotees of Resnick and Elliott, be it those who saw the film in the theater or those who joined the cult later. One of the film’s most devoted fans, indie rock legend and comedian Jon Wurster, saw it on opening day with a few of his friends in Chapel Hill. They all but lost their minds. “I remember there being other people in the audience that day,” he says, “but I can’t say any of them laughed as much as me and my friends did.” The only flaw in his initial viewing experience, he says, had nothing to do with Resnick and Elliott’s artistic vision but rather with his own lifestyle choices at the time. “My only regret is that I didn’t smoke pot back then. What a movie to see while you’re high.”

It’s here that we must stop and posit a once unthinkable, now reasonably accepted position: Though flawed, Cabin Boy is a cinematic experience like nothing else, and one that has been extremely important to the development of American comedy.

It’s often said that Mick Jagger failed to become a soul singer, and in the process became one of the greatest voices of rock music. Adam Resnick and Chris Elliott failed to make a big-budget Hollywood comedy, and in the process made a surreal, anarchist experience. It looks and feels wrong in a great way, in a way that a more technically accomplished director could never hope to achieve, much as no conventionally “great” singer could ever hope to match the raw emotion of Daniel Johnston’s “Some Things Last a Long Time.” The film holds a mesmerizing power, from the contrast to the surrealistically fake ocean and old-timey garb of Elliott’s shipmates, played by character actors like Brian Doyle-Murray, and anachronistic elements like a limo and a microwave that are never commented on. The special effects are so delightfully chintzy, especially whenever the cuckold giant shoe salesman shows up. The jokes always arrive at the wrong time and never do what you expect them to do, such as when a giant cupcake spits tobacco on Elliott, and then disappears without explanation. Elliott gives a fully committed performance, nailing the stunted man-child archetype years before Will Ferrell would popularize it, and using his posture and awkward gait to fully sell Mayweather’s metamorphosis into a Cabin Man.

None of it makes sense, and that’s the point. Nothing in this godforsaken life will ever make sense, and it’s all a joke, anyway, Resnick and Elliott seem to argue, so why not make everything a joke? Why not explode the conventions of comedy structure until only the strangest, strongest ideas survive? Why make sense when you can have Andy Richter dance like a “harem girl” for way too long?

The careers of Chris Elliott and Adam Resnick are a synecdoche for American comedy’s evolution in the past several decades, widely underappreciated but key to the development of what would become known at alt-comedy. In the ’80s, they helped David Letterman’s knowing detachment become the accepted language of smart-asses everywhere, often providing his show with the loopy hostility the host was too dry to provide himself. With their early-’90s TV show Get a Life, they took part in the beginning of the sitcom’s evolution from a provider of mass-market repetitive comfort to an engine of rapid-fire absurdity aimed at a boutique audience, a model that shows like 30 Rock would benefit from. And with Cabin Boy, they incepted the idea that a joke didn’t have to make sense to be hilarious—in fact, it could be funnier if it didn’t.

Random bits of nonsense in a comedy were nothing new. But while, say, a Zucker brothers comedy would work overtime to throw every idea possible at you to make you laugh, Cabin Boy doesn’t care whether you laugh or not. It’s dangerously indifferent to anything but its own need to confuse, which is one reason squares hated it. This deep affection for the non sequitur, for the random joke, for the thing that will thrill a few and befuddle many, would later be refined by Late Night With Conan O’Brien and elevated by Mr. Show With Bob and David. Adult Swim would make it, if not mainstream, then at least the lingua franca of college night owls. Dan Harmon would turn it into something akin to a theology. But it was Resnick and Elliott who stopped making sense first, and for their efforts they were shunned and mocked before becoming heroes to weird kids everywhere.

Growing up, it was a given that Elliott would get into show business. His father, Bob, was one half of the famed radio comedy duo Bob and Ray (whose show ran for about 45 years, starting in the 1940s). As a teenager, Elliott apprenticed at a few summer stock theaters, where he quickly realized “dramatic acting wasn’t right for me.” Bob Elliott “pulled some strings and got me into the Eugene O’Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut, because I didn’t go to college,” he says. “I started writing there.” At first, he wanted to be a writer for Saturday Night Live, but then he heard that David Letterman was making the transition from being a regular guest host for Johnny Carson and the host of a low-rated morning program (The David Letterman Show) to starring in a more appropriately timed late-night program. He applied for a job as a production assistant, and not only did he get the gig—he ended up on air.

“Dave put me on TV when I was still a runner. He thought I was goofy, and it was a small group of people when the show first started. And so it was easy to make an impression on the boss,” he says. “I was on the first show. I was dressed in lederhosen, and doing something stupid.”

Following the election of Ronald Reagan, America became a place of stifling sunshine conformity. Squeaky clean retro-nuclear family comedies like Silver Spoons and Family Ties abounded. In a largely pre-internet, pre-cable time when it was nearly impossible to experience left-of-center culture if you weren’t in a metropolitan area, Late Night With David Letterman acted as a lifeline for anyone who longed for a little more. It was a place where you could see Elvis Costello and R.E.M. perform live on television, or get a worldview that reflected the sense that life was growing increasingly absurd.

Elliott found a home on Late Night, quickly graduating to writer and performer, offering up early characters such as “The Guy Under the Seats,” a disgruntled crank who appeared periodically to rant at Letterman and openly plot his downfall — sometimes with the aid of a puppet. In his early appearances, Elliott is bursting with the nervous energy of a boy who can’t believe he’s on TV, even as he uses every bit of his awkward, elderly-seeming frame for laughs, all but flaunting his receding hairline. Even then, he had the grin of a guy who knew something the rest of us would never grasp. Elliott quickly began earning fans, one of whom was a disillusioned New York University film school student from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

“I didn’t feel like I wanted to direct movies anymore once I got to film school,” says Resnick, prophetically. “But I sensed I was a writer, even though I wasn’t pursuing that specifically.” Resnick watched Late Night from the very first episode and instantly got it. “This was a guy who was funny and who had no tolerance for bullshit, and that’s what you’d never really seen before.” Resnick had no idea what an internship even was until he learned the term from a classmate; soon after, he cold-called NBC to see whether the Letterman show could use help. He landed a job as a writer’s assistant, and eventually worked his way onto the staff. “It was my foot in the door, so I really worked my ass off,” Resnick says.

When Resnick and Elliott met, it was love at first sight. “This is like a brother that I …” Elliott says, before trailing off. “We needed to hang together, and work together, and just laugh together. We had all the same sensibilities. Our references were all the same. We were about the same age. We grew up, although in different parts of the country, having the same insecurities, hating school, and loving the same movies. It was just easy for us to start writing together.” They soon realized they spoke the same pop-culture language, having both grown up watching The French Connection, All the President’s Men, The Exorcist, and Jaws on an endless television loop. They began devising smart pop-culture skits, rendering Marlon Brando as a childlike, dancing idiot boy and doing a deranged take on the right-wing reactionary talk-show host and quintessential ’80s phenomenon Morton Downey Jr. (Even Dave seemed taken aback when Elliott started throwing his fake boils at him.)

It’s tempting to view Elliott and Resnick’s work, especially during this time, as a veiled critique of the times, much like Devo’s “Whip It” video, in which the swinging-dick cowboy machismo of the Wall Street ’80s is pumped up in order to reveal its hollowness. But Elliott says his attraction to swaggering idiots comes from his need to reckon with the complicated requirements of 20th-century masculinity. “I was always enamored with the leading men from television shows from the ’60s and ’70s, like Mike Connors, and David Janssen. And I’ve always sort of thought that I’ve played those characters, except I look like me,” he says. “I would never be cast in Hawaii Five-O. I would never be cast as The Fugitive, but I was just so influenced by their way of acting: lowering one eyebrow, and raising another, and that sort of steely jawed delivery that all of them had. I think that I sort of do that, I just look like this moron when I do it. So, it’s automatically funny to see this bald, bearded guy with no chin acting like Jack Lord.”

The characters Elliott played on Letterman were all, to one extent or another, desperate for attention. “I think playing an overly confident guy was, subconsciously on my part, just to counter my own insecurities. Probably.”

Resnick calls his time on Late Night “the happiest I ever was.” He didn’t want to leave. Back then, no one wanted to leave Letterman. But when the Fox Broadcasting Company emerged in 1986, it began luring writers away to work on The Simpsons and Married With Children. “I always thought those guys were saps for going out there and doing sitcoms. It seemed so lame, the opposite of the Letterman sensibility. Going to L.A. and trying to get a show on the air — I had no interest in anything like that.” Then Fox approached Elliott about a television pilot.

“He just knocked on my door and told me they offered him this deal, and asked me if I wanted to write the pilot with him,” says Resnick. “I never thought anything would actually come of it. But Chris and I were so close and I loved writing with him.” When Fox ordered a pilot, Resnick began to get worried. He always said he would never move to L.A. But it was only a pilot, right? “And then they picked up the show and it became one of these things where I really didn’t have a choice. So I thought, ‘I’ll do it for a season and maybe it’ll lead to something.’ Which eventually, unfortunately, was Cabin Boy.”

While it wouldn’t land with the seismic shock of, say, Nevermind or Twin Peaks, the September 1990 debut of Get a Life was, in its own singular way, part of a cultural wave heralding the message: Here Come The ’90s. It’s About To Get Weird.

For a show that reveled in no-brow humor, Get a Life had a prestigious cast and crew. Elliott’s father, Bob, played his television dad; both Bob Odenkirk and Charlie Kaufman wrote for the series; and R.E.M. — who, like their friend Letterman, spent the ’80s as counterculture ambassadors to alienated intellectuals — allowed their single “Stand” to be used as the theme song.

On some level, the series, created by Elliott, Resnick, and executive producer David Mirkin, was intended to be a meta-deconstruction of ’50s and ’60s sitcoms. It starred Elliott as Chris Petersen, a 30-year-old paperboy who still lived with his parents and had seemingly no relationship to reality. “It was basically like if Dennis the Menace got old and never moved out of his house,” Resnick says, pointing out that he wore a striped shirt that was meant to be an homage. “That was the nucleus of Get a Life when we were kicking around ideas, but I don’t think that we consciously stuck with that.” But even though the Petersens’ kitchen brought to mind the wholesomeness of Leave It to Beaver, Resnick says that the element most critics point to as being the most blatantly parodic, the overbearing laugh track, was actually a mistake. “Really, it was just badly mixed.”

The pilot episode found Petersen bugging his straight-laced friend Larry to blow off his accounting job and go to the fair with him. They proceeded to get stuck on a roller coaster. Antics mildly ensued.

”I remember really not liking the pilot. To this day, I think it’s weak. It felt like Chris and his brilliant character and sensibility from Late Night got homogenized. But after the pilot, when they picked it up, Chris and I were like, ‘OK, we have to do a course correction immediately and make the show closer to what we’d want it to be,’” Resnick says.

Inspiration struck thanks to analog media, Resnick says. “I had seen this ad — it might have been in the back of Rolling Stone: ‘Become a Male Model.’ And I was like, ‘There’s the perfect episode.’” That episode, “The Prettiest Week of My Life,” found Petersen, convinced he had the looks to become a male model, signing up for classes at the not-at-all sketchy Handsome Boy Modeling School; he later got arrested for crashing a runway. “That one sort of established the tone of the show,” Resnick adds.

Creative differences with various executives and the realities of grinding out weekly television, Resnick admits, led to some duds. But when the series was on its game, it was like nothing else on television, a real-life cartoon that never acknowledged that anything strange was going on. Petersen broke up Larry’s marriage, and his wife vowed to kill him in return. He gained psychic powers. He fought a robot. He went through the entire experience of human courtship in one day. There was an episode called “Zoo Animals on Wheels.” Petersen died. Multiple times. Once by exploding.

”They got Jackie Earle Haley to play Cousin Donald in that episode where the perfect cousin shows up,” Wurster remembers. “There’s that great line Chris says as he’s stuffing tuna fish into Cousin Donald’s tape deck in the car: ‘Here you go, Donald, I think you’ll like this song; it’s called, “Why Does My Car Smell So Bad?”’”

Airing right after The Simpsons, back when it was a Time-cover-level cultural phenomenon, this was thrilling stuff to jaded adolescents, college stoners, and weirdos alike. And confounding to everyone else.

”There wasn’t a sense that there was an audience out there clamoring for this. We got a sense of that later on. So I think there was a freedom in not giving a shit, like we were going to be canceled anyway,” Resnick says. “There was no pleasing the network after a while. There was no script that would make them go, ‘Oh, this is great.’”

By the time Petersen met and then ate an alien in a particularly vicious Mac and Me parody, the network had become too baffled to interfere, though Elliott says that at one point Fox pressured them to at least attempt to make something a normal person might enjoy.

”There was a certain antagonism between the network and the show,” says Elliott. “As edgy as Fox was, the notes that we would get would be so lame: wanting a real moment between me and my dad, and things like that. They were notes that you would’ve given to The Cosby Show. They wanted a family show. And they thought, for some reason, I was the guy that could deliver that.”

Realizing that hugs and lessons would not be forthcoming, Fox briefly brought the series back for a second season to fill a scheduling hole, only to cancel it. But along the way, it made a high-profile fan in director Tim Burton. And after the box office success of Batman and Batman Returns and the critical success of Edward Scissorhands, Burton was looking to return to his whimsical roots. Something à la Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. In Elliott, he thought he had found his naïf.

“If there hadn’t been Get a Life, there wouldn’t be Cabin Boy,” Resnick says. “Which makes me think, ‘Shit. I wish Get a Life didn’t end up doing us so many favors.’”

Some artists have a difficult relationship with the art that earned them a cult following, especially if they think the attention is overwhelming or misplaced. This is often expressed by relentlessly critiquing the art, explaining where they went wrong or saying how they’re baffled that anyone likes it. This is not commonly called Rivers Cuomo Pinkerton syndrome, though perhaps it should be.

Resnick readily admits that Cabin Boy was a tough period in his life, which makes it difficult to enjoy the cult success the film has gone on to have. He’ll tell you he’s told this story before and he doubts anyone cares and that he’s over it all now anyway. Then he proceeds to give you a detailed vignette that pops with a pain that feels fresh.

Burton tapped Resnick and Elliott to write a film for him, something in the Boy’s Adventure lane of Paul Reubens’s Pee-wee Herman films. (Burton declined to be interviewed for this piece.)

“It’s not what Adam and I would have done, had we been on our own. A long time ago, I had wanted to do some parody of Aku-Aku by Thor Heyerdahl,” Elliott said. “And then when Tim called, I had just seen Captains Courageous again, which was one of my favorite movies. And Adam and I started talking about it, and with Tim’s involvement, we sort of thought, ‘Oh, OK. Well, we gotta add some mythical creatures into this.’ And so we put in Calli and Chocki, and these goofy, semimythical characters.”

Though Resnick says Burton loved the script, he dropped out of the project in order to make Ed Wood and, “generously but wrong-headedly,” recommended to Resnick that he take the directing job. “I resisted that, because I thought it was absurd. I’d never directed anything. But eventually you’re in that situation and everyone is telling you, ‘How can you pass up this chance? It’s the chance of a lifetime.’” But even then, he said he was thinking, “This is not something I would want to direct or come up with on my own. This is a movie that was for Tim. If Chris and I were going to come up with a movie, we never would have written anything like Cabin Boy. I don’t know what we would have written, but it just wouldn’t have been that.”

But eventually he relented and accepted the position. And if you ask the film’s female lead, Melora Walters, who plays the championship swimmer who becomes ensnared in “fancy lad” Nathanial Mayweather’s life, he did a smashing job.

“I thought he was amazing — really kind, really gentle, and really practical. So, it didn’t seem to me, ‘Oh, he’s a first-time director,’” Walters says. “He knew exactly what he was looking for, in everything. Even with the casting, he was very specific. I think that’s why I had to audition over and over, because he had a vision.”

But there was less certainty among Elliott and Resnick.

”I have to admit there were plenty of days when I went home just not knowing what we got, which is not a really good sign,” Elliott says. “If you’re doing a comedy, you should feel like you at least made the crew laugh. For some reason it just felt like we were performing for a hostile group of people holding the cameras. I don’t think any of the crew completely understood what we were trying to do, and maybe that’s because we didn’t totally understand what we were trying to do.”

After Burton left, the budget on the film shrank “to nothing,” Resnick said. The original script contained many scenes requested by Burton that had to be diminished, or cut altogether. Resnick had never directed before, and shooting on a giant water tank in a warehouse proved to be difficult. But when he saw the first edit, he began to calm down. “I was thinking, ‘No, this actually is not bad. I think we got something here,’” he says. Elliott was encouraged. He remembers discussing what they would do for the sequel while making the film, and was anxious about his next move. “I was in Connecticut. And my wife and I were trying to figure out, Do we move out to L.A., or not? And Adam was calling me, saying, ‘Come on out. The water’s fine.’”

But once the film was finished and the studio, Touchstone Pictures, saw what Elliott and Resnick got up to, travel plans were shelved. Elliott admits that Adam “was fairly shocked at the first screening.”

“It was just so awful. One of the worst nights of my life. I can’t imagine a screening going any worse than Cabin Boy. It was in Pasadena and it was a pretty big theater and easily more than half the theater emptied out by the time it was over,” Resnick says. “Not only did people walk out, you could hear them muttering angrily under their breath about it; things like, ‘So fucking cheesy.’”

Most movies that are released to pans in the first week of January wash away before people even notice them. You might remember a few Januaries back there was a movie called Monster Trucks that was about literal monster trucks—but you probably don’t. Cabin Boy, though, lingered on through the mid-’90s, becoming an easy punch line, the go-to people used when they wanted to feel superior to the lowest possible cultural detritus. For an avowed movie snob and a guy who loved to point out the bullshit of the world, being considered the creator of the most bullshit movie ever was a difficult weight for Resnick to bear.

“If it had just been seen as weird or something that didn’t quite work, quirky, but off-putting, that’s one thing. But it wasn’t even given that much credit at first. It was seen as something worse than the worst Pauly Shore movie, the stupidest, dumbest, most brainless whatever,” he says. “That’s what hurt the most, I think. What freaked me out the most. That it was just seen as hacky. And hacky is the only word that I wouldn’t use to describe it, but that’s how it was treated.”

Looking back on this time, Resnick says, “sometimes it felt like we had committed some sort of sin that we were now paying for. But all the obvious things that lead to a fall — greed, ambition, narcissism —personally, I’m pretty low on the spectrum for all those things. Chris too,” he says. “So there was no meaningful self-reflection regarding that stuff. I guess it was just a combo of bad luck and stupidity. Or naivete.”

Resnick isn’t sure why the film stayed in the public consciousness when so many of the B-level comedies that Touchstone Pictures cranked out on a regular basis, movies like 3 Ninjas and Captain Ron, came and went without notice. “It still to this day baffles Chris and I why anyone gave a shit that much about this little movie.” Maybe, he thinks, having the imprimatur of Burton as executive producer raised people’s exceptions, or maybe people were excited by, at the time, Letterman’s only cinematic cameo, in which he delivers the future comedy-geek password “Hey, wanna buy a monkey?” (“God, what a great scene that is,” Wurster says. “It just feels like he just rolls onto the set and just said, ‘I’m doing this once and you get what you get.’ And what you got was great.”)

It perhaps didn’t help that Letterman couldn’t stop bringing the film up, performing nightly self-owns for appearing in a bomb, even tapping Resnick to film a “Cabin Boy Auditions” bit at the infamous Oscar ceremony he hosted, thus ratifying the film’s national punch line status. “I hated that Academy Award thing. Hated it. Hated it,” Resnick says, while adding that he just couldn’t say no to the man who started his career. Whatever it was, the film would just not go away.

“I always said it wasn’t just that it was widely hated, it actually pissed people off,” he says. “And that’s what makes it different than even the Tom Green movie where, like, he crawls in a cow or something, which I’ve never seen and am not disparaging. But even that movie pretty much was allowed to just disappear after the initial week of outrage. And Cabin Boy didn’t—it really lingered on.”

In many ways, the intense negative attention given to Cabin Boy later added to its cult appeal, turning it into a forbidden fruit that the curious had to see to believe, only to discover it was quite a bit better than the “Worst Movie Ever” label would indicate. “This is just so shitty, we gotta watch,” Elliott ponders of the initial attractions, “and maybe it started that way and then some brave soul said, ‘You know, this is actually sort of funny,’ and it spread from there.”

One of these future cult members would go on to be called — somewhat to his annoyance — one of the kings of Weird Twitter, the segment of social media dedicated to celebrating popular culture at its most inconsequential and arbitrary. Patrick Monahan, the popular New York–based comedian known online as Pattymo and widely admired for his mastery of Frasier and Tomi Lahren memes and popularizing the theory that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer, says he first stumbled upon Cabin Boy at Blockbuster. “I would say that I saw it at least a half dozen times. I always remembered certain little moments: the floating cupcake that spits tobacco; Chocki; ‘THESE PIPES … ARE CLEAN,’” he says via email. “The movie exists in its own strange unreality.”

Monahan says he has vague memories of watching Get a Life while it aired on Fox. He later bought it on DVD, “largely on the recommendation of like-minded internet people and in particular Tom Scharpling and The Best Show. I think it was extremely before its time, which is always a strange thing to say, because things you say that about are almost always essential to creating the later ‘time’ they don’t get to be a part of,” he says.

At the turn of the century, there was an explosion of pop culture websites, like The A.V. Club and Splitsider, and message boards devoted largely or exclusively to comedy. And for a younger generation of comedy fans, theatrically unpopular films such as Pootie Tang, Wet Hot American Summer, the Freaks and Geeks and Mr. Show box sets — as well as both Cabin Boy and Get a Life — became items of totemic significance; like a copy of Surfer Rosa or Naked Lunch, one passed it along with a dollop of, “Hey, kid, here’s the real shit. It’s gonna blow your mind.” To people whose tastes were at least partially formed in this maelstrom, the importance of Resnick and Elliott is de facto.

Wurster has been a part of the Elliott fan club for so long that he might as well be the president. His appreciation for Letterman goes back to catching a few episodes of the morning show back when he was in college, and as a regular viewer of Late Night, he was delighted every time Elliott appeared. Before Wurster would go on to join indie rock legends Superchunk and drum for both the Mountain Goats and Bob Mould, he worked at a Chapel Hill record store, where he would watch Get a Life with his boss, thinking not another soul on earth was watching the show.

In 1992, he had recently joined Superchunk, and was playing a stacked bill at the New York club the Ritz, featuring My Bloody Valentine and opener Pavement. It was there he met a friend of Superchunk, the radio DJ and future comedy writer Tom Scharpling. The pair quickly realized they had the same favorite show.

”We just really hit it off about a few things, but the main thing was Chris Elliott in Get a Life. And it was so rare to meet someone who even knew of Get a Life,” he says. “It was like when you were a kid and you just saw someone with a Black Flag button on their jacket. It was so rare that you would just go up and talk to them. It was this primal bonding thing, a real flashpoint for our friendship.”

Scharpling and Wurster would go on to form arguably the most important radio comedy duo of the 21st century. As part of Scharpling’s The Best Show on WFMU (now a podcast), Wurster would call in to voice an assortment of kooks, such as the fanatical Philadelphia booster Philly Boy Roy or an insane music elitist who dismisses the Beatles for having too many chords. The two would regularly evangelize on behalf of Resnick and Elliott’s oeuvre, but even Wurster says he was taken aback when Get a Life finally arrived on DVD. “I remember being surprised it was coming out because, at that point,” he says, “I almost felt like the only people who were talking about it were Tom and I.”

Wurster is such a superfan that he has bought four copies of Elliott’s book Daddy’s Boy, a parody of Christina Crawford’s tell-all Mommie Dearest. (Elliott is a prolific parody novelist, having once written a spoof of The Da Vinci Code called The Shroud of the Thwacker.) But when it comes to devotion to all things Elliott, we must all bow to Dan Nakamura, who has also been on the team since he was a Late Night–watching teenager and also caught Cabin Boy in theaters.

Making conceptual and defiantly strange hip-hop as Dan the Automator, the Bay Area producer first tested the waters by naming a song on Kool Keith’s watershed 1996 release Dr. Octagonecologyst “Halfsharkalligatorhalfman,” a nod to Chocki. But he went all in with 1999’s So … How’s Your Girl?, the debut of his group Handsome Boy Modeling School, even adopting the alias Nathaniel Merriweather, a variation on Elliott’s character’s name in the film. Working with hip-hop legend Paul Huston (a.k.a. Prince Paul) and inspired by Elliott, especially the “Prettiest Week of My Life” episode of Get a Life, Nakamura took delight in tweaking the puffed-up machismo and self-seriousness of late-’90s hip-hop. “They’re pretending to be gangsters or pretending to be drug dealers, so it’s like, why don’t we set up a modeling school?” he says. “A lot of people were like, ‘You guys are just doing something stupid, right?’”

Not that Nakamura, who later titled a compilation Wanna Buy a Monkey?, took that as an insult. Their commitment to stupidity is an aspect of Elliott and Resnick’s work that he deeply admires. “From the dryness of a Letterman to the wackiness of a Conan, you have Chris riding squarely maybe in the center. Conan breaks out of the bit, but Chris Elliott plays the bit until the end. You don’t know if he’s winking at you.”

In his mind, the appeal of Elliott is that if you are on his wavelength, everything he does can feel like an inside joke, a wink just for you. “Every once in a while I see him on something and he’s always funny. Like even in The Abyss he’s funny. It’s not designed to be funny, but the absurdity just … it just oozes out,” he says. “I think most people who like Chris Elliott are equally amused by the fact that other people don’t get it at all.”

For the first several years after its existence, Cabin Boy was scorched earth. But its reputation slowly grew, much to the surprise of everyone involved with the film. “I was in the grocery store, I can’t remember the year, and a stranger said, ‘Oh my God, you’re in Cabin Boy!’ And I thought, ‘I can’t believe this person saw it,’ because I thought it just disappeared,” says Melora Walters. “And then they’re like, ‘You know it’s a cult classic, right?’ I was just like, ‘What?’”

Walters, who was unaware of but excited to learn about the Blu-Ray rerelease, is best known for her dramatic roles in Paul Thomas Anderson’s films Boogie Nights and Magnolia and the HBO series Big Love, which in retrospect makes her appearance in Cabin Boy one of the film’s best jokes. While she was initially surprised to learn of the film’s endurance, she thinks she knows why it speaks to people. “I think as much as it’s really weird and odd, there is a sophistication underneath,” she says. “But I also think, in a weird way, Chris Elliott’s character, he’s on kind of a Joseph Campbell hero’s journey. All these myths or fairy tales or all the Star Wars or even the Marvel things, it’s a mythological quest, and I think that must touch on something, whether you’re conscious of it or not.”

Elliott says that after a hot streak in the ’80s that even found him doing his FDR: A One Man Show special for Cinemax, the phone stopped ringing for years. “I think we were fairly naive. I know I was. I had this feeling of, OK, we screwed up. We didn’t do a great movie. It was a valiant effort for guys that have never done a movie, but we’ll get a shot to do another one, and that one will be better,” he says. “It didn’t even occur to me that, no, this was your shot.”

Eventually, both of their careers recovered. Resnick has never directed again, nor does he want to. “I’m not collaborative. I’m a solitary writer. I don’t even like being around people that much. So for something that is so collaborative, directing was uncomfortable for me,” he says. He eventually joined the writing staff of The Larry Sanders Show, and has since written a number of screenplays. In 2014, he released an acclaimed collection of humor essays, Will Not Attend, which he calls “the best creative experience that I’ve had so far, especially writing for something that’s not meant to be turned into anything. It’s just a book.”

Elliott joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1994, during a curious era that also saw the venerable show recruit and then squander established stars such as Janeane Garofalo and Kids in the Hall alum Mark McKinney. “I think that was always in my mind, me thinking I should go there, and I think when I did, I was too old and had done too much on my own to establish my own kind of voice,” he says. “They were all really happy I was there, they were all very nice to me, but it just felt totally wrong from day one.”

Since then, Elliott has appeared in television shows and films ranging from There’s Something About Mary to Dilbert to How I Met Your Mother to the Scary Movie franchise. Harmon asked him guest-star in an episode of Community, and Adult Swim acknowledged its debt to Elliott when he starred in Eagleheart, a bizarre spoof of Walker, Texas Ranger that finally let him feel “like a 1970s leading man, like the Fugitive guy.” He currently stars alongside Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara on the sitcom Schitt’s Creek. A working actor is a happy actor, of course, but one can’t help but think that Elliott is an untapped resource that in the right director’s hands could still befuddle the world. Elliott’s comedy never gets old because Elliott never gets old because he’s always been old.

He has never lost his essential, confrontational energy, and he still feels singular. But for now, critical reappraisal and cult icon status will have to do—not that he sees it that way. “I don’t think of myself as that at all. I think that I’m a reference point,” he says. “I’m not being humble here, but what I’ve done is easily forgotten.

“Really, at this point, it’s just a matter of putting food on the table,” Elliott says of his career. “I think I still live in a certain level of panic that things haven’t stabilized. I’ve been lucky to make my nut every year, but there’s never been this feeling of abundance in terms of the business for me.”

There is, perhaps, an alternate timeline wherein Tim Burton does make Cabin Boy, and Elliott goes on to have the career Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler had, and Resnick doesn’t spend years wondering whether he blew his best friend’s shot at being a movie star. But perhaps not. Perhaps Elliott and his friend were always just too strange, too eager to provoke rather than please the audience, too dedicated to the unsafe choice to become bona fide superstars. “I mean, nobody doesn’t want to be successful,” Elliott says. “I guess I wanted whatever success I could have to come from what I do without selling out, and ultimately I think that’s probably what I’ve done. I just wish certain things that I’ve done, like my TV show and Cabin Boy … it’s impossible not to wish they were better received. [But] do I want them to be less weird? No.”

Elliott still stands by Cabin Boy, spitting cupcakes and all. “Flawed as it is, it is still an interesting piece of footage to watch. I’m not embarrassed by the movie,” he says. “The thing about Cabin Boy is that it made both Adam and myself want to hide. I don’t think I’ve gotten out of that mode exactly, and that’s a hard mode to be in when you’re in show business.”

But there is a bright spot. Friendships have been ruined over much less than becoming a national laughingstock. But Resnick and Elliott never blamed each other, never turned on each other, never lost contact. If anything, the bunker mentality they adopted made them even closer. The most painful thing about the reaction to the film for Elliott, and the sting that no amount of cult love or fans trying to sell him a monkey can seem to heal, is that nearly 25 years later, he still can’t work with his best friend. They can get gigs separately. But as a duo, they were too discouraged by the Fox false start to ever try collaborating again. These misfit soulmates still feel radioactive.

“That’s our punishment,” Elliott says. “I think Adam is the funniest writer in the world and I’m still learning things from him. I still can get on the phone with him and we can talk about the guy who danced weird in the wedding sequence of The Godfather and laugh about that. But I think we would be too insecure to try to work together again.”

Elliott and Resnick have the respect of comedians ranging from Ant-Man director Peyton Reed to Adult Swim dadaist Tim Heidecker. They also earned the respect of another born contrarian: Chris heard through Courtney Love that Kurt Cobain really loved Cabin Boy. “That makes you feel good for about a second,” Resnick says. “I don’t know what’s better than that. But it doesn’t … unless you felt what Chris and I went through, it would be hard for anyone to understand why it was difficult to enjoy the occasional compliment.”

He’s OK now, Resnick insists. He’s happy that there are passionate fans of the film, that it brought smiles to strange children who carried it through life. But before he even knew those fans existed, he spent years absorbing the slings and arrows, feeling the pain of a smart man being treated like an idiot. To this day, all he can see are the flaws, or think about what he would do differently. “If we could do it over again, but only change a couple of things, I think we’d lose the helium accent and maybe Chris wouldn’t wear shorts,” he says. “That’s what we always talk about. The combination of those two things might have been our first and fatal mistake. Most cinemagoers just couldn’t overcome that.”

Resnick and Elliott forged their reputation for being just as happy to elicit a blank stare as a guffaw. So it’s only appropriate that their apotheosis perplexes and eludes even them.

“Chris and I don’t know how to talk about it anymore. It’s confusing. There was the long period where we were falling on our swords, saying it’s our fault and we didn’t want to do it,” he says. “I mean, that’s basically true, so it continues to be hard to move away from that. Why do they like it? I don’t know the answer. I wish that I could see the movie through someone else’s eyes.”

He admits that even if he could see the movie fresh, he still probably wouldn’t like it. But he knows other people really do. For some reason. And that will have to be good enough.

“I guess Cabin Boy works for some people because of the flaws,” he says. “I honestly don’t know. Chris and I always say this, but we’ll never be able to figure it out. We’ll go to our graves not really understanding Cabin Boy.”

Michael Tedder is a freelance journalist who has written for Esquire, Stereogum, Playboy. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

An earlier version of this piece misspelled Jack Lord.

Michael Tedder