Although I love Portlandia, I find Fred Armisen to be one of the worst comics I've seen. Left to his own devices, his timing misses the mark by miles. He reaches for Kaufman, but falls squarely into obnoxious. It often seems more like he forgot his line and simply doesn't know how to quit. This film is case and point.

This film funny, but ceases being so about 1/10th of the way to the credits. It would have made a fine SNL skit for about 3 minutes, but 27 minutes is far too long for the schtick to hold it's humor. For half an hour, we are treated to an endless procession of Armisen's smug mug smirking at the camera as he poorly pantomimes various, decidedly unskilled drum techniques.

The film lampoons the hubris of musicians who feel themselves more technically accomplished than they are. It mimics the worst of their pedagogy as they demonstrate technique as instruction, but without the exposition to actually teach it. Instead, it's ego fueled exposition, and YouTube has an endless array of examples of this form of video.

Ironically, this film is almost a self-referential metaphor for Armisen performance itself: over-confident and self-indulgent. What makes it worse is that I know he could do better. He writes well, he can be quite funny, and he can actually play the drums. There's just little excuse for this to be the unfunny, tedious mess that it is.