With the 4/20 Arrival of ‘Quasi,’ Broken Lizard’s Jay Chandrasekhar on What Makes a Stoner Comedy
variety.comRoy Trakin Broken Lizard, the five-man comedy troupe which formed in 1990 at a fraternity on the upstate New York campus of preppy Colgate University, have been stoner icons since the very first scene of their 2001 breakout hit “Super Troopers.” That’s when Jay Chandrasekhar’s mustachioed Vermont cop Lieutenant Arcot “Thorny” Ramathorn pulls over a car full of potheads and proceeds to terrorize and freak them out.
Like they did in 2018 with “Super Troopers 2,” their newest film, “Quasi,” a reimagining of Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” is a no-holds-barred, scatological combination of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” crossed with Mel Brooks’ “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.” It premieres today — April 20 — as a Hulu Original through Fox Searchlight.
Boasting their own cannabis brand, Smokin’ Lizard, Chandrasekhar notes, “When we get high with friends like Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg, they take it seriously enough to try to smoke us into the ground and knock us out.
Those two guys really ruined us. We smoked every day at Colgate and then several decades after that.” And while the group’s eight features to date don’t necessarily spotlight pot-smoking like Cheech & Chong, it’s all in the inspiration, according to Chandrasekhar. “They’re stoner movies in the sense that we wrote them at least partially stoned,” he admits. “A major part of the writing process takes place when we’re smoking and riffing on a lot of silly stuff through the first half-dozen drafts before we go into a sober phase where we do the structural work on the narrative.
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