Jason Sondhi

After watching A Bear in the Woods, the latest film by advertising veteran and S/W alum Andrew Laurich (A Reasonable Request) my mind drifted to questions of classification. I’m not brushed up on comedic theory so forgive my naivete, but I sketched a 4×4 quadrant of behavior vs action as a thought exercise. In the bottom left there is normal behavior in a normal scenario (not terribly comedic?) contrasted with an upper right of insane behavior in crazy circumstances. If a singular performer (Jim Carrey for example) can excel in the top left of “wacky behavior in a mundane setting”, it takes a gifted writer to make the bottom right of “normal interactions during insane events” succeed.

For me, that’s what Laurich does best, operating in that lower right quadrant by taking prosaic but meaningful interpersonal discussions between characters and setting them against a backdrop of an absurd premise. It’s a simple trick, but what elevates it in his two major S/W featured shorts is a dry commitment to the emotional stakes of those ordinary discussions and a steadfast refusal to react proportionately to the contextual insanity, creating a classically humorous incongruity.

Mimi Michaels (L) and Will Ropp star in A Bear in the Woods

In A Bear in the Woods we have an age-gap couple enjoying a romantic night of camping. The elder woman, Taylor (Mimi Michaels), is enjoying the company of Mark, her younger boyfriend (Will Ropp), but the enjoyable tryst is interrupted by a bear. Not only does the threat put a damper on their fun, but it also forces the couple to confront their attitudes toward gender norms, dating, and each other, as Mark struggles to take charge and perform his classic role. In turn, Taylor retreats emotionally—in a world of dating app match abundance is Mark worth sticking her neck out for?

The important thing to remember in Laurich’s formulation is that “normal” ≠ boring. With brevity and economy, he is gifted at sketching out characters beyond their archetypes and creating dilemmas that could easily power a more conventional setup. Taylor exasperatedly announces to Mark that she is “almost 40” at one point in the film and her ticking biological clock is a clever feature that imbues the scenario with more depth and elicits audience connection. This kind of effortless character-building is a hallmark of Laurich’s and is essential to his magic trick. The joke is the way the characters are able to avoid – or at least sideline – the big elephant in the room, and we as an audience must be with them in that myopia because of our emotional investment in their concerns. The secret to his style of comedy writing is actually to over-index on the not-comedy aspects.

This approach to the fundamentals of character development serves the writer/director in good stead when venturing outside of comedy and Laurich relates to us that the impetus for this short was, in part, to experiment with bridging his style with more explicit genre work. The director was featured in Hulu’s Bite-Size Horror Anthology with his short Live Bait a few years ago and is currently working with the streamer on a feature film. The busy creative also has a second feature in development based on a previous short and is working with FX on a TV show.