Cheech & Chong Light Up the Screen in Hey, Watch This!

It was forty years ago when I was sixteen years old. It was going to be another night at the Bitter End, the legendary Greenwich Village coffeehouse where I gloriously misspent my youth. It was the very beginning of that process. Two months earlier I smoked pot for the first time and a month later I bought my first bag of weed and went to the Bleecker Street club to watch George Carlin reinvent the comedic wheel. Carlin was a known quantity, a veteran funny man familiar to me for years from many television appearances who finally grew his hair, listened to the weed and gave his craft over to the counterculture.


Tonight was different. We were going to the Bitter End to watch a pair of unknown comedians whose shtick was soaked in weed. They had one album out but were still relatively unknown. Whereas Carlin was a comedian who turned into a hippie, it seemed as if Cheech & Chong were hippies who had turned into comedians.


Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin may have been unknown but they were also familiar. In 1970 there was an “Us” and a “Them” and Cheech & Chong were decidedly, unequivocally, without question two of “Us.” Cheech & Chong, like the culture they came to represent, turned out to be loosey-goosey, multicultural, shockingly crude, hysterically funny and most importantly – stoned! They were all about the marijuana and so were we, and their comedy gave concrete expression to our emerging stoner sensibilities. That first night at The Bitter End I was introduced to a collection of memorable characters which would be impressed forever on my freshly enhanced neural pathways. At the start of my marijuana journey, between the punch lines, Cheech & Chong were teaching me that I wasn't alone, that I wasn't wrong and that the best way to deal with disapproving authority was to laugh at it together. These were important lessons. Cultural resonance was commencing and it would last the rest of my life.


Four decades later and I am almost forty years stoned. That sixteen-year-old neophyte pothead has evolved into the Associate Publisher of HIGH TIMES and what began as a diversion has turned into a career – this weed thing seems to have worked out. Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, 62 and 72 respectively, have released Hey, Watch This!, a concert film of their highly-anticipated 2009 reunion tour – and I approach that event with a doobie-ous critical eye. The standup shtick in Hey, Watch This! cannot be just a collection of skits and jokes pulled out of the closet for profit. I hold them to a higher standard. It must be nothing less than the empowering moments of my youth memorialized, preserved and digitized for all time. I have a lot of emotional currency invested in this film. A lame retread, a commercial repackaging would break my heart, while a collection of glittering gems that stand the test of time would reaffirm long-held truths. I place the advance screener in the CD drive, hold my breath and push the button.


Hey, Watch This! is a sparkling jewel of a film filled with a soft-green light. It succeeds not only as a document of Cheech & Chong’s seminal standup and a celebration of marijuana culture but also as an affirmation of my deep convictions. Earliest reports from industry insiders sniffed that Hey, Watch This! will only give stoners what they want but that anyone looking for something new will be disappointed - that is simply not true.


The film contains many (but not all) of the dank duo's most beloved bits that somehow manage to be both intact and updated. The structure and substance of the routines remains the same – the punch lines are all there and the audience howls at each familiar line – but the careful listener with discern the upgrade – call it Cheech & Chong 2.0. There are plenty of references to dotcoms, digital technology, modern-day dank and George W. Bush. A huge digital screen behind the boys enhances the performance and during the first bit – “Two Guys In A Car” – the addition of a synchronized road clip in the background provides a sense of terminal velocity that the original standup left to the imagination. We’ve come a long way from the Bitter End.


There’s more music in their modern show than ever before, including performances of the 1985 hit, “Born In East L.A.” and a sing-along of the title song of their first film, “Up In Smoke.” Over the years Tommy Chong had become an accomplished blues guitarist, a skill that now lends his “Blind Mellon Chitlin’” bit an air of authenticity that the old act didn’t have. In fact, Chong’s blues sound is so good, it is far too short. It would have been nice to see him extend the riffs more than he did.


There is additional new material in short setups and blackouts used to cut and pace the performance. The boys offer running commentaries as an aging gay couple and as a couple of aging stoners in the balcony watching the show. Tommy Chong’s wife, Shelby, is also on hand as virtually a new member of the team who gives an extended anecdotal introduction to the act and, most funny, plays Fifi, the infamous love interest of Ralph and Herbie, the butt-sniffing dogs.


The world has changed much since the dank duo last performed. Medical marijuana is legalized in fourteen states with more to come. California is on the cusp of legalization and cannabis has gained a cultural acceptance that no one would have predicted. “Our long nightmare is over,” Tommy declares early in the film, “Cheech & Chong are back together!”


I tend to agree.

http://hightimes.com/entertainment/rick/6367