So I Guess I’m the Guy Who Enjoyed ‘Unfrosted’

Why all the hate for this Mel Brooks-esque parody?

The way people are talking about Unfrosted, the directorial debut of one Mr. Jerry Seinfeld, you’d think watching the movie automatically triggers an IRS audit or something. Having now watched the film, I have to say, I’m more than a little baffled by this reception. Unfrosted isn’t a great movie, but it is frequently quite funny, and it’s one of the increasingly-rare contemporary comedies that owes more to Mel Brooks than Judd Apatow. It fires off about fifteen deeply-silly, not-at-all-subtle jokes a minute, and while some of those are definitely duds, enough of them land to make the movie entertaining.

Unfrosted alleges to recount the creation of Kellog’s Pop-Tarts. Coming less than a year after Flamin’ Hot, a movie about a Doritos product, it may seem plausible that someone would make an earnest film chronicling the advent of a specific brand of toaster strudel. But Unfrosted has no basis in reality; like 2022’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Unfrosted is a parody of biopics, following the paint-by-numbers structure we’ve seen in these films a thousand times while making the details as ludicrous as possible. It’s so packed with gags and one-liners that if you don’t laugh at one of them, it kinda doesn’t matter, because another will be along in three seconds.

The “story,” such as it is, ostensibly reimagines the space race as a dash between two rival cereal companies to make a breakfast pastry. Seinfeld (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Barry Marder) plays Bob Cabana, an executive working at Kellog’s under Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan) in 1963. After their competitors at Post (led by Amy Schumer as Marjorie Post) use corporate espionage to take the lead, Bob persuades culinary engineer Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) to leave her job making food NASA astronauts can eat in space to head up his team. Said team also comes to include fast food business all-stars Chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan) and Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez), as well as fitness guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), children’s bicycle maker Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), an IBM supercompuer, and, perhaps most amusingly, Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), a “German immigrant” (read: ex-Nazi) who “invented” Sea Monkeys. Meanwhile, in addition to the threat of being overtaken by Post, Bob has to worry about a mafia-esque dairy industry out to prevent the production of a breakfast product that doesn’t require milk to enjoy (menacing milkmen include Peter Dinklage and Christian Slater)

Also, Jon Hamm and John Slattery show up as Don Draper and Roger Stern from Mad Men.

If Unfrosted had absolutely nothing else to offer, I don’t know how anyone can get through a movie where Bill Burr plays JFK and Hugh Grant plays Tony the Tiger and not laugh once. We live in a world where The Hangover Part II is the second-highest grossing comedy of all time, but this movie has everyone up in arms? What is happening to the world? Even at its absolute worst, Unfrosted is completely inoffensive.

I can’t help but think that the negative reaction to Unfrosted really stems from two issues, neither having anything to do with the movie itself.

The first is that people seem to have just now noticed that Seinfeld is kind of a complicated guy (which has always been the case - or has everyone forgotten he dated a 17-year-old when he was 38?), and people are conflating the possibility of this once-beloved comic being an asshole with the quality of his film.

The other is the death of Borscht Belt humor, from which I believe Unfrosted’s constant barrage of preposterous zingers springs. As I said earlier, Unfrosted comes from the Mel Brooks School of Comedy, which has always favored quantity over quality. When History of the World, Part II came out last year, there were a lot of complaints that it had three bad jokes for each good one… but that’s always been the case with Brooks’ work. At his best, those good jokes are SO good that you don’t even notice the bad ones. But for time immemorial, the way those kinds of films function is to drown you in absurdity.

To be fair, Seinfeld is also 70 now, and his reference points might not play for a younger audience. I wonder how many young Netflix subscribers even get jokes about Nazis escaping to Argentina, the Doublemint twins, and Nikita Khrushchev, who is portrayed here by Dean Norris, hilariously mumbling what is very clearly made-up Russian? Unfrosted’s real problem may just be that the audience who would most appreciate it are either dead or incapable of remembering their Netflix password.