Okay, pop quiz. What happens when a male feminist named Jude who’s sewn his urethra shut in an effort to “understand the female plight” syncs up with his old, involuntarily celibate high-school friend, Hamburger Kennedy, in an effort to find common, pro-feminist ground?
Oh, come on! You don’t know this?!
Left of Centre happens!
Written by and starring Mitra Jouhari and Sandy Honig and directed by Honig, Left of Centre features two of the Three Busy Debras who scooped up a couple of fedoras, penciled in some facial hair, and transformed into a couple of the most self-important and woefully out-of-touch young men you’ll meet this side of a Goldman Sachs elevator. In fact, the idea that Honig and Jouhari portray Jude and Hamburger as such anti-bros is what lends so much subtle power to this piece.
Jude’s NYU-grad character is a pitch-perfect commentary on the pervasive sense of male entitlement that results in the misconstruing and co-opting of the feminist struggle for no discernible aim other than self-preservation. Then, there’s Hamburger — the kind of guy who feels entitled to women’s affection simply because he’s gone without it for so long. Well, forever. I know both of these men many times over, but Jouhari and Honig seem to know these guys better than they know themselves.
In the end, our insufferables — one, a fair-weather feminist who describes himself as the “Gandalf of grinding a clit until it falls off,” the other an angry troll who at some post-chin-stroke point muses, “You know what I wish for the women from the march … is that they would march right off a cliff” — come to recognize the common ground they’ve shared all along.
What ground, you ask?
An Entenmann’s coffee cake that they feed to each other.
Yep. It’s really good.
Oh, I almost forgot a couple of crucial plot points: Hamburger graduated from the Cincinnati Institute of Method Acting … bottom of his class. Jude keeps all the clits he’s ground off in an ornate wooden box.
Watch, watch!
Luke is executive producer at Big Breakfast and a watcher of many web videos. Send him yours @LKellyClyne.
