Comedy Central tapped into the souls of college students this past Sunday, taking a two-hour jaunt into the scandalous extracurricular hours of a select group of Yale students, in the network’s first original film, “Porn ‘n Chicken.”
Yes, that’s right, “Porn ‘n Chicken,” a film with greasy poultry and Jenna Jameson as its highlights, whose main function is to beg the question: Why waste your time with intramural badminton when you could be downing saturated fat and watching pornography with strangers?
“Porn ‘n Chicken,” which only began production this June, is based, in part, on the true story of a group of college students who challenged the mediocrity of Yale nightlife by beginning a sexual revolution of sorts by forming a smut-watching club whose ultimate goal is filming its own porn on campus.
The real-life club was formed in 1996, according to Comedy Central, when Yale’s Graduate Employees and Student Organization, which held meetings discussing strikes for better wages, lost its focus and opted to order chicken, drink beer and watch porn. The club, actually called Porn ‘n Chicken with an illustration of a choked chicken as its symbol, has since perpetuated itself via anonymous on-campus postings and emails, soliciting members and participants for its film project.
Their porn-to-be, which began production in November 2000, is called “The StaXXX” and is set in well known Yale locations, such as their library (known to students and faculty, as the stacks.) When the production of the porn began, the underground society began to receive hundreds of interview requests. The New York Times and MTV combed the Yale campus, searching for members of the underground society. To date, no one is sure if “The StaXXX” has actually been completed, but the urban legend the society created has swelled to an audience-luring bursting point.
In Comedy Central’s version of P ‘n C, the film doesn’t quite take off. The students are busted by Yale’s Dean Richard Widehead (Kurt Fuller), also known as Dick, as they begin shooting the first scene of the movie in the library. When threatened with expulsion, the students come up with a clever way of blackmailing the administration, managing to gain admittance into the graduate schools of their dreams.
While the choice to tell this story is ingenious on Comedy Central’s behalf, P ‘n C probably could have generated a lot more profits and a larger audience in the movie theaters. The caliber of the breakout actors, script, and cinematography is equal to other college comedy films like “American Pie” and “Slackers.”
Most of the actors in P ‘n C have had small parts in big TV shows or movies and are just on the verge of being well known names. Take, for example, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays a convincingly anal-retentive Yale senior named Hutch who has spent his entire college career shaping his law school application. Moss-Bachrach is currently filming “Mona Lisa’s Smile” with Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles and appeared in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” His character, Hutch, is the film’s main argument for the worth of P ‘n C. Hutch has been on the verge of a panic attack since he arrived at Yale and is only freed from stress when his friends force a Miller Genuine Draft and a chicken wing down his throat and have him watch “Debbie Does Dallas.” Ok, so classic porn and beer may not be what college life is all about, but the film makes a solid case for the importance of relief from the sometimes overwhelming pressures of academia.
The question may come to mind, is P ‘n C just a haven for horny, hungry and single males? And the answer, provided by Comedy Central and news reporters, is definitively no. Real-life TIME magazine reporter Joel Stein, who worked his way into a P ‘n C meeting by bringing along porn star Sydnee Steele (a situation recast in the film with cameos by Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson), claimed in his May 2001 article, “The Chicken was Delicious,” that half the meeting’s attendees were female, and there were also eight hand-holding couples. Shocker.
In the film, Angela Goethals plays Polly, the head female in P ‘n C, a star of “The StaXXX” and also the daughter of one of the university’s most wealthy contributors, Roger Stone (Joseph Siravo). Stone threatens to pull his endowment when P ‘n C antics embarrass him personally — P ‘n C members appear at Stone’s donation ceremony wearing nothing but mascot-style chicken heads — providing the impetus for conflict between administrative authority and rebellious college students throughout the rest of the film.
Beyond the necessity of well spent free time, as expected, the message of “Porn ‘n Chicken” is largely empty. However, the two-hour escape succeeds admirably as a mental nap and an amusing tale of sticky-fingered American college students with little to revolt against besides the dullness of their existence.
Catch encore presentations of “Porn ‘n Chicken” on Comedy Central Fri., Oct. 18 at 11 p.m. and Sat., Oct. 19 at 11:30pm.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
