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‘Hangover’ Is Stupid, Profane And Genuinely Funny

VPM | By Jacki Lyden and Bob Mondello

Published June 6, 2009 at 8:00 PM EDT

Updated July 13, 2023

JACKI LYDEN, Host:

“The Hangover” is a new movie about a bachelor party so wild that the next morning, when the party guys wake up in a trashed Vegas hotel suite, no one can remember a thing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, “THE HANGOVER”)

U: (As character) Do not go in the bathroom.

M: (As Phil Wenneck) Yeah, we throw some (unintelligible).

U: (As character) Phil, there is a tiger in the bathroom.

M: (As Phil Wenneck) What’s going on?

U: (As character) There’s a jungle cat in the bathroom.

M: (As Phil Wenneck) Okay. Okay. I’ll check it out.

U: (As character) Don’t go in. Be careful. Don’t go.

(SOUNDBITE OF A TIGER’S ROAR)

M: (As Phil Wenneck) Wait, he’s not kidding. There’s a tiger in there.

U: (As character) Yeah.

LYDEN: Sounds like a premise for a raucous guy comedy if ever there was one. So we decide to bring in our own raucous guy, movie critic Bob Mondello…

BOB MONDELLO: Oh, my.

LYDEN: …to talk about the movie.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

LYDEN: Hi.

MONDELLO: I’m not feeling terribly raucous but okay.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

LYDEN: We can work on that.

MONDELLO: Okay. Well, I’ll be happy to.

LYDEN: And this movie will help. So let me get it straight. Four guys have a bachelor party, three wake up with a tiger in the hotel suite, and I guess the groom is missing.

MONDELLO: That’s right. And there’s also a baby in the closet, and Stu is missing a tooth; one of the guys there. And they were all going through their pockets the next day because they’re trying to figure out what. They don’t remember anything, and so they’re going through pockets. They’re trying to find something that will give them clues. And they find a bill for $800, I think, was to a wedding chapel. They find the tooth.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MONDELLO: And among the other things they find is some evidence that one of them was in a hospital. And they follow the hospital thread and that gets them to a wedding chapel. And there, they’ve discovered that one of them has gotten married. And so they track down the bride and happily, the baby is hers.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, “THE HANGOVER”)

M: (As Jade) I’m going to go clean him off. That’s all right, daddy didn’t mean it.

(SOUNDBITE OF A CRYING BABY)

M: (As Jade) No.

U: (As character) Oh, my God.

M: (As Jade) He was just hungry. He’s fine.

U: (As character) Oh, good.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

U: (As character) About last night, do you remember the last time you saw Doug?

M: (As Jade) I guess it was around 1:00 because I had to go back to work and finish my shift. And then when I got out, I headed to over to the hotel with Tyler.

U: (As character) I have a question. You said when your shift ended, does that mean you’re a nurse or a blackjack dealer?

M: (As Jade) You know this, I’m a stripper.

U: (As character) Mm hmm.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MONDELLO: So they’re now married and he has to deal with that. And all of this happens in, like, the first 25 minutes. And it’s not the kind of comedy that I’m usually very favorable about. Because on some level it is just about jokes, right?

LYDEN: Right.

MONDELLO: But this one, for some reason, works better than most of them. It’s just, it’s funny.

LYDEN: Well, it looked funny to me. And it’s a guy film, “Pineapple Express,” “Superbad,” you know, you think Judd Apatow, did he have anything to do with this movie?

MONDELLO: In general, he makes very clever movies that are cleverer than their premises, in a way. And I think that’s what he’s done again. This is, sort of one of his predecessors is something like “Animal House.” Except this is “Animal House” for the young married set.

LYDEN: You know, sometimes you just need a movie and that a lost weekend. I think it looks like a last one.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MONDELLO: “The Lost Weekend,” now there is the other – that’s the other way of looking at this is drunken jamboree.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MONDELLO: It is stupid. It’s profane. The language in it is just awful. There’s a reason that it got an R-rating. And it’s genuinely a funny movie. It’s worth it.

LYDEN: And there’s a cameo by Mike Tyson.

MONDELLO: This is true.

LYDEN: Bob Mondello is our movie critic, talking with us about the new movie “Hangover,” one we might not have expected but that makes it all the better, Bob.

MONDELLO: Totally true. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Jacki Lyden

Longtime listeners recognize Jacki Lyden's voice from her frequent work as a substitute host on NPR. As a journalist who has been with NPR since 1979, Lyden regards herself first and foremost as a storyteller and looks for the distinctive human voice in a huge range of national and international stories.

In the last five years, Lyden has reported from diverse locations including Paris, New York, the backstreets of Baghdad, the byways around rural Kentucky and spent time among former prostitutes in Nashville.

Most recently, Lyden focused her reporting on the underground, literally. In partnership with National Geographic, she and photographer Stephen Alvarez explored the catacombs and underground of the City of Light. The report of the expedition aired on Weekend Edition Sunday and was the cover story of the February 2011 National Geographic magazine.

Lyden's book, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, recounts her own experience growing up under the spell of a colorful mother suffering from manic depression. The memoir has been published in 11 foreign editions and is considered a memoir classic by The New York Times. Daughter of the Queen of Sheba has been in process as a film, based upon a script by the A-list writer, Karen Croner. She is working on a sequel to the book which will be about memory and what one can really hold on to in a tumultuous life.

Along with Scott Simon, current host of Weekend Edition Saturday, and producer Jonathan Baer, Lyden helped to pioneer NPR's Chicago bureau in 1979. Ten years later, Lyden became NPR's London correspondent and reported on the IRA in Northern Ireland.

In the summer of 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Lyden went to Amman, Jordan, where she covered the Gulf War often traveling to and reporting from Baghdad and many other Middle Eastern cites. Her work supported NPR's 1991 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for Gulf War coverage. Additionally, Lyden has reported from countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. In 1995, she did a groundbreaking series for NPR on Iran on the emerging civil society and dissent, called "Iran at the Crossroads."

At home in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001, Lyden was NPR's first reporter on the air from New York that day. She shared in NPR's George Foster Peabody Award and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Lyden later covered the aftermath of the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In 2002, Lyden and producer Davar Ardalan received the Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and Television for best foreign documentary for "Loss and Its Aftermath." The film was about bereavement among Palestinians and Jews in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.

That same year Lyden hosted the "National Story Project" on Weekend All Things Considered with internationally-acclaimed novelist Paul Auster. The book that emerged from the show, I Thought My Father Was God, became a national bestseller.

Over the years, Lyden's articles have been publications such as Granta, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is a popular speaker, especially on mental health.

A graduate of Valparaiso University, Lyden was given an honorary Ph.D. from the school in 2010. She participated in Valparaiso's program of study at Cambridge University and was a 1991-92 Benton Fellow in Middle East studies at the University of Chicago.

See stories by Jacki Lyden