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Humor & Life Quote by David Cross

"As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy"

About this Quote

David Cross is doing that comedian’s trick where a compliment arrives wearing a smirk. On the surface, he’s endorsing Tenacious D as movie material, but the sentence is booby-trapped: “of course it could work” is immediately undercut by the impossibly neat list of requirements. All it takes is a “great writer and great director” who can “think outside” standard comedy. Translation: sure, anything can be good if you hire geniuses to reinvent the form.

The subtext is about adaptation anxiety. Tenacious D’s appeal lives in a specific register: parody that’s also sincere, dumb bravado executed with real musicianship, a mythology that’s funniest when it feels like an overgrown sketch. Stretch that into a feature and you risk the classic SNL-movie problem: thin premise, inflated runtime, too many connective scenes. Cross isn’t just name-checking craft; he’s pointing at the gap between a cult act’s intensity and the industrial demands of a 90-minute narrative.

Context matters, too: Cross comes out of alternative comedy, a world suspicious of “conventional film comedy” and its safe beats. So his praise doubles as a critique of the mainstream pipeline that sandblasts weirdness into product. The line flatters Tenacious D while setting a high bar that quietly implies how rarely Hollywood clears it. It’s less a pitch than a dare: if you want this to work, don’t just film the shtick; build a movie around the band’s outsized, faux-epic logic.

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TopicMovie
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Cross, David. (2026, January 17). As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-for-tenacious-d-of-course-it-could-work-as-a-49006/

Chicago Style
Cross, David. "As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-for-tenacious-d-of-course-it-could-work-as-a-49006/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-for-tenacious-d-of-course-it-could-work-as-a-49006/. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.

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About the Author

David Cross

David Cross (born April 4, 1964) is a Comedian from USA.

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