Humor & Life Quote by David Cross

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.