After years of waiting, the comedy team behind Super Troopers returns with more mustaches, more mayhem and plenty of fresh ammunition for firefighters to roast cops
When you are sitting around the firehouse and get bored of making fun of each other, what’s the first thing you turn to? Duh, making fun of cops, of course. That is, so long as you don’t cross any lines of good taste or spend too much time on the topic. Ha, who are we kidding? There are no good-taste lines. And with all that easy material, the gags can go on forever.
That material, well, just got a bit deeper. Thank you Super Troopers 3.
Note to all rookie firefighters, if you didn’t know Super Troopers 3 was coming out, you may not want to admit that to the crew. If you’ve never heard of the Super Troopers movies, definitely don’t admit it and go do your cop-humor homework — meow.
And if you talk to the creators of the mother of all cop humor movies, don’t expect them to be serious, even for a second. Because, pretty much, they just can’t do that.
The CRACKYL team learned that when they sat down with Super Troopers Kevin Heffernan and Steve Lemme just before the film’s Aug. 7 release. Both, along with Jay Chandrasekhar, are writers for all three movies. Heffernan plays Farva and Lemme plays Mac. Chandrasekhar plays Thorny and serves as the film’s director.
The push for more Super Trooper humor started before Super Troopers 2 dropped. Then the crew launched into the TV series Tacoma FD and the plan to make more fun of cops stalled.
“We knew we wanted to do it. Doing Tacoma made it difficult to get back to,” Heffernan says.
Lemme and Heffernan are Tacoma FD’s creators, writers and stars.
Lemme adds that those conversations on doing Super Troopers 3 took shape in the nearly 10 months between when the final edits were done on the second movie and when it hit theaters.
So pretty much what they are saying is they spent a bunch of time making fun of cops, shifted to making fun of firefighters, got bored and went back to making fun of cops again. Sounds about right.
“Even from the beginning we knew we wanted to do this kind of funny Indian wedding,” Heffernan says. “We had the initial idea, what if Farva was sleeping with your sister; how would you feel about that? Then it grew into what if Farva married your sister. Then it turned into this ‘let’s put Farva on an elephant.’”
And of course there was a lengthy discussion about the scene where Heffernan as Farva bends over wearing nothing but his “sex shirt” to show the world his ass. You won’t be able to unsee that — you’ve been warned. In fact, Heffernan says his wife let out a groan the first time she saw that scene during the screening. As with the dayroom, if you are expecting some lines of good taste that won’t be crossed, disappointment awaits.
After answering questions like when and where can you see Super Troopers 3, your next likely question is: What the hell took so long?
Lemme and Heffernan agree that getting the studio approval to move forward and then trying to line up all the key players and the studio schedules to write and shoot a film is like herding cats. “Pretty soon, two years have gone by,” Lemme says. Movies, they say, are not as regimented as is the process for making TV shows, like Tacoma FD.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The bottom line is that it is out. The mustaches are back. The syrup is back. And there’s a real good chance you’ll be quoting lines from this one in the dayroom when you get bored with making fun of each other.
