Traveling and Eating: Comedians going where everyone has gone before

The Binge
Jessica Zafra

EVERYTHING’S BEEN DONE, the British actor Rob Brydon points out in The Trip to Italy. You can only do it differently. Take travel shows. There are so many of them that whoever claims to venture “off the beaten track” is asking for a beating. They’re mostly the same: the host goes to a new place, points at the buildings and tells us what they are, tries the local cuisine and maybe chats up the natives. As unique experiences go, we might as well be browsing Google Street View.

No matter how spectacular the sights or fantastic the cuisine, a travel show is only as entertaining as its host. There’s the world-weary host who is out to prove that he is cooler than you are, the wide-eyed innocent who enthuses over everything, and the self-promoting celebrity who is essentially taking a series of selfies with exotic backgrounds.

Then there are the comedians. Phil Rosenthal, creator of the very popular sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, has his own travel show on PBS called I’ll Have What Phil’s Having. (As in Meg Ryan faking an orgasm at Katz’s Deli in When Harry Met Sally and an old lady telling the waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”) Rosenthal, who could be the son of Peter Boyle from Everybody Loves Raymond, conducts himself like a stand-up comic performing in the Catskills in the 1970s — lots of yuk-yuks, and you can almost hear him saying “Oy, gevalt.” (Note: I have never been to the Catskills, but I grew up watching Woody Allen movies.) He can’t help but make fun of himself. When he goes for a run in Paris, he announces, “This is for the ladies.”

Rosenthal works the stereotypes. In every episode, he Skypes his parents in Brooklyn to check in on them and describe what he’s been eating. His mother responds with the requisite horror. In the show’s introduction, Rosenthal recounts how there were things he never had at home while growing up, like food with any flavor. When he got a job, he took to traveling the world. On the show he revisits favorite cities (Paris, Florence) and experiences others for the first time (Tokyo, Hong Kong). His character is that of the American innocent abroad, in the uniform of T-shirt, knee-length shorts, running shoes and butt bag (Actually I’m not sure he’s got one, but he acts like he does), loudly professing ignorance of the local customs. However, the results are charming.

The secret is his genuine appreciation for foreign cuisines and situations, which comes through even when he tries to make light of them. When he tastes the finest gelato in Florence, tears come to his eyes. He recalls how he got his wife to marry him by proposing to her in Paris. In Tokyo he thanks his hosts for a terrific meal by making them egg creams. Phil doesn’t try to be cool or to impress the audience with his sophistication. He just loves his job.

The Trip and its second season, The Trip to Italy, is nominally a travel series starring comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. It’s really a meta-travel show in which Steve Coogan plays “Steve Coogan” and Rob Brydon plays “Rob Brydon.” In The Trip, Coogan invites Brydon to join him in a tour of the north of England, during which they will try six highly rated restaurants and review them for the Observer magazine. Coogan had intended to do the tour with his girlfriend, who suddenly flies to the US, leaving him to scramble for a last-minute companion. Brydon, his costar in Tristram Shandy, the film that was also directed by Michael Winterbottom, steps in.

Like Tristram Shandy, the show is a loose and very funny mixture of improv, fiction and wise-assery. Brydon, who has a wife and a baby at home, is the chatty, affable man who gets along with everyone. Coogan, divorced, left by girlfriend, is the self-important, insecure celebrity. Within minutes it is clear that the tour is just an excuse for the two to do impressions, go off on riffs, and critique popular culture from the love lives of the Romantic poets to the music of Alanis Morrissette (their iPod dies in Italy, leaving them with only her CD to listen to in the car).

I saw The Trip to Italy first and did not know what to make of it until the two sat down to an excellent meal in Piamonte and began to imitate Tom Hardy as Bane in Dark Knight Rises. This is a show about friendship between men. Sure, we see the picturesque mountains and glimpse the preparation of the meals, but more than that we see the ongoing competition between two friends. Who does the more accurate impression of Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery, Marlon Brando? Who can do a funnier pronunciation of “Alanis”? Who can render entire scenes from the James Bond movies more convincingly? Whose observations are more clever? Who can sing Abba’s “The Winner Takes It All” better?

Who is more famous? Coogan may be better-known in Britain, but he’s still trying to get his break in Hollywood. The expression on his face when an old lady at a gift shop recognizes Brydon instead of him is priceless. It rankles when Brydon is invited to audition for an American mafia movie. It stings that comedians are not taken more seriously as actors. In real life Coogan has been doing straight roles — the journalist in Philomena, Julianne Moore’s ex-husband in What Maisie Knew — but he’s had his greatest success playing the incompetent TV presenter Alan Partridge.

Who is more attractive to women? Coogan thinks he is, though Brydon notes that the young women they encounter in Italy probably assume that they’re an old gay couple. Running through the relentless one-upmanship and wise-assery in The Trip and The Trip to Italy is an undercurrent of melancholia. The road trips are a laugh riot. Life is something else entirely.

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