10 Crazy Tricks Directors Tried To Pull On Audiences
7. Cake Is A Made Up Drug - Brass Eye
Next month sees the long-awaited US release of The Day Shall Come, writer-director Chris Morris’ marvellously dark and hilariously vicious satire on homeland insecurity, law enforcement and terrorism.
Like his first film, the astonishing Four Lions, The Day Shall Come is an inventively caustic black comedy skewering targets other filmmakers would be too scared to even touch: the creation of a man with absolutely no f*cks to give.
Of course, if you’d been following Morris’ career you’d know that already.
Morris began as a radio DJ, losing almost every job he took due to the on-air pranks he’d pull on the hapless audience and the d-list celebrities he’d persuade to be interviewed. He seamlessly moved to comedy after that, the linchpin of BBC’s The Day Today and Brass Eye, satires on news programming and current affairs, respectively.
Yet he still found time to mercilessly lampoon the great and the good: memorably persuading various celebrities that a drug named Cake was plaguing the streets of Britain, that paedophiles have more DNA in common with crabs than with humans; or that an elephant at a Berlin zoo had stuck her trunk into her own anus in protest at captivity, a victim of ‘zoochosis’.
Utterly fearless, surreal and brilliant, Chris Morris is a national treasure: go and watch The Day Shall Come next month and you’ll see.