Dreux and Alyssa need money, and they need it fast. After Alyssa’s (played by singer and songwriter SZA) good-for-nothing boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua Neal) loses their rent money, they have mere hours to come up with $2,000 before their landlord will evict them to make room for white gentrifiers in their Los Angeles neighborhood—all while Dreux (Keke Palmer) prepares for the big interview that might finally get her out of waitressing and into the reliable corporate job she wants.
The roommates’ desperation drives them to a place familiar to far too many Americans: a payday loan shop. Ignoring the double-meaning telegraphed by the slogan adorning the sign and walls of the store (“We gotcha!”), the duo makes their way in, only to be intercepted by a ragged man with a wild look in his eye.
“Don’t do it!” he pleads. “They’ll come for you!”
This scene from the new Issa Rae-produced buddy comedy One of Them Days is the funniest sequence of a very funny film, its frenzied pace underscoring the futility of Dreux and Alyssa’s attempt to maintain their dignity as the ragged man (Katt Williams) warns them away (“If you don’t have the money this month, you won’t have it next month!”). But the payday loan scene also stands out for another reason: Dreux’s and Alyssa’s plight, despite being so common for many Americans, is one that has been almost entirely absent from movie screens in recent memory.
One of Them Days, the film debut of director Lawrence Lamont and writer Syreeta Singleton, mines the maddening nature of struggling to make ends meet for comedic gold. It’s not just Dreux and Alyssa who are stuck balancing on the edge of economic precarity: The neighborhood hair stylist Jameel (Dewayne Perkins) leaves Dreux’s hair in a state of total disrepair to get to his next client, afraid he’ll go broke without her patronage. Similarly, the phlebotomist (Janelle James, of Abbott Elementary) who draws the blood Dreux donates for a quick buck is hilariously inept—she took the job for a steady paycheck, and is as out of her depth as Dreux. Meanwhile, Dreux and Alyssa must tolerate their new white neighbor Bethany (Maude Apatow), whose easy access to money makes her totally oblivious to the world around her.
Even the film’s inciting incident, in which Keshawn reveals that he used Dreux and Alyssa’s rent money to “invest” in a doomed T-shirt business, underscores the pain of longing for economic security. At no point does the film feel like it’s preaching a socialist agenda to the audience. It doesn’t have to. Lamont executes Singleton’s ideas with flash and energy, and all of the performers—especially the electric Palmer—sell the gags with panache.
One of Them Days taps into an all but abandoned tradition of comedies for and about the working class that dates back to a century ago, when audiences filled nickelodeons to see Roscoe Arbuckle and Mabel Normand evade the cops while looking for food and rest in their popular series of short films for Keystone Studios. Likewise, filmgoers delighted at watching The Three Stooges’ pandemonium-inducing attempts to deliver beer or fix a plumbing leak in a rich person’s house, or Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp getting tossed around by a wealthy man’s shifting moods in City Lights (1931). Comedies of the 1940s tended to foreground wealthy protagonists, but Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), and others see their rich men changed by the virtues of the poor. The New Hollywood movement that revolutionized the industry in the 1960s and 1970s underscored the political power of the working class, as seen in films like Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Watermelon Man (1970), and Scarecrow (1973). Even as recently as the 1990s, comedies like Wayne’s World (1992), Clerks (1994), and Friday (1995) built jokes around the relatability of their protagonists’ dire financial straits.
But in recent years, Hollywood appears to have forgotten even this tradition, focusing instead on films that either satirize the lives of the rich or eschew economic realities entirely. In an oft-quoted joke from Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022), a young woman named Felicity (Aimee Carrero) tells the vengeful chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) that she ought not to be murdered along with the rest of his wealthy guests, as she is merely there in her capacity as a personal assistant; when pressed, she reveals that she graduated from Brown without student loans, to which Julian simply declares, “I’m sorry. You’re dying.” It’s a well-earned laugh—there’s something cathartic about seeing the rich held accountable, forced to face the same circumstances that plague everyone else.
The same can be said of private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), protagonist of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), dismissing the scheme of an Elon Musk-like billionaire (Edward Norton) not as “so dumb it’s brilliant,” as his air-headed companions claim, but “just dumb.” Triangle of Sadness (2022) similarly mocks privileged doofuses aboard a cruise ship (among them, a socialist more in love with quoting leaders than ever joining the masses), but a reversal in the final acts aligns audience sympathy with those same people surviving a shipwreck.
There’s certainly a place for comedies that expose the rich and powerful as undeserving buffoons. But even at their most skillful, most contemporary “eat the rich” comedies lack the genuine anger behind such classic attacks as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s dramedy Teorema (1968) or Luis Buñel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), both of which present the rich as thoroughly morally-bankrupt and elicit audiences’ cheers at their destruction. What’s more, unlike One of Them Days, which follows the tradition of Watermelon Man and Friday in probing the intersection of class and race, most of these more recent films center a white perspective.
While Teorema’s story of an outsider who seduces and then destroys a rich family gets recreated in Saltburn (2023), the latter film cannot avoid admiring the beautiful upper-class family it depicts, and thus frame them as victims. The same can be said of The Menu and Glass Onion, which normalize their rich characters’ privileged status despite framing themselves as class satires. For this reason, laughing at their characters’ foolishness doesn’t provide the same catharsis as laughing at one’s own identification with working class characters.
These recent class-conscious comedies too often treat their characters’ economic peril as little more than set dressing. For every film like Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s surprise hit Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), in which struggling laundromat owners Evelyn Quan (Michelle Yeoh) and Waymond Wang’s (Ke Huy Quan) stress over an IRS audit at least serves as a jumping off point for the movie’s wacky reality-jumping shenanigans, a glut of recent major comedies like Barbie (2023), American Fiction (2023), and Poor Things (2023) take place in classless fantasy worlds or feature characters with immediate access to cash. Sure, it’s funny when Poor Things’ protagonist, Bella (Emma Stone), produces a wad of cash after she and her partner Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) have been living on the streets for days—but the punchline is that they were never really poor at all.
But when a clerk cannot stop laughing at Dreux’s abysmal 122 credit score for long enough to formally reject her loan in One Of Them Days, the working class viewer can laugh too—not with the clerk, but with Dreux, whose desperation at having rent due and no money with which to pay is more than recognizable. We too have ridiculously low credit scores, bills we cannot pay, and demeaning jobs that don’t make ends meet. We laugh because it’s the most human thing we can do in such an absurd situation. With such laughs all too rare on the big screen nowadays, One of Them Days makes for a much-needed return to the tradition of working class comedy.
One of Them Days is now playing in theaters nationwide.
