InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 11

SXSW 2023
I USED TO BE FUNNY
Ally Pankiw
An angry young girl runs away, leaving behind an affluent but
troubled home life to throw in her lot with unsupervised older
teenagers and low-level drug dealers. Her former caregiver,
straightjacketed by PTSD, must shake off her mental cloud and
track the girl down, venturing into the criminal underworld to
bring her home so she can be cared for by her family. In that
particular framing, Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny perhaps
sounds like a Schrader-esque, quasi-reactionary, deep dive into
moral decay. Of course, that’s not really what the film’s about, but
it’s easier to talk about it in those terms than what the film’s
actually attempting to do. That’s because I Used to Be Funny is
about very, very slowly revealing that trauma at the center of its
main characters’ shared pasts — an event that inextricably
altered the course of both of their lives, the full nature of which
isn’t revealed until nearly an hour into the film. It would be unfair
to the film, premiering this week as part of SXSW, to give away
what that trauma is, but that speaks to the fundamental problem
with it: there really isn’t much to chew on here other than
navigating the obfuscation. One must wait a small eternity for I
Used to Be Funny to finally come out and simply acknowledge the
thing we’ve been watching its characters endlessly talk past.
Indie it girl Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby) plays Sam, a
Toronto-based standup comedian and nanny mired in a crippling
depression (she receives mock adulation from her roommates
simply for bathing). We learn from a local news broadcast that
14-year-old Brooke (Olga Petsa), whose family Sam had worked
for two years earlier, has run away from home. Sam had a
fraught confrontation with Brooke only days earlier — the teen
showed up at her house, drunk, demanding to be let in — which
just adds to her former nanny’s guilt. In spite of this, we watch
Sam attempt to resume a normal life, gravitating toward the local
comedy club she used to perform at and where her network of
comedian friends congregate backstage. At the same time, the
film repeatedly flashes back to years earlier, when Sam first met
Brooke and her family. We learn Brooke’s mother was in the
hospital, battling a chronic illness, leaving the tween especially
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