‘Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie’: One Final Joint From a Legendary Comedy Duo

Late in Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong start arguing about what exactly it meant to say that Tommy Chong wrote and directed the scripts for their movies. The thing about Cheech and Chong, as a comedy duo, is that they were primarily improvisational. They didn’t have scripts so much as situations. And indeed, they frame Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie as a situation, with the now elderly Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong driving in the desert, having pothead-style conversations in their signature style that they obviously intend to use for the larger documentary, but just as obviously not written out in advance. So who deserves the creative credit here?

Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie is as much about a bygone era where people conceptualized comedy itself in completely different terms as it is a documentary about Cheech and Chong specifically. The stories told are weird, not so much because they really are weird, but because they’re a different way of looking at the world as we know it. When Tommy Chong talks about his father being Chinese and his parents’ whole relationship being, you know, illegal, technically, he’s not really mad about that bygone era so much as bemused that he could take it all in stride. When Cheech Marin talks about his terrifying cop father, it’s a formative experience in how to deal with that terrifying cop father rather than an indictment of yesteryear’s masculinity.

As comedians, Cheech and Chong’s perspectives are easy enough to grasp. The apparent absurdities of their lives led to equally absurd humor, well-conceptualized by trippy animated sequences that, among other things, tell the story of how they came up with the stage name of Cheech and Chong. There’s also remarkably little self-pity. One of the big stories since the documentary came out was the revelation that they only earned $50,000 each for their work in their first movie, Up In Smoke.

But in context, what hurt Cheech and Chong was less the money as it was the fact that David Bushell, who up until that point they considered an equal member of the team, was taking a disproportionate share of the earnings. When a sleazy lawyer who Cheech openly dislikes, and even blames in part for the breakdown in the creative relationship with Chong, ultimately solves the situation, Cheech just as openly acknowledges that this guy was a perfect fit for Hollywood.

Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie even extends this excellent sense of perspective to its title characters, with the desert car ride turning into an environment with limited opportunities for rebuttal. Tommy Chong doesn’t exactly cop to being a philanderer (he insists that a shared acid trip mainly prompted his extramarital pregnancy), but his first wife neither excuses nor forgives him and the movie clearly gives the impression that over the long haul the instability of  Chong’s comedy lifestyle was causing the relationship to wear thin even without that added pressure. This kind of background makes Chong’s breakup with Cheech fairly unsurprising. Even if, granted, most people going into this movie know that Cheech and Chong broke up eventually.

Despite documentaries increasingly existing in a ghetto intended only for hyper-specific audiences, Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie does a remarkably good job of explaining who Cheech and Chong are to viewers (like me) who are a bit too young to really remember them in context. I’ve actually seen Cheech Marin more as a wise guy sidekick than, you know, the Cheech of Cheech and Chong, partially because in terms of screentime he’s actually performed that role more often. Remember Nash Bridges?

Well, probably not, and Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie doesn’t discuss it because that’s not what the movie’s about. But it does dig through some really decent nuggets of documentary footage to hint at their later selves, like one where Cheech Marin immediately grasps an arcane comparison of the Cheech and Chong movies to fine art and starts discussing Hieronymus Bosch while Tommy Chong just sits to the side bewildered as to the whole premise of the conversation.

It’s no surprise that the credits sequence shows Cheech Marin emerging victorious from a round of Celebrity Jeopardy. It’s equally unsurprising that footage taken at the Playboy Mansion, where Cheech and Chong deny being athletic, then shows both these men running at the beach looking fairly nude, and their present day selves contextualize this apparent contradiction by saying that smoking lots of pot and taking care of their bodies are perfectly synchronous ideas. They premised the whole spirit of improvisational comedy on the notion they could be anything at any time, pending the situation. Their ability to adapt, and not take setbacks personally, was of greater importance to success than anything more commonly conceptualized as talent. Even if the world has changed a lot since their day, this remains pretty good advice.