look no further than a night at the roxbury for evidence of the decline of two institutions : " saturdy night live " , which hasn't managed to be funny in over a decade and a half , and american comedies in general . roxbury is so wan , so thin and juiceless , that it barely classifies as a movie . it also commits the cardinal comic sin : it's not funny . roxbury gives us the butabi brothers , steve and doug ( will ferrell and chris kattan ) , who are in themselves clones of an earlier snl routine , the " wild and crazy guys " . the post-high-school butabis are still stuck in their parents' house , work for dad's flower shop , and head out when the sun goes down in futile attempts to get into upscale nightclubs and score with the ladies . after countless rejections ( in a movie like this , anything that happens so much as twice feels " countless " ) , they get lucky and wind up weaselling their way into the ultrahip roxbury as part of the entourage of a tv star ( richard grieco ) . all along the way we get a barrage of hit-and-miss gags -- the best of which have already been played to death in the trailer . it's a little distressing how the movie manages to play host to many different pieces of action without making any of them funny , or even interesting . f'rinstance , father butabi ( dan hedaya , they guy who looks like harry dean stanton's weaselly brother ) and mom ( loni anderson , of all people ) , are barely milked for a single joke . their function is to stand there and look bewildered . a neighboring businessman's daughter , emily ( molly shannon ) , gets a mad crush on steve -- as part of a larger plan to manipulate them into mergingin their businesses as well as their bodies -- but they dimness of the boys is so absolute that we hardly care they're being suckered . what fun is that ? lacking a story , or even a real moment of comic invention , the roxbury creators threw everything else they could think of at the screen , and hoped some of it would stick . fights , weddings , wayne-and-garth antics , and on and on . for some reason i was reminded of the equally lamentable tommy boy , which featured snl alumns chris farley and david spade , landlocked in a script that was equally barren of entertainment , and equally overstuffed with things to attract , but not keep , our attention , 
