Ron Burgundy’s blissful return – Anchorman 2 brilliantly one-ups its predecessor

Ron Burgundy, the gloriously inept and absent-minded broadcaster, was gone too long.

In 2004, Will Ferrell and his partner-in-crime, writer/director Adam McKay, brought one of the most memorable comedies to the silver screen with Anchorman. The film has everything going for it—quotability, a great supporting cast and non-stop laughs.

Since then, Ferrell and McKay have had carte blanche to poke fun at other targets. By himself, Ferrell is a comic who delivers on the absurd consistently, even when the script isn’t up to snuff. See Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro and The Campaign, just to name a few. Together, they have created great comedies that only get better with age.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby poked fun at Southern culture. Step Brothers tackled man-child syndrome with more profanity than a Tarantino film. The Other Guys pitted Ferrell with Mark Wahlberg, and they raced against the clock to investigate and stop corporate corruption.

Yet, none of these feel as vital as Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.

The sequel finds Burgundy rising from the ashes once more after being fired by his boss and mentor Mack Harken (a man with a name that could cut through steel, who also is played by Harrison Ford). When Burgundy is given the chance to return to the anchor desk via GNN (Global News Network), New York’s first 24-hour news station, he gets the Channel 4 News Team back together.

Ferrell and McKay keep the laughs coming. I cried repeatedly. I was exhausted from laughing. The only scenes that didn’t hit were a few forced cameos and Kristen Wiig’s character, the love interest of Brick Tamland.

However, the film is so on point, and its theme resonates beautifully today.

Burgundy and his team are given the graveyard shift when they are hired on at GNN. Then, Burgundy makes a suggestion to give audiences the stories they want to hear.

The team then options for stories on blonde women, animals doing cute things, and the very notion of “America.” Tamland’s weather broadcasts are done outside in harsh conditions. Champ Kind’s sports highlights are relegated to home runs, dunks and no soccer. Brian Fantana’s investigative journalism starts out with a story on ranking women with the best attributes.

It’s scary how effective the film’s gags become because they parallel our current ideals of “news value.”

We no longer want objectivity. We want our friends’ take on things from a feed of neverending stories through social media. We want clips of animals being silly and gif lists on Buzzfeed. We don’t want facts as soon as possible. We want speculation until we get the facts, and in between those two points, we want to argue constantly. No matter what side of the coin, what political party you align yourself with, this is what major news networks and broadcasts have become.

Films like Network and Dr. Strangelove predicted modern times.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues works well because it’s shoving all those notions in the face of a public that will readily consume a constant barrage of needless media after the lights go up.

With their other films, Ferrell and McKay bit off more than they could chew. Talladega Nights mocked a demographic that mocks itself on a daily basis and has no problems shrugging its shoulders after saying something ridiculous (read: rednecks). Step-Brothers could be seen as a big essay on the problems of the modern man’s attitude and lands as a thesis without a thesis statement. The Other Guys‘ best moment came in the credits as McKay and Ferrell turned the movie into an amazing infographic about corruption.

Anchorman 2 is the moment when Ferrell and McKay are firing on all cylinders. More than 90% of the jokes land, and when you think about what you’re laughing at, you’ll say to yourself either a) “That’s absurd,” or b) “That’s so true.”

To which I say, “Thanks Ron Burgundy. We never knew how much we needed you. You keep stayin’ classy.”