This scene cracks me up every single time I watch it, and I’ve watched it at least two hundred and fifty times. I don’t mean that as a rough estimate, the way people say they’ve seen The Godfather “a hundred times,” when in fact they’ve only caught it half-asleep on AMC during a Thanksgiving marathon. No, I mean that I have returned, again and again, almost compulsively, to this exact two-minute clip in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Orgazmo, a film that by all reasonable standards should have been buried in the ‘90s indie-video dustbin. And yet here I am, decades later, still pressing play.
Before Parker and Stone became household names, before they had Tony Awards on their mantels and a Broadway show that could make your grandmother laugh about AIDS, they were simply two Colorado boys with cameras, an appetite for provocation, and a knack for marrying stupidity with astonishingly precise comic timing. Their first foray into filmmaking was Cannibal! The Musical, a student project that mixed frontier cannibalism with Monty Python absurdism. Their follow-up, Orgazmo, is at once a porno parody, a Mormon fish-out-of-water tale, and a superhero comedy about a man whose greatest power is to induce instantaneous orgasms with a laser arm. If that sounds unmarketable, it was.
The set-up is, in its own warped way, classic American storytelling. Trey Parker plays Joe Young, a Mormon missionary knocking on Los Angeles doors in a crisp white shirt, trying to save souls the old-fashioned way. He’s got a fiancée waiting at home, and she wants to marry him in the grand Salt Lake City temple, a rite that costs money Joe doesn’t have. Enter a porn director who offers Joe a starring role. And so Joe finds himself reluctantly donning spandex and wielding a glowing arm cannon as “Orgazmo,” the hero who zaps enemies into shuddering ecstasy. One could call this a metaphor for selling your soul to Hollywood, but that would give the filmmakers too much credit. Really, it’s just funny.
What’s remarkable about the film is not its plot, which is pure farce, but its obsessive commitment to the bit. Take, for example, one of the movie’s great running jokes: the complete absence of female nudity. In a porn spoof, no less. Every time the camera seems ready to deliver the expected skin, some dude’s rear end barges into the frame, accompanied by a slapstick sound effect. It’s idiotic. It’s brilliant. It’s both. In retrospect, it feels like a training exercise for South Park, a gag so juvenile it circles back around to sophistication.
Still, my favorite moment has nothing to do with bare butts or glowing phallus-proxies. It’s a scene so brief and so perfectly formed that it feels like a self-contained short film, dropped in the middle of an already chaotic feature. Joe’s co-star and unlikely sidekick, Ben (played by Dian Bachar, a sort of house character actor for Parker and Stone before they went global), sits him down and confesses, with the gravity of a Kurosawa ronin, that he has long practiced a secret martial art known as Hamster Style. The name itself is comedy. Two words that, when uttered together, instantly collapse the solemnity of any sentence.
Ben explains, almost mournfully, that he has vowed never to use Hamster Style again, though the reason is too painful to discuss. What follows is a flashback so absurd and deadpan that it transcends parody. There are no elaborate fight scenes, no expensive set pieces, but just a tiny, perfect glimpse of the “trauma” that led him to forsake his art. The gag lands because it is played with absolute seriousness. It is, in its own demented way, a parody of trauma narratives, martial-arts epics, and the whole idea that anything in this movie deserves gravitas.
The joke also captures what makes Parker and Stone more than just pranksters. Their comedy has always thrived on the tension between sincerity and idiocy, and between treating something as deadly serious while knowing it is fundamentally ridiculous. South Park would later refine this formula, taking issues like climate change, Scientology, or Kanye West’s ego and inflating them into grotesque morality plays, but the DNA is right there in Orgazmo.
Part of why I keep returning to this scene is personal nostalgia. I discovered Orgazmo in college, during that impressionable era when you and your friends thought quoting cult movies in funny voices was the height of wit. (We were wrong. But we were also right.) The VHS tape was passed around like contraband. Watching it felt like membership in a secret society, the kind where you nodded knowingly at someone who muttered “Hamster Style” under their breath at a party.
And now, years later, revisiting the film, I find myself laughing not just at the scene but at my younger self for laughing at the scene. It’s comedy compounded by memory, silliness lacquered with sentiment. The scene hasn’t changed, but my relationship to it has. In a way, that’s the hidden brilliance of Parker and Stone. They make things that grow funnier as you age, because the absurdity only sharpens against the straight-laced seriousness of adult life.
So yes, I could sit here and write about the craft of comedy, about deadpan delivery, or about the way Orgazmo skewers both Mormon purity and Hollywood depravity in a single gag. But honestly? The reason I’ve watched this scene more than 250 times is simpler than that. It makes me laugh harder than almost anything else. And in a world where seriousness is in endless supply, I’ll take two minutes of Hamster Style over two hours of prestige drama any day.
