An open letter to Ben Stiller

Dear Ben,

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it: We’re through. Sure, we’ve had some good times over the last 15 years or so. We’ve laughed. We’ve cried. Well, mostly I’ve cried, with disappointment. But this has got to stop.

Years ago, when we were both young, things were different. It was a simpler time then, a time when we were doffing our gold lamé parachute pants and slathering on the Teen Spirit, an era when we really were too sexy for our shirts. You were a few years past your appearances on the best TV shows of the ’80s — “Miami Vice” and “Kate & Allie” — and you’d just gotten a show of your own. I had grown tired of the stale antics of the geriatric “Saturday Night Live” and the racially charged humor of “In Living Color” and was looking for a new sketch show to fill the comedic void in my life, when we met-cute one night while I was flipping around the channels.

There you were, with your wry, put-upon smirk, being abused by the coke-deranged Andy Dick, the wrist-slittingly depressed Janeane Garofalo and … that other guy. It wasn’t your Tom Cruise impersonation that hooked me, and it wasn’t your Eddie Munster or your Bono impersonations either. Or your Bruce Springsteen impression. No, there was something else that made me sit up and take notice of this fresh-faced youngster and vow to follow his career wherever it went. But vows are meant to be broken.

The glory years
For a while there, things went pretty well. Though “The Ben Stiller Show” was almost instantly canceled after it sucked major wind in the Nielsens, it got a posthumous comedy-writing Emmy, proving that at least someone recognized your genius. You directed and co-starred in the decent “Reality Bites” and made a quick visit to one of the best and now-forgotten animated shows of the decade, “Duckman: Private Dick/Family Man.” And then? Then the glory years began.

“Flirting With Disaster,” “The Cable Guy,” “There’s Something About Mary,” “Meet the Parents” … the great comedies just came fast and furious, each playing on the nebbishy, hapless character you pulled off so well back then. (Ah, Ben. No one can mangle his genitals with a zipper or demonstrate how to milk a cat quite the way you can.) Why, you even managed roles as unpleasant, total- or near-bastard types: “Permanent Midnight” and “Your Friends and Neighbors.” But enough about your resume; you know the highlights as well as I do.

The important thing is that there came a turning point, somewhere around 2002. The shine was off your diamond, you fell off the talent wagon, you bought a one-way express ticket to Crapton. Pick your tortured metaphor. The bottom line is you started sucking. Quietly at first, with a few less-than-stellar stints on “The Simpsons” and “King of Queens,” and then louder and louder, until your acting output was a veritable maelstrom of cringe-worthy drivel.

An ugly turn
“Duplex” was bad, but it paled in comparison to your work in 2004, when you were nominated for a record five Razzie awards for movies you appeared in that year. The list reads like a cautionary tale for all aspiring comic actors: “Along Came Polly,” “Starsky & Hutch,” “Envy,” “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”

Put them all together and you’ve got a “Clockwork Orange”-worthy marathon of cinematic suffering. Of the bunch, “Envy” was the real crime against humanity, an audiovisual violation so completely, evilly unfunny that it should never have been given the opportunity to lose the $30 million it did. (Clue: If your press kit includes an aerosol can labeled “Vapoorize,” you might want to pull an Alan Smithee on the film and remove your name from the credits.)

And since then? Since then, you’ve never recovered. It’s been all sequel this, crazy cameo in halfhearted comedy that, and now I find you playing a security guard in this new “Night at the Museum” movie, Shawn Levy’s attempt to bring Stephen Sommers’ crazy “Mummy” antics to a setting that wouldn’t require travel to far-off locations: a natural history museum. Oh, and I might add that that delightful Brendan Fraser isn’t in the movie. But Robin Williams is. Joy.

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