A Night at the Roxbury

It began as a nearly wordless Saturday Night Live sketch. In March 1996, Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan debuted as a pair of overeager club brothers who bobbed their heads in perfect unison and inflicted themselves on every woman in the room. The bit found its final form that May, in a now-famous episode where host Jim Carrey joined the lineup and Haddaway's "What Is Love" played under the bobbing for the first time. From then on the song and the sketch were inseparable, and a parade of hosts took the guest spot in the years that followed.

Paramount released the film version on October 2, 1998. Directed by John Fortenberry and written by Ferrell, Kattan, and Steve Koren, with Lorne Michaels and Amy Heckerling producing, it finally gave the brothers names — Steve and Doug Butabi — plus day jobs at their father's artificial-plant store and a dream of opening a club of their own. Dan Hedaya and Loni Anderson play the parents, Molly Shannon schemes as Emily, Jennifer Coolidge turns up as a cop, and Richard Grieco appears as himself, the celebrity key that finally gets the brothers past the Roxbury's velvet rope.

The critics were merciless. The film sits at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert's review landed the cleanest hit: "the characters are in a one-joke movie, and they're the joke." There was even something spectral about the premise — the actual Roxbury on the Sunset Strip had closed in 1997, the year before the movie came out. Audiences shrugged and went anyway: made for about $17 million, it pulled in roughly $30 million and then settled into the cable-rerun rotation, where its reputation quietly improved with every airing.

A quarter century on, the movie has outlived its reviews the same way the sketch outlived its era. Nobody needs to have seen either one to know exactly what it means when two people in a car start bobbing their heads in sync — and somewhere, "What Is Love" is always playing.