Ever since his childhood in Park Ridge, Greg Glienna has pictured himself as a director of comedies. At age eight he, with the help of his best friend, Jim Vincent, made his first film in Super-8. In the early 80s and several shorts later, he and Vincent enrolled in the undergraduate film program at Columbia College, where they stayed long enough for Glienna to finish The Vase, about a guy meeting his fiancee’s family. Vincent dropped out of college and has since worked mostly as a free-lance production manager on commercials. Glienna dropped out and hit the comedy circuit–as he puts it, stand-up comic has been his “day job” since the early 80s.
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Glienna is noted for a self-deprecating wit that builds on the bafflement experienced by his yuppieish stage persona–a kind of non-Jewish, midwestern Albert Brooks. His lines and routines were honed in comedy clubs across the country. “I even played in Kalamazoo,” he says. Most of the time he opened for better-known comedy acts–which is how he met Emo Phillips, the wan, reed-thin comedian from Downers Grove who’s readily recognizable with his hick getups and pageboy haircut.
Like a silent comedy, Meet the Parents depends largely on intricate sight gags for laughs. And its simple and straightforward premise (The Vase expanded) could have served Laurel and Hardy: an unassuming young copywriter meets the family of his fiancee in their all-American suburban home and becomes the unwitting catalyst of a series of disasters. As the director and lead, Glienna had to play the straight man while orchestrating behind the camera the crescendo of hilarious and maddening mishaps that revolve around his character. Glienna also added a postmodernist touch–the cautionary tale is told by a gas-station attendant who may or may not be endowed with an overactive imagination.
