One of the things I have to give Lorne Michaels' and the Saturday Night Live gang credit for is they know how to turn a one joke, multi-sketch character (or characters) into feature film material. In the past Michaels and crew have fleshed out such SNL favorites as Coneheads, Wayne's World, Pat, and Stuart Smalley into fully realized characters, and usually quite funny films.
Following in that tradition come A Night at the Roxbury, starring those two previously unnamed characters who hang out at the night clubs shaking their head to "What is Love?" by Haddaway and asking girls who they want to dance with ("who me?,him?, him,me,himmemehim...?"), and when a female gets between them, they bounce her back and forth. Thankfully, the catchgag from the sketches is thrown aside after the first ten minutes, and whole new gags and nightclubing buzzwords are created, so you needn't be a frequen SNL watcher to "get it."
The two nightclubbers, played by Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan, are Steve and Doug Butabi. They live at home, in the same room, and work in their dad's (Dan Hedaya, Nick Tortelli from Cheers) fake plant shop. The next shop over is a lighting shop, and Emily Sanderson (Molly Shannon) who has a big crush on Steve (the feeling harldy reciprocated). The boys dream big of getting into the Roxbury, and ultimately starting their own night club. After a car accident with their idol Richard Grieco (sans Yasmeen), the boys get their ticket into the big house, where they meet with the night club guru of LA and start to make headway into their second dream(played by Chazz Palminteri), only to find at their meeting the next day he doesn't remember them.
Their dream shattered, the boys have a falling out, Doug moves into the pool house, and Steve ruluctantly begins dating Emily. Soon, Steve finds himself in over his head as Emily turns faces and becomes a controlling manipulative freak. The story culminates into what is probably the funnies wedding sequence ever in film.
In normal comedy-film fashion, everything works out for the boys (and everyone else) in the end. While the premise may not seem all that funny, it's the physical and verbal comedy that generates the laughs. Unlike most outrageous comedies there are very few sight gags in Roxbury, (sight gags typically being the big laugh getters) so most of the film is a chuckle film. But as the film begins ascending towards it's climax it gets funnier and funnier (and then there's the wedding scene). While neither Ferrell nor Kattan are particularly appropriate for leading men, nor are they really big screen material, the roles are right comedy wise for them, and it the pair work well together. Shannon does well the two-faced girl-next-door/bitch-from-hell routine, and it's the interaction between the three current SNL stars that really work well on screen.