‘World’s Greatest Dad,’ the darkest dark comedy, turns 15

Bobcat Goldthwait’s tale of suicide and literary fraud, was Robin Williams’ last great movie

World’s Greatest Dad is a movie so daring and bizarre that it’s hard to believe it exists. The film, which arrived in August of 2009 — 15 years ago last week — was audacious and daring, having a clear point to make about the weaponization of grief.

But beyond that, it’s a movie about coming to terms with the death of a loved one and how grief is often imperfect.

Directed by comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, the film starred Robin Williams as Lance, a high school English teacher who harbors failed literary ambitions. He’s also the single father to Kyle (Daryl Sabara), an appalling asshole who sexually harasses everyone he meets. Kyle is pretty much despised by everyone who knows him, in between frequent bouts of autoerotic asphyxiation. 

Halfway through the movie, one of those asphyxiation sessions leads to Kyle’s death. Lance, wanting to spare his son the embarrassment, stages it as a suicide, even writing a bogus suicide note. 

The result is surprising: The suicide note strikes a chord with the students at school, who adopt Kyle as a posthumous icon and pretend to have loved the guy they despised when he was still alive. More than one critic noticed at the time the rapturous reaction around the same time to the death of Michael Jackson — widely treated as a pathetic grotesquerie in the last decade or so of his life — was strikingly similar to the posthumous love for Kyle.  

Lance also writes a fake journal that also becomes a sensation, earning him the literary fame and admiration he’d long wished for. 

Lance is clearly doing a terrible thing in exploiting his dead son for fame, literary cachet, and even to get laid while presenting an idealized, dishonest version of Kyle — one who is kind, smart, reflective, and interested in literature — to the world. “You know what's strange about the book?,” Kyle’s one friend tells Lance, “Kyle never talks about vaginas, anal sex, fisting, felching, or rimjobs.”