Topher Grace vs. John Krasinski
Battle of the Deadpan Dreamboats

It's hard to make an accurate generalization about mainstream comedy products -- there are many superficial differences between your Joe Dirt and your Miss Congeniality -- but one statement we can probably all agree on is that they do not trade in subtlety. When you're trying to appeal to "kids from 8 to 80," or whatever the hell, you can't exactly hinge comic setups on a Derrida reference; your gags have to be obvious, and they have to be loud. Ideally, they should be delivered by a bucktoothed Jim Carrey or a spastic Martin Short, so you can be sure that absolutely no one will miss them. And, look, we're not anti-comedy -- we've nearly worn out our Zoolander DVD, and spent a delighted afternoon last weekend watching Jackass: Number Two through our fingers -- but amid the inescapable obnoxiousness of the average production company's comedy output, both film and TV, a bracingly dry comic performer is a relief and a pleasure. Given our appreciation for such a comic style, it should be clear why we've spent the past couple of years monitoring the careers of John Krasinski and Topher Grace.

To give you a sense of how much the pop-culture landscape can change in five and a half years, the first time we covered Grace here, it was to compare him to Elijah Wood. Since then, Wood has blown up as a sci-fantasy obsession due to his role in the Lord Of The Rings movies, and has also made some respectable indies, like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Everything Is Illuminated. Probably, we should have paid his Hobbit ass a little attention in the years since that long-ago 2S1S...but instead, we've focused on Grace. We'll be the first to admit that we've probably given him more scrutiny than Grace's slender list of credits actually demands, but the thing is, we really like him. We like the way he can communicate so many emotions -- fear, disgust, confusion, alarm -- with his library of silent stares. We like the way he can shrug with just his face -- even just a part of his face. We like the way he comes across as smart but not arrogant, and that ineffable mixture of confidence and sheepishness that is apparently innate in privileged young men from the East Coast (which we always suspected, and which Prep just confirmed for us.) We have liked Grace enough to have studied his mannerisms for the past several years...

...which may have been why we were so surprised to see basically all of them transplanted into the "Tim" guy when the American version of The Office started airing last year. Because we like them both, we won't say that John Krasinski, who plays Jim on The Office, is just biting Grace's style, but...like, he's lucky we like him, because wow, he really reminds us of Grace. Anyway, Krasinski had made several guest appearances on all the usual shows (C.S.I., Without A Trace, Law & Order: Criminal Intent) while Grace starred on his long-running Fox sitcom, but didn't start on The Office until Grace was leaving That '70s Show, the better for Krasinski to take up Grace's fallen TV-deadpan torch. Krasinski even had his own collection of silent stares, showcased in an episode in which a "jinxing" left him unable to speak for the better part of a day. (This is the sort of thing that makes The Office so addictive: the characters exhibit the same maturity and dedication to their extremely important work tasks that we remember displaying at our office jobs. Especially the one where we would routinely arrive after 2 PM and take three-hour lunches.)

But torch-carrying is apparently not enough to satisfy Krasinski's professional ambitions: he's starting to bear a stronger resemblance to his Office co-star Steve Carell in terms of plentiful output. Krasinski's tiny but memorable role as a (deadpan) Gulf War office drone was just the beginning: he now has four movies yet to be released in 2006, including Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration, the hotly anticipated musical Dreamgirls, The Holiday (with Kate Winslet and Jack Black); next year, there will also be License To Wed (with Robin Williams and Mandy Moore). The last two of these find Krasinski playing "Ben"s, and if that sounds familiar, it's because the character he briefly played in Kinsey was also named "Ben." Remember? He was the Kinsey student who couldn't figure out why his wife couldn't climax during intercourse, and who'd heard that oral sex could interfere with pregnancy. Fictional character or no, to come back (heh) from that sort of on-screen prudery takes a really dreamy actor.

Grace may not be as prolific as Krasinski -- Win A Date With Tad Hamilton! aside, he's always been choosy in his roles -- but 2007 will find him playing a villain in Spider-Man 3 (a franchise that got James Franco a lot of work, even if it's all been total shit) and an NAACP lawyer working with Terrence Howard's Thurgood Marshall in The Crusaders (could be another step on the road to being our generation's Tom Hanks). Even if all Krasinski's '06 movies tank the way Doogal did, next year he'll play Sir Lancelot in Shrek 3 (our feelings about the franchise aside, people do like it) and star in his directorial debut, an adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (oooh, artsy!). As our esteemed colleague Glark correctly observed of this matchup, it will be hard to determine the dominant performer between Grace and Krasinski until Krasinski gets sick of shrugging at TV cameras and decides that he'll only shrug on film. Krasinski may not yet be famous enough to get a role in a big-budget movie franchise that will let him show his face, but if Grace -- having taken 2006 off -- doesn't start showing his face a little more, he risks losing his deadpan market share to Big Tuna.

Advantage: Grace -- for now