They have coffee talk on the display couch they’ll steal in during Thanksgiving to host a holiday dinner. They treat the place as their second home, and I mean that literally. It’s the bright and daffy absurdist spin-off that these weren’t-but-could-have-been-sketch-comedy characters deserve, and it feels, in its modestly clever and diverting way, just right.īarb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) are enthusiastically twee Midwestern rubes who work at Jennifer Convertibles - which isn’t funny, though what is funny is that they think it’s an exciting job. As Barb and Star, a couple of ludicrously fuddy-duddy fortysomething best friends from Soft Rock, Nebraska, Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo don’t wear out their welcome, and the movie, while it has more chuckles than belly laughs, doesn’t feel padded. “ Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” is another. “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” was one. Now, though, you see original comedies that, in spirit at least, could be “SNL” sketch spin-offs. That era faded (in 2010, “MacGruber” drove a stake through its heart), but that was probably a good thing, since most of those movies were notoriously tepid, hit-or-miss affairs.

For a while, starting in the ’90s, the highest honor you could bestow upon an “SNL” character was for him or her to be given their own spin-off movie. On “Saturday Night Live,” sketch characters arrive, connect with the audience (or not), and hit occasional sustained peaks of popularity, becoming laugh-riot fixtures and old friends.

Barb and star go to vista del mar