Pop Culture Happy Hour - The Dink

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

The Dink is pickleball’s very funny new entry into the classic genre of sports comedies. In the new film, Jake Johnson stars as a washed-up tennis underachiever whose loyalties become divided after befriending a pickleball player played by Mary Steenburgen. It’s got a contest with huge stakes and a surprising dose of heart, and the jokes make it over the net. If you want more breezy fun flicks, check out these episodes: In 'Power Ballad,' Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas hit all the right notesFun movies you may have missed Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport Pop Culture Happy Hour+See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

What do you call, like, a collection of pickleball courts? I don't know. The courts? I don't know. A barrel? A jarred pickle balls. The very silly sports comedy is a classic genre. Major League, happy Gilmore, Dodgeball.

And now the pickleball is everywhere, it only makes sense that it has its very own silly comedy. The dink features a washed up underachiever, a looming contest with huge stakes and a surprising dose of heart. I'm Linda Holmes. And joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is my fellow host, Aisha Harris. Hello, Aisha. Hello, Linda. And also with us is one of the hosts of NPR's Code Switch podcast, Gene Demby. Hello, Gene.

What's good, y'all? I'm so glad to be here. I love to have you here to talk about other things, but especially sports. Yes, we'll go. So the movie The Dink features Jake Johnson as dusty. He was once a promising young tennis player, but after an injury years ago during a match against Andy Rodic, who appears as himself. Dusty's professional tennis aspirations were doomed. Now he kicks around the tennis club owned by his controlling dad, played by Ed Harris, giving lessons to kids and hating his life.

The club becomes embroiled in a conflict between its tennis establishment and the upstarts who want to play the one game, Dusty respects the least pickleball. He meets a pickleball player named Candice, played by Mary Steenbergen. Hey, you should play again. You could be a great pickleballer. A great pickleball. I pass. Why? Just because the name sucks and it looks kind of dorky and most people out there are out of shape and have never played a sport before? Yes, those are the exact reasons. Surprisingly, the two become friends and Dusty's loyalties are soon divided. A match looms in which pickleball and tennis will fight it out and Dusty may have to choose between his father and his new pals.

The movie is streaming on Apple TV. Aisha, I'm going to start with you. How did you like The Dink? Well, I don't think I'm particularly known for my sports commentary or sports thoughts ever, so it's fun to be on this episode. But I do enjoy a fun sports movie, and this is fun. I found it utterly delightful. You know, as someone who remembers having to play, weirdly enough, I remember having to play pickleball as like a section of our gym class. Oh, wow. Are you serious? Yes.

We did have to play it in gym, and I haven't thought about it until years later when it suddenly became this thing. And I was like, I remember having to play this in high school. I've marveled at the fact that this has become such a, especially among millennials, such a big sport that people love to play. And I have not picked up a pickleball racket since. So it was fun to kind of watch the Jake Johnson character slowly become like less and less put off by this. But all of the feelings that he has, as that clip says, like it's a dumb name. It's a silly name.

And it's like low effort. You can understand why people, once they reach a certain age, tend to flock to it. But it also has a respect for the sport. So I enjoyed it. I thought it was pleasant. And very just like lots of funny little moments and asides that kept this movie. It never felt long to me. Like it moves along and it's fun and delightful.

That is the word I will describe for this movie for me. Yeah. How about you, Gene? What did you think? So now I'm like, wait, why is it called pickleball? I don't know. I thought this was an incredibly dumb movie. And I mean that in the most affectionate way possible.

Like, there were so many stupid jokes in this movie that I cracked out loud laughing at. There are all these, like, I should just alluded to this, all these, like, silly asides that don't have anything to do with anything. They're just sort of like these weird digressions, like people go on. I have a lot of time for Jake Johnson. I have a lot of time for Mary Steenbergen. They have really great chemistry, I guess, which is not surprising because I think Mary Steenbergin probably has good chemistry to everybody. Yeah, agreed. One of the things that sort of was odd to me, and it's not a complaint necessarily, but like it felt kind of sitcom-y.

Like, it felt like this felt like a really nice sitcom stretched out to 90 minutes, but it didn't feel stretched out. It didn't feel like it overstayed its welcome, but it felt like it had the rhythms of, it didn't feel very, like, movieish to me, right? It felt like a really silly TV series about a tennis club, you know what I mean? Yeah. And again, that's not a complaint. Like, it was so much fun to watch this. during a big sports moment, they just cut out all the sort of TV and movie filigree and just let you hear the sound of them playing

Pickleball and show and erotic. And Jake Johnson playing pickleball against each other just at regular speed. And it's so funny because it is so ridiculous. And the sound like, it's so dumb. It's like ASMR. Absolutely.

There's just all these little moments in the movie that I just like genuinely chuckleworth. I enjoyed this a lot. Yeah, I enjoyed this a lot too. I was a little caught off. because I tend not to have a lot of patience with kind of man-child anger ball movies where the whole joke is that the guy starts off as like resentful, ticked off, yelling at everybody because he's frustrated with his life and his life's never been satisfying. This is a guy that like I feel like guys like Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell and guys like that have played this kind of guy a lot. And I tend to get really frustrated with it.

What I love about it, and you can hear a little bit of it in that clip, what I think is. What I think works so well is that as soon as he meets Mary Steenbergin, Candace absolutely refuses to take him seriously at all, to take his grumpiness and complaining. They don't really become like immediately antagonistic. She just treats it like it's funny that he's being so ridiculous about it. And when she reacts that way, he reacts that way back. And he starts to laugh back. And very quickly, they're kind of making each other laugh. And so it makes sense that they're becoming friends.

Whereas often in a movie like this, you see the antagonism, you see the fighting, and you see like everybody's mad at each other. And then all of a sudden it's like there's some kind of revelatory moment where like all of a sudden now they're friends. You can see from the beginning, she just acts like, come on, man. Like what are you doing with your lousy attitude and your everything like that? And I think it changes the chemistry of the movie so much to have him pretty quickly get away from his sort of sour mood toward everything. Calm down. You're being a sore loser. You're being a sore loser.

Everybody. I'll say no. I hate this stupid game. I'm leaving. Hey, kid. What? You want a rematch? Yes, I'd like that opportunity.

He meets these different pickle balls. players and he kind of likes them and they kind of like him and he comes to realize that maybe he could have fun doing this and of course it's got you know a bunch of really fun people in the supporting cast you know we mentioned and erotic as himself this is also maybe my favorite use of john mackermore as himself which is really kind of it's a little bit surreal he's like getting progressively Probably larger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you reading off of something?

I'm just reading the expressions of the crowd and the body language of the players. Now Dusty's got a glimmer of hope. Sometimes that's all you need. Patton Oswald is in it and I think is very funny. Ed Harris is really Ed Harrising it up for you. Pickleball. The novel coronavirus of sports.

So yeah, I had a great time at this, and I kind of felt like, this is like the best case scenario for this movie to me. Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. I 100% agree. We've got a lot more to talk about. We'll be right back after this break.

And we're back. Well, I think it's interesting, Gene, that you said this felt like a sitcom stretch to 90 minutes. Because I watched this not long after having to watch The Hawk, which is another sports comedy, but that is in sitcom form, 10 episodes, Will Ferrell, doing his Will Ferrell thing. that he's done in a lot of other movies like Talladega Nights and whatever. And our complaint on that episode that we did about that, and Ronald Young Jr., our guests actually made the point. And I agree with him is that that could have been a movie.

It would have been way more digestible as a movie and trying to stretch it out. The joke ratio, the joke density ratio, was incredibly off in a way that here, when you have an under two-hour movie, you get all those jokes in. You get a funny moment where as the dusty character is heading to the pickleball courts for one of the first times or the first time, you hear someone just randomly say like, hey, ho, ho, new guy, fresh pickle. It's just like, that stuff is fun. And when you have that, plus you have these very, like, yes, the Steen Virgin and Jake Johnson, like, the dynamic there is just so, I don't think we see these enough. I love movies and TV shows where you see genuine friendships between like a generational divide and the fact that she's, you know, decades older than him. But they have this mutual respect for each other, like that grows and grows as they bond over the sport.

It was just so lovely to see. And I don't think you see enough of that. And I think it also helps that Jake Johnson is such a affable character. And he's not, he's playing a man child, but he's also like not dumb. He has his hang up. and he has his very insecure and he's got daddy issues. But he's not stupid, right? He has like a emotional intelligence to him that needs to be tapped into,

and he finds that through the Candace character and through these older women who he's playing pickleball with. It's just, I don't know. There's just something, it didn't have to be this good and it is this good, if that makes sense. Yeah, when I say it for like a sitcom, I don't mean like that it felt like it was stretched out. It was more like the cons of jokes they were making, right? It was like very sort of really, really silly jokes that seem to be like about the characters and the way that, like, you know, the way you would see on another show that, like, you sat with these people for a while and you, like, get a sense of their sort of sense of humor. You mentioned, oh, a new pickle.

First of all, that whole moment he's walking into the, I don't know what you call it, a pickle ball pavilion, what do you call? Yeah. We call a collection of pickle ball courts. I don't know. Courts? I don't know. A barrel? A barrel.

A jar of pickle balls. A pack of pickle balls, of course. And you like, when he makes that joke about a new pickle, as he's walking through that little tunnel, the sound of the pickle balls getting struck gets louder and loud. It sounds like very ominous, but it's such a silly sound. Boink, boink. The stakes are very low.

I don't think it's, like, spoiling anything. We're really like, like, Ande Rodic recognizes the stakes are not low, even though he's like the sort of the giant antagonist. He's like, this does not matter. Yes, exactly. He doesn't feel threatened by it at all. He's like, it's not to us. Exactly.

And I would give a shout to Cleo King and Lynn Marie Stewart who play the two other older women that Candace plays with. Lynn Marie Stewart has passed away since they made this movie. But I find myself as I get older so conscious of how they present women who are over about 40 in movies. And these women are considerably older than that. And I think they manage to share. show them in a way where they are older women. They have slowed down in some ways. And that's part of their pickleball experience. But they're also funny, smart, competitive. You didn't think you'd be playing with a bunch of old ladies. So you're trying to bail. But we don't have numbers without you.

And I came to get a sweat bitch. So I play with Judy. You play with Candace. Let's go. They sort of see this guy coming and they have this attitude of like, why are you? you acting like this? And I think when you talk about Dusty being a man child but not stupid, part of what that comes from is that once somebody sort of talks to him in a way that's like, they're not mad at him. They're just like, why are you acting like this? He kind of has this moment of being like, why am I acting like this? It would be more fun to not act like this, you know? Yeah, yeah. I also, I have to shout out once again, Fortune Beamster, who was also in the hawk TV show.

Yeah, so she played in that show. She played Wolf Fowell's new caddy in that show. But here she shows up for a smaller part, but her bit with another actor is very funny. Just like, again, getting into the nitty-gritty of like pickleball just how silly it is, but also like how seriously people take it and then like the little quirks that come with it. You two going to hog the court gab all night,

or are you looking to run some pickle? We'll run some pig. Again, noises and sounds in this movie are very key to so much of the humor. I liked Aaron Chen, who plays PJs, sort of Dusty's Yes, Yes, Man. He just has this very kind of dry delivery. He worships Dusty, basically. All these, like, just funny asides between the two of them, between Dusty and PJ was like, he's like, where Dusty's just like,

That's not the point of the story. I need you to just follow. Oh, yeah, yeah, when they start talking about the specifics, yeah. Because he's so guileless, right? He's like, Andy Roderick was playing chess, and I was playing checkers, and he's like... Okay, I see the pattern of lying because you said chess before. No, it was a storytelling device. I said, I was playing checkers and he was playing chess, meaning he was way better than me.

Got it? Where's the device? What? Where are you keeping the storytelling device? Is it like, Kindle? It's just a way to tell you. So many stupid jokes. I appreciate stupid jokes.

And I mean that in a loving way. Oh, yes. It has a warmth to it that I think movies like this do not always have. It has a rather than a sort of a sharp sugaryness to it, where like you're always going to get the satisfying moment at the end of a sports movie, generally speaking. And it's going to be figured out what that should. look like, you know, what's going to be satisfying. But there's throughout, there's a warmth to it that I think comes through in the Jake Johnson performance, partly because of just who he is as an actor, who Mary Steenbergin is,

who some of the supporting players are. It is a warm movie as opposed to being a snarky movie, I guess I would say. Yes, yes. Like, it still respects tennis, but also very much respects Pickleball and respects what it means to people. And I think that's a fair thing to posit and fair thing to express is that pickleball, is it silly? Yes. But so are most sports. They all have their weird things. And it's just fun to get to see this kind of new trend, I guess, although at this point it's not that new anymore, but this trend, get its due, it's not going to make me go out and play pickleball anytime soon.

But I admire it. And I think like, you know, we've been talking about how it has a little bit of fun with how seriously people take club pickleball. But I think it also has some fun with how seriously people take club tennis, right? And at some point, kind of asks the question, like, what should be the point of playing sports recreationally? Right. What is it supposed to be for? Yeah. What are you supposed to be getting out of it? And at what point have you lost the plot? I've had people tell me that you can learn how to play pickleball in under an hour, as if that's a good thing. But that is not how you build something that lasts.

And I think there is a little bit of a suggestion that maybe it's like the pickleball people have lost the plot a little bit. Maybe it's the tennis people who have lost the plot in terms of why we all should be here at a tennis club when we do not play tennis professionally and all of that stuff. Like maybe everything should be a little bit more about community and being active and meeting people and having a good time. And people could stand to be a little less intense. I mean, this is a real thing that, like, old and millennials, like, myself, like, are going through it's, like, you're trying to right size.

Like, okay, the part of your life where you're going to start PRing at things, right, that when you start to, like, when you're going to have your fastest run or, like, your best basketball playing days or your best soccer plan days, those are all behind you. And so, like, now you have to, like, recalibrate yourself to, like, pick up soccer somewhere, right? And, like, you hear people all the time talking about, like, getting hurt or, like, hey, man, I don't know if this is worth it. I don't know if, like, going out for my weekly Monday night basketball runs, like, if it's worth, I have a partner and a child. Like, I need to be able to walk tomorrow. Like, and people having to, like, slowly come to grips with their, like, you know, diminishing capacity. That's the thing that's, like, why pickleball is the thing now, right? It's like, right.

And so I think the idea, like, that pickleball is also a place where people are having that negotiation with just getting older, you know what I mean? In this movie, very much, like, he has lost this thing that gave him all this identity. and now he's on the pickleball courts. Maybe more than earlier than he would have liked to have been. But pickleball is coming for us all, man. It's coming for us all. That's true. Yeah, yes.

So I hear. Yep, so I hear as well. All right. Well, as you can tell, we all like this one. This is a really fun movie. Again, you can find it on Apple TV. That brings us to the end of our show, Gene Demby, Aisha Harris. Thank you so much for being here.

I play pickleball with either one of you any time, and you'd both beat me. Oh, I mean, probably. But I would love to love to play with you at some place. Your confidence is so much place, but I appreciate that. This episode is produced by Liz Metzger, Lennon Sherburn, and Mike Katzv, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.

Hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time.