Dress Will Ferrell in a navy suit, put him at a podium and there are bound to be certain associations. “I did George Bush for so long, I think it’s burned into people’s memory banks,” says the comedian. “But this character, Cam Brady, is more John Edwards.
“Where George Bush would be, like, ‘Any more questions? Gimme a break! Suck it!’ Cam Brady would loooove to talk all day long,” says Ferrell, transitioning from his Bush impression into an Edwards-ian drawl. “And thank you for that question!
“Which,” he adds in his normal voice, “means nothing, of course.”
Ferrell’s new movie, the hard-R comedy “The Campaign,” out Friday, focuses squarely on the kind of ridiculous political theatrics that have become increasingly prevalent in both parties, especially in this contentious election year.
As Brady, Ferrell is a North Carolina congressman who thinks he’s running unopposed — until Zach Galifianakis’ underdog character decides to enter the fray. Brady quickly learns that saying what you actually think is not what politics is about.
“If, at either of the conventions, someone stood up and said, ‘It’s about America! And Jesus! And freedom!’ the crowd would just go nuts,” Ferrell tells The Post. “But what does that even mean? I don’t know. People love it.
“It reminds me of this joke my friend and I used to have growing up,” he says. “If you ever needed to get into anywhere you weren’t supposed to be, you just said, ‘Don’t worry, my dad’s a doctor.’ It would stun people and later they’d be like, ‘What did that mean?’ Politicians have come up with varying ways of saying, ‘Don’t worry. My dad’s a doctor.’”
Ferrell found a kindred spirit in political junkie Galifianakis, with whom he produced “The Campaign,” alongside director Jay Roach and Ferrell’s frequent collaborator, Adam McKay.
The two wildly popular comics had never done a film together before, and found an easy shorthand right away.
“I think Will and I find the same things really funny,” Galifianakis tells The Post. “Absurdity and miscommunication. Some of it is really juvenile. Last night we went to dinner, and I’m too embarrassed to tell you what we were laughing at, but it was things two grown men are not supposed to be snickering about in a fancy restaurant.”
The pairing was a dream come true for Roach, as he was expanding his political repertoire (“Game Change,” “Recount”) into outright comedy. “We have the maximum-strength oppositional design of two of the funniest guys on Earth trying with equal zeal to crush each other through horrible behavior and horrible ads,” he says. “That required that one be a Democrat and one be a Republican.”
It also lent itself to some first-rate comic freestyling, says the director, particularly during the debate and town-hall segments. “In one of them, Zach’s character finds an essay that Will wrote in second grade about a rainbow and a pot of gold and sharing it, and Zach decided it’s a communist manifesto,” says Roach. “And someone in the audience stands up and goes, ‘I’m an American! I’m not going to Rainbowland!’ and Will’s going, ‘It doesn’t exist!’ and it triggers a riot.
“That’s very plausible, you know,” says Roach. “I’ve seen town halls where debates go off into bench-clearing riots. That scene, to me, was the microcosm of what our whole political system is about these days. It is professional wrestling. It’s people throwing chairs; it’s Jerry Springer.”
As it happened, filming began on the New Orleans set of “The Campaign” during the Republican primaries, providing an ongoing televised counterpart to the antics in the screenplay. In fact, says Galifianakis, “we were running the risk of not being over-the-top enough. Real life was kind of keeping up with the absurdity in the script.”
The mudslinging in the primaries made its mark on the screenplay, Roach says. “Every day was some great new thing. We started noticing people competing to say they had more guns — at one debate someone said, ‘I have two guns.’ Someone else, ‘I have five guns.’ That begat a hunting scene in the movie.
“Then Herman Cain got tagged with that harassment scandal, and his poll numbers went up. We put that right in the script.
“And then it came out that Rick Perry had gotten C’s. I begged the writers to put in a scene where they compete about who had the least education: ‘I dropped out of college.’ ‘I never went to college.’ ‘I got F’s!’ ”
Good old Rick Perry, says Ferrell. “It was a shame to see him go by the wayside. The thing that was amazing was he made Bush seem like the greatest statesman of all time. That was wild.”
Also? Great hair.
Hair is essential to Ferrell’s character. Modeled on Edwards’ impossibly groomed locks — the ones that inspired a YouTube video of him getting dolled up, set to the song “I Feel Pretty” — his hairdo defines his character in the way that it has for several notable politicians. (We’re looking at you, Blagojevich.) “Biden? A little scraggly, but Romney’s good,” says Ferrell.
“Really strong hair.”
The current Republican candidate has also come up with some off-the-cuff remarks that Ferrell says he’s heartily enjoyed as a spectator. “‘I like the trees; I like the lakes. I like the big lakes. I like the little lakes,’” he recalls of Romney’s Michigan commentary. And, of course, “the latest, over in England. ‘I’ve got some concerns.’ Why would you say that? Just say, ‘We’re here to celebrate Great Britain, and the great job they’re gonna do with the Olympics.’ It’s the easiest. Just go over and say all the right things. Instead, ‘I’ve got some concerns.’ Yeah.”
One of our local politicians also informed a plot point in “The Campaign” — former congressman Anthony Weiner, whose sexting scandal broke shortly before filming began. “He really was a gift to comedy,” says Roach. “We put that right in the film” — in the form of Brady mistakenly leaving a lewd message on the answering machine of a devout Christian family, instead of his mistress.
“At first,” says Ferrell, “we thought [Weiner] got set up. That he didn’t really do it. And then it was like, ‘You dummy! What are you thinking?’ ”
“I had seen Weiner’s speeches on C-SPAN and was very imwpressed with them,” says Galifianakis. “He was really eloquent and passionate and smart. But then how smart can you be if you’re doing that? At least use a Polaroid. So you can rip it up. ‘Here’s that Polaroid I promised you. Can you please send it back?’ ”
Another divisive local figure, says Galifianakis, is Chris Christie. “I follow him,” he says. “He was born 7 pounds, 800 ounces.”The New Jersey governor shares a certain plain-spoken quality with Marty Huggins, Galifianakis’ character in “The Campaign.”
“What’s refreshing about him is his matter-of-factness and straight talk, but sometimes his straight talk is just rude,” says the comic. “It’s too rude. Sometimes he’ll just go after a reporter. You have to be a little more forgiving in that atmosphere.”
The one guy everyone agreed surpasses the normal political mold is our mayor. “I like Bloomberg,” says Galifianakis, who lived in the city until two years ago. “I like that there are more bike paths here. Who doesn’t? It’s a slippery slope when you start telling people they can’t drink giant things of soda — but I was around when smoking was everywhere here, and now those complainers have kind of gone away.”
“He’s hard to pigeonhole,” says Roach. “He’s an interesting guy. I think that happens in New York because of the pressure of, you know, pulling off this giant experiment that is running a huge metropolis.
“I wonder if you could really survive as mayor of New York if you really were just a politician. You have to be defined a little differently — you have to be competent!”
sstewart@nypost.com