Comedies with real actors no longer fill theaters. Or they would not fill them, in case of being released. In fact, to find a pure and simple humorous film that is not animated and has grossed more than 100 million dollars worldwide, we have to go until 2019, where, by the hair, ‘Good Boys’ did it. comedy is a genre despised by a type of contemporary public who almost seems to consider laughing as a sign of weakness: the closest thing to a comedy that we currently have is Marvel cinema. And we already know what the main complaint is in this saga.
Laughing is for the weak
‘Grab it as you can’, ‘One, two, three’, ‘Zombies party’, ‘The General’s driver’, ‘Brian’s life’… The humor It is an intrinsic part of the history of cinema since 1895with the screening of ‘El regador regado’ (and its hundreds of imitations), but it had never been received with so many long faces as it is now. Why is comedy so reviled by today’s viewers? Is it because we receive and understand humor in a different way since the expansion of the Internet, because our innocence has been destroyed, because the quality of gags has gone down, or perhaps because we are opposed to mixing it with other genres?
Today, the scene where Indiana Jones pulls out a gun and kills a swordsman would have been criticized in a thousand different ways (with terms like “implausible”, “unnecessary jokes” or “betrayal of the character”), not to mention any hint of humor in ‘The mummy’ or ‘Behind the green heart’. Although comedy was once accepted (and celebrated) as part of the family adventure, a script mechanism to relax tensions, to a greater or lesser degree, on the current billboard there are those who put the line of implausibility there in movies about gods with hammers or altruistic millionaires.
And yes, I talk about adventure movies with humor (‘Jungle Cruise’, ‘The Suicide Squad’, ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’) because we don’t have Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks or Monty Python premiering their films. Not because they don’t exist, but because we will never know. The purely comic projects have major problems getting ahead in their film format. Producers underestimate the public and this has the effect that humor tries to find its place disguised as a film of another genre. Action and consequence: there is no place for comedies, so Taika Waititi sneaks in an adventure film costume and the public that does not want so many jokes leaves angry. And the wheel turns again.
Laughter on your mobile
In 2022, comedies don’t compete with the rest of the billboard. They compete with TikTok, Reddit, Twitter and the series. Everything in our day to day is humorous, from the last meme that came out yesterday and has already been burned today to the kitten that doesn’t know how to wash through ‘Only murders in the building’ or ‘Last week tonight’. It’s hard to decide to watch a funny movie when you can find the same result in your pocket without paying admission.
But the few that do try don’t manage to get high beyond extreme projects that are impossible to replicate, like ‘Jackass Forever’, which takes us back to the days of Buster Keaton and slapstick: the laugh that we ourselves want to deny, the one that enjoys the blow and the pain of others, reminiscent of ‘Vídeos de first’. It’s a strange time for comedy, when the strangest and most modern humor resides on television (‘Hanging in Philly’ always at the head of the avant-garde) and on the billboard we have to make do with white and familiar products like ‘Father there is only one 3’ (no matter how well they work at the box office). And Marvel, of course: the eternal Marvel.
Why would producers want to fund new comedy movies when we have a Marvel movie every four months taking all the cake? We may not have romantic, silly, or teen comedies, but we do have an overdose of adventurous and superheroic comedyalmost indissolubly. And it can go very well, but it is not enough. We don’t have ‘With skirts and crazy’ or ‘New moon’ because no one would fund those scripts. At best, they would be relegated to the bottom of the Netflix catalog.
fusion-comedy
There are not a few of us who miss ‘Young Frankenstein’, ‘Land as you can’ or even ‘Scary movie’, but, what is left to parody when the cinema itself is already a parody, everything is humor, and what is not already has its iconoclastic version shortly after without resorting to direct mockery? Pure comedy, without mixing with other genres, only has a place on television and occasional exceptions -and increasingly miraculous-. There is adventure, mystery or horror comedy, but without a merger, he does not end up gaining the approval of the public. Even ‘Borat: movie film sequel’, which came from a successful movie and was expected by the public, premiered on Amazon Prime Video without going to theaters (although the pandemic had a lot to say about this).
Or maybe it’s true after all: maybe in the time of John Mulaney, Tig Notaro and Bo Burnham there is no way to put those jokes on the big screen for an hour and a half without it being artificial, or that the language of stand-up and television cannot be transferred to the cinema in a way that is satisfactory for the box office. There is always a hunger for laughter, but they are sought by other means.
Among the they killed and she died alone. The derogatory comments about comedy in adventure movies (“They’re back with the jokes”), as if all superhero movies had to have the long face of ‘The Batman’ or the first two installments of ‘ Thor’ instead of enjoying coexistence only further damage a genre already relegated to the 25-minute format and underestimated by the general public. A genre whose laconic situation, no matter how hard some insist, is no laughing matter.