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Laughing is one of my favorite activities. I think this holds true for a lot of people; just look at an annoying girls’ Facebook info under “interests.” However, the love for laughter is particularly apparent in widespread movie tastes.
Films like Pineapple Express and The Hangover continue to entrance audiences with crazy antics. While very popular, they are not the most intelligently written, and more comedies in the same “stupid humor” bracket continue to emulate this style. What I’m wondering is: what happened to witty repartee and smart comedy?
Comedy was one of the first film genres because it is easy to convey—especially with absence of sound and limited time frames. It came about when people were still excited to see every day things “copied” and played over on one-person viewing machines created by Thomas Edison.
Silly dances, obnoxious slapstick, and overly exaggerated emotions were the first recorded shorts intended to be funny. Over time, the genre obviously matured with the advent of storytelling through film and more so when sound was added to the mix.
The early stages offered different types of comedies with one of the most prevalent being “screwball” comedy. It takes a crazy situation and usually involves quick wit, sharp tongues, and a ridiculous plot. An intelligent script was one of the most important facets; a good example of such a movie would be Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). 1934-1944 is the period in which this type of film proliferated, but many directors since then have emulated this style and paid homage to earlier directors.
My favorite example of this is What’s Up, Doc?, a 1972 movie starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. It is quite literally one of the funniest films I have ever seen, and it is my dear father’s favorite movie. Might I say my father is a pretty cool guy; he has over a Terabyte of every kind of music on a hard drive and reads Charles Dickens in his spare time.
It did very well when it came out, partially because it respected audience IQ levels and partially because it engenders the fantastic mood that comes with riotous laughter.
Nowadays, I feel like the stuff we are subjected to has knocked itself more than a few pegs down on the “smart” scale. There have always been films that appeal to a baser side of humanity, but they are usually accompanied by many alternative styles of comedy. It’s sex, sex, sex, but blatant sex (see Superbad) and vulgar, disgusting stuff.
Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes you need some vulgar, disgusting, sexy gore films, but I would hope not as often as they seem to come out.
I know this really appeals to our generation in particular, but the entire nation isn’t made up of college kids, is it? I highly doubt it. In fact, I know many people who are not college students. Where are the comedies for parents? My mother scoffs and wrinkles her nose at anything partially vulgar and I would fear for my life were she to try Knocked Up one night. Grandparents find some middle school plays hard to understand and would probably bust a sprocket trying to decipher our crazy lingo.
Obviously, this shows that producers are marketing to their main consumers: teenagers. This makes sense from a business point of view, but I can’t help thinking that us teenagers do not dominate the universe (although sometimes we think we do).
Unfortunately, this happens in way more areas of business than just the movie industry, but that’s a topic for another article.
Getting back to my point, I don’t think our generation is slipping in intelligence, but the producers seem to. All they have to do is include parts from both “smart” and “dumb” comedies, and they’d be able to transcend generations.
I might be saying this out of selfishness, because I’ve exhausted the screwball comedies of the past—and I want more. Not only that, but everyone deserves to laugh, not just crazy inebriated super-humans such as us teens.
