What’s wrong with comedies?
I don’t mean that as in, “why aren’t today’s comedies as good as the olden days?” Because that’s nonsense—the breadth and depth of innovative, hilarious comedy being done today is staggering: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Portlandia, The Comeback, Nathan For You, Inside Amy Shumer, Parks and Recreation, The Daily Show, John Oliver, The Colbert Report, Drunk History, Arrested Development’s revival on Netflix, Bob’s Burgers, Veep, The Soup, Key & Peele… I mean, yeah, that’s a big ole’ list of TV shows not movies, but it’s not like 2014 was devoid of good comedies of different styles and approaches in theaters: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Muppets Most Wanted, 22 Jump Street, Top Five, and (infamously) The Interview.
So, no, my question isn’t why aren’t comedies better, but why don’t comedies get more respect?
This past Sunday, as usual, the Golden Globes worked their way up to the top honors of the night—for dramas—by working their way through comedies first. After each comedy award was given, the announcer asked “Who will win the top award of the night?” Because the comedy award is never the top award. The Oscars have only rarely handed out Best Picture Awards to comedies. And this attitude seems to filter down from critics to practitioners—there’s a frankly rather disturbing trend of comic actors “proving” themselves as actors by making tear-jerky dramadies: Jenny Slate in Obvious Child, Steve Carell in Dan in Real Life, Melissa McCarthy in Tammy, Tina Fey in Admission…
Let me be clear—I don’t begrudge these actors the desire to show their range, their desire to do dramas, or their desire to advance their careers. They are making sensible professional choices. What I rankle at is the pervasive cultural prejudice that makes it such that doing drama is the way to be taken more seriously in the first place.
I mean, of course these actors are impressive in dramatic roles. Comedians always are. Their sense of timing, the awareness of their own physicality, their attention to just which words said just how—in short, by being able comedians they are already masters of a greater range of skills than drama demands. Comedians tend to be revelatory in dramas in part because they’re slumming—it’s like marveling if some MLB pros won a Little League game.
And the assumption that dramas are inherently superior to comedies is one that has been flayed on screen by some very sharp satires—from Sullivan’s Travels to Top Five, to name just some obvious choices.
This is my frustration. Why haven’t we as a culture collectively recognized that comedy is really hard, and that the people who do it are extraordinarily skilled? That making people laugh is in itself something to be treasured, and that anyone who manages to makes lots of different kinds of people laugh over a long period of time has done the cultural equivalent of striking gold, or inventing the lightbulb? That comedy is a form of genius?
I have some theories why Hollywood doesn’t, ahem, take comedies seriously. Here they are:
1) Comedies are interactive.
I guess I better explain that one.
What I mean is, comedy depends on an audience. If the audience isn’t laughing, it isn’t working, and if they are, it is. The value of the work is measured right away, in real time.
Consider Seven Minutes in Purgatory—where standup comedians are forced to perform alone in a soundproof room while a live audience watches the feed separately. Deprived of the feedback from the audience, the comedians lose their confidence, lose their timing. It’s a controlled experiment that demonstrates very bluntly just how much comics tweak their performances on the fly to stay in synch with their audience.
Multicamera live-in-front-of-a-studio audience sitcoms may be out of vogue these days, but there are still plenty of shows that use live audiences (at least 4 of the shows I listed above do) and those shows and motion pictures that are filmed “dry” can still employ focus groups and preview audiences to generate a similar kind of feedback.
But this all runs contrary to the ethos that says True Art is an uncompromising vision of a singular artist unwilling to kowtow to the masses. When comedians bend their work to incorporate/accommodate/pacify audience demand, isn’t that the very definition of compromise, of kowtowing to the masses?
2. Somewhere along the way in recent history, some pathological fear of humor took hold. I think it may have had some connection to the rise of geek culture and the influx of comic book movies, because that audience seemed palpably afraid of the condescension that had colored previous comic book movies, and associated that condescension with campy humor and jokes. So, the grimmer and more humorless the superhero movie, the more it was perceived as serious. And as comic book movies took over Hollywood, that fear of jokes spread with it, perhaps as an unintended and even possibly unnoticed side effect.
3. Economics
For this one, let me direct your attention back to the top of the post, with the long list of TV comedies that aired in 2014 I admire and the much shorter list of movie comedies I liked from 2014. Obviously, the one list will necessarily be longer than the other simply because the sheer number of TV channels broadcasting 24/7 overwhelms the output of theatrical features. But even accounting for that, it feels like movie comedies represent a fairly narrow percentage of Hollywood’s annual output.
In the case of TV shows, as long as somebody feels compelled to make it, and somebody out in the audience likes it, there’ll be a home on some cable channel to support it (or, in the case of Arrested Development, Netflix).
But that’s not how modern Hollywood works anymore—not for a long time. It’s not enough that someone wants to make it/someone wants to see it—the costs of getting the film into theaters and the competition from other films trying to shove it off those screens is too intense for anything that doesn’t have mass appeal.
And here’s the thing: when I say “mass appeal” I’m not talking about the 30-some million people who live in America. I mean the world, which is actually code for “Asia.” A studio executive who doesn’t show up for work each day worrying about what people want to see in China just isn’t doing her job.
And this poses a special burden for the makers of comedies. Most jokes don’t translate across cultures well. Back in the olden days of silent film, physical slapstick translated excellently and became an international language of comedy. But the transition away from slapstick introduced cultural barriers.
I remember when I first started getting into Monty Python at age 10—as a sheltered middle class American kid I completely missed enormous swaths of the cultural references that this erudite British comedy traded in. Because the show was so surreal and given to bizarre non sequiturs, I tended to assume that any joke I didn’t get was meant to be baffling, and I laughed on cue because I could tell where the rhythm of the joke expected me to laugh. Only decades later, after travel to England and getting to know actual English people and spending time in Europe generally, did I finally start to get a lot of jokes I’d been laughing at for years.
Jackie Chan’s star rose as meteorically as it did because he was already appealing to Chinese audiences and his physical comedy was as exportable as Keaton’s and Chaplin’s back in the day.
Which all tends to mean that the current cultural tides are not auguring well for a focus on comedy, or an appreciation of the great comedy we already have.
Comedy can change the world. Comedy is a threat to evil (just ask North Korea, or the publishers of Charlie Hebdo). This is a heavy world we live in. Making light of it is powerful work, and the people who do it work miracles.