No Laughing Matter
Comedy is going through a strange phase, and arguably has been for some time. Save for Pixar’s better offerings, there has been precious little quality output in the genre in recent years, resulting in the generous critical reaction to Juno and Knocked Up described in Liam O’Brien’s review (see below right). While they certainly show quality, the sudden canonisation of Judd Apatow as Woody Allen reborn seems veritably reactionary.
As with every awards season, there is a sudden inundation of ‘serious’ movies, and for every No Country For Old Men there is a Crash. Set in a post-apocalyptic universe where no one has a sense of humour, bullying the audience into emotional submission, occasionally hilarious in just how damned tragic the whole thing is. On the other hand, the scenes in No Country between Sheriff Bell and his enthusiastic deputy are pretty darned amusing, providing a neat balance to the nihilist leanings of the film’s narrative. The black humour in the movie betrays the Coens’ comic pedigree, and sure enough, The Big Lebowski, probably their funniest work to date, draws most of its humour from less-than-comic situations.
Drama is not an optional aesthetic for gainful comedy, it is a prerequisite, and not just in the rom-com-volta sense when Kate Hudson thinks Matthew McConaughey is cheating on her. The most touching scenes in Knocked Up come when it shows a willingness to take itself seriously, and, indeed, the film centres on a character struggling to do just that. It’s by no means a resolution by the end, but the respect the movie shows to its characters makes them more than simple clowns.
So what can be done? There has always been and always will be a market for cheap, bland comedy, and the fate of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip illustrates in another medium what happens to a work which is good but unprofitable. A fundamental issue is how poorly comedy is esteemed – if a film treated its dramatic moments in the way, for example, the Scary Movie series treated its comic ones, it would never see the light of day. So why are the goalposts shifted so disproportionately across the genres? One argument is comedies are cheap to produce and easy to peddle to an existing and receptive audience, but Juno has proved that quality can also perform financially. 8½ has some pretty remarkable things to say about art, life and everything, but at a basic level it’s a comedy. Quality and humour shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
