The Hangover’ and therefore the Age of the
Jokeless Comedy
- INTRODUCTION
“The Hangover half II” arrives very like a
hangover — bludgeoning, harsh and relentless — nevertheless it’s a notable,
even groundbreaking film. It represents the logical evolution of a roughly
five-year trend: somebody has finally dared to create a thought yank comedy
within which nothing funny happens.
This is to not say that nothing happens or that
the picture isn’t funny. But within the vacated area wherever, say, jokes might
usually go — you know, those familiar contraptions of setups and punchlines;
the misunderstandings, mistaken identities, spoofed conventions or parodied
clichés — “The Hangover half II” offers instead shrieking, squirming, beatings,
panic, a severed finger and a facial tattoo. It’s like a “Saw”-style
torture-porn movie with a laugh track, into which the shaved-headed (and
autonomously funny) Zach Galifianakis has wandered, lost and bewildered and
looking for the exit sign.
This mutant subgenre is the offspring of 2
genetically compatible fathers: Todd Phillips, director of both “Hangover”
films, as well as “Old School”; and Judd Apatow, director of “The 40-Year-Old
Virgin” and “Knocked Up” and therefore the producer/midwife to a litter of
similar-looking movies with mix’n’match titles. (“Forgetting the Greek”? “Get
Him to Sarah Marshall”? “Drillbit Taylor Express”?) along, like Vladimir Lenin
and Trotsky, Phillips and Apatow have designed a comedic-cinematic group
action. “Old faculty,” in 2003, was the April Theses for this rebellion, and
“The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” in 2005, was its October Revolution.
Their movies ar, initially look, similar: profane
however per se sweet-natured comedies concerning soggy broheems orbiting each
other, water bongs and adult life. Apatow’s boys ar typically fringe geeks or
happy outcasts (comedy nerds, career stoners), whereas Phillips’s characters ar
sad, altered or changed adults: dentists, stereo salesmen, sad-sack husbands
and submissive clods. In Apatow, the enemy is adulthood, that ruins life; in
Phillips, the enemy is ladies, United Nations agency ruin men.
What these auteurs actually have in common,
though, is that they need consistently poached away several of the pleasures
antecedently related to comedy — 1st among these, jokes themselves — and
replaced them with a special reasonably lure: the attractiveness of paying 2
hours hanging out with a loose and jocular gang of goofy bros. (Also: ritual
humiliation. Humiliation is a big part of it, too.)
And these movies are often enjoyable. If you were
to list your favorite comedies of the last 5 years, I bet a minimum of 3 of
either Apatow’s or Phillips’s films would create the list. Yet are you able to
recall one celebrated gag from any of those movies? What was absolutely the
most humorous joke in “The Hangover”?
(My informal poll suggests that it absolutely was Galifianakis’s mispronouncing
“retard.”) Tellingly, the foremost quotable sequence from any Apatow film is
that the “You savvy i do know you’re gay?” exchange between Seth Rogen and Paul
cyprinid in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” that was jury-rigged on the sidelines,
then stuck into the film, and which, trust me, doesn't profit from being
reproduced for posterity in print. Surely there should be a minimum of one
ineradicable gag, line, or scene from only one of those films? If there is, I
can’t identify it, and don’t call me Shirley.
All trendy film comedies are often divided
roughly into 2 categories: character-driven and joke-driven. The first class
includes movies like “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Meet the Parents,” “Manhattan” and
“The Hangover”; the second includes movies like “Austin Powers,” “Blazing
Saddles,” “Bananas” and “Airplane!” the first distinction lies in their several
relationship to reality. In character-driven comedies, funny folks say funny
things and constitute funny things, however it’s all contained among the realm
of plausible realism; nothing absurd or unbelievable happens. Joke-driven
comedies, in contrast, start with the absurd and unbelievable and go from there.
Their jokes burst the boundaries of realism; actually, they’re typically
concerning detonating the boundaries of realism. Character-driven comedy is
million Ryan loudly faking Associate in Nursing sexual climax {in a|during a|in
associate degree exceedingly|in a very} delicatessen and an previous girl
expression, “I’ll have what she’s having”; joke-driven comedy could be a girl
(in “Top Secret”) being asked to translate a speech and expression, “I grasp a
touch German,” then turning and waving at a midget in lederhosen.
On TV, you would possibly outline these designs
because the distinction between a broadcast like “Everybody Loves Raymond” and
a sketch show like “Saturday Night Live” — or, in additional modern terms,
“Modern Family” versus “30 Rock.” (Part of the brilliance of “Modern Family” is
its ability to infuse a broadcast formula with associate degree antic,
joke-driven energy that stays simply this side of absurd.) In fact, sitcoms,
within the last decade, have taken a tough flip toward absurdity: “30 Rock” and
“Community” owe additional to the spirit of “S.N.L.” and “The Simpsons” than
they are doing to “Friends” or “Cheers.” Movies, meanwhile, have gone pace, as
a herd, in the other direction. The Nineteen Nineties were dominated by the
braying of Jim Carrey, the “Austin Powers” franchise and therefore the
eww-gross ideology of “There’s one thing concerning Mary” — all films stuffed
to the point of asphyxiation with blatant gags. On Sept. 28, 2001
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