The End of Funny Movies

What is comedy in a world with no sense of humor?

Mitt Romney once defended himself to a reporter who called him “stiff” during his first presidential campaign by saying, “I love humor. I live for laughter!”

Don’t we all, Mitt.

I spent years dreaming about writing for David Letterman as a kid. I think Trading Places should be in the Smithsonian, along with Tootsie and The Big Lebowski. I thought I had a decent sense of what was funny and what was not. But after subjecting myself to Anora before the Oscars to see what all the fuss was about, I am wondering if the word “comedy” needs to be redefined.

After watching the movie, I read some of its reviews. I was baffled to discover that every reviewer describes it as a “hilarious slapstick comedy.” Huh? It was supposed to be funny? It has no jokes!

“Screwball”? Excuse me?

Yes, it’s an entertaining, well-written movie by an (apparently) based director, but comedy it is not. I watched a dark, coming-of-age cautionary tale that verges into horror as a street-smart young woman hurtles towards the cliff.

The story is: a young outer borough New Yawk stripper/hooker who sounds like Adriana from The Sopranos agrees to marry a goofy drug-addled Russian billionaire’s son for a green card, thinking he loves her. She almost immediately learns that her trick tricked her. It’s a fairy tale, I guess, which I am a sucker for. In this case, it’s Sinful Cinderella, who misses out on a castle but maybe finds her own version of a prince in the end.

But: I didn’t laugh, not one time. Did you? Maybe a surprised chuckle or two, a few smirks here and there, but this was most certainly not a comedy. In fact, I was in a state of mild terror the whole time. The entire premise of a very young woman resorting to stripping and escort work fills me with existential horror, and then seeing her strip for, and have sex with, these losers, repeatedly, is not titillating or funny. It’s bleak and awful—and apparentely I’m the only one in America who feels this way.

When was I supposed to laugh, exactly? When she was performing an awkward striptease for her loser john? When she spends a full 15 minutes screaming at the top of her lungs to Russians? When she’s hysterically crying, emotionally devastated?

The last act of the movie is a caper through New York as she and some Russians look for her deadbeat husband, who’s run off before the annulment can happen. It’s amusing at times, but so are horror movies.

And the last scene where she robotically performs a final, unfeeling sex act for a guy who likes her but she has shown nothing but disgust for, and then breaks down in tears—this was funny to you? No thanks.

If Anora is a comedy, then suicide-inducing Breaking the Waves is a side-splitting romp.

Am I just old, or has the word “comedy” been redefined?

Remember Funny Movies?

If a piece of content made you laugh hard in the last five years, it was almost certainly a random Instagram Reel video or a clip of a TikTok comedian.

But laughing during a movie? Haven’t done that in a while.

In spite of myself, I confess that I laughed out loud several times watching the trashy cult 2004 comedy, White Chicks. It’s famous now as one of the worst movies of all time. The actors had to disavow it after it came out—it was that hated.

And yet: the zoomers have discovered it and they love it. They think it is the funniest movie they have ever seen. In order to debunk this and set them straight, I agreed to watch it for the first with some of the kids last weekend, since I had wisely skipped it when it came out.

White Chicks, if you remember, was the Wayan Brothers entry into the massively popular genre of black comedians using full face and body prosthetics to play other races and other genders that started with Coming to America and devolved into the terrible Big Momma and Madea franchises.

The story’s ludicrous: Two black male undercover detectives have to dress up like two rich white bimbo heiresses in the Hamptons in order to foil their kidnapper’s plan to capture them. If Anora is a not-so-pretty Pretty Woman, White Chicks is Some Like It Hot with hot sauce.

Of note: It’s nonstop PG-13 sexual innuendo and MTV-era references, but it’s also a surprisingly wholesome, not hateful, satire of race, of real white chicks, and of black men who love white women.

It’s like opening a strange time capsule to a moment when people, not just the stars, are having fun on camera and trying to make each other laugh.

Even the New York Times agrees!

Also it has this gem:

It’s the kind of throwaway movie that manages to survive its own stupid gross-out gags and ridiculous premise by hitting a few good jokes that build until you get to the final, over-the-top dance-off scene, when you are now primed to laugh when the Wayans brothers in full white-face do an improbably 10/10 breakdancing routine in their prosthetics and Paris Hilton outfits, and yet somehow no one knows they’re black dudes.

It’s shocking to see this many white people together in a movie, I know.

There is now an entire TikTok genre of people learning and recreating the “iconic” (lol) dance-off scene. And in this dance, there’s zero nudity (thank God).

Anora is a much, much better movie, yes—but it’s not a comedy. There is nothing screwball about it! Has everyone gone crazy?

Are there any comedies anymore? Is this a thing that exists, or has “being funny in a movie” gone the way of natural-sized lips on women?

There used to be dozens of genuine comedies released each year. Ivan Reitman movies. Eddie, Dan, Chevy movies. Mel Brooks movies. Billy Crystal movies. Chris Farley and Adam Sandler movies. Bridesmaids. The Hangover. Meet the Parents. Anything with Vince Vaughn or Owen Wilson.

Breaking news: I have pinpointed the exact moment comedies stopped being funny. It was in 2014, naturally—when Wes Anderson released The Grand Budapest Hotel. It was one of his first without his co-writer Owen Wilson, and people still thought of him as a comedy director, but it was, for me, a laugh-free experience.

It was the movie where Anderson’s twee schtick finally overcame the humanity of his earlier films:

Deep down you know I’m right.

Anderson’s early movies are some of my all-time favorites but in that one he was transitioning away from comedy as something that made you laugh to comedy as something that made you mildly bemused, or worse: think.

He did recover in the delightful Asteroid City, but that’s not a comedy.

Real Comedies Rule

What’s comedy? And who made me the judge of what’s funny?

Comedy is even more like porn than porn is: not only do you know it when you see it, you don’t even know if it’s comedy until months after you write the joke and it gets reacted to by an audience.

What’s funny to me? Here are some movie jokes that never stop being funny:

Stifler’s (and Will Ferrell’s) greatest moment:

I’ve never been in a theater where people laughed harder than when the ladies all got horrific Indian food poisoning in the super fancy bridal shop:

Here’s a classic Mel Brooks bit, of thousands:

And a trademark moment from my first crush, Groucho. I love a man in a greasepaint mustache!

Here’s another dance scene played for laughs:

And finally, from my all-time favorite comedy:

There are so many. Thousands of hours of funny stuff, from funny people.

And not a single YouTube compilation of “funniest movie moments of all time” includes a scene from any movie made after 2014.

I didn’t have room to even scratch the surface: Monty Python, Woody Allen, Peter Sellars. Richard Pryor.

Where did it all go? Is it over for comedy in movies?

Now excuse me while I go watch an actual “screwball” comedy, that contains actual comedy bits, performed by funny people.

Thanks for reading (and watching)!

—Peachy

What’s your favorite funny movie? Post it in the comments below!