If you were to list your favorite comedies of the last five years, I bet at least three of either Apatow’s or Phillips’s films would make the list. Yet can you recall a single famous gag from any of these movies? What was the absolute most hilarious joke in “The Hangover”? (My informal straw poll suggests that it was Galifianakis’s mispronouncing “retard.”) Tellingly, the most quotable sequence from any Apatow movie is the “You know how I know you’re gay?” exchange between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which was improvised on the sidelines, then stuck into the film, and which, trust me, does not benefit from being reproduced for posterity in print. Surely there must be at least one indelible gag, line, or scene from just one of these films? If there is, I can’t identify it, and don’t call me Shirley.
The first category 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 primary distinction lies in their respective relationship to reality. In character-driven comedies, funny people say funny things and fall into funny situations, but it’s all contained within the realm of plausible realism; nothing absurd or unbelievable occurs. Joke-driven comedies, by contrast, start with the absurd and unbelievable and go from there. Their jokes burst the boundaries of realism; in fact, they’re often about bursting the boundaries of realism. Character-driven comedy is Meg Ryan loudly faking an orgasm in a deli and an old woman saying, “I’ll have what she’s having”; joke-driven comedy is a woman (in “Top Secret”) being asked to translate a conversation and saying, “I know a little German,” then.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
I KNOW A LITTLE GERMAN: In anticipation of The Hangoverover, Adam Sternbergh delineates the difference between character-driven and joke-driven comedies, suggesting that Todd Phillips and Judd Apatow have unnecessarily sent the latter into hibernation:
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Yet Seth MacFarlane has built a sizable empire entirely on joke-based comedy. Yes, there are characters on Family Guy et al., but they're usually there as little more than a framework for an unrelated joke, or drawn in exceedingly broad character traits. And animation doesn't require that--contrast with the Simpsons, where even though the characters have become more one-note over the years, at its best, the characters were rich and nuanced.
ReplyDeleteYep, Family Guy is all-gag, almost-no-character. Funny, yes, but not memorably.
ReplyDeleteThere's a name missing from that article, one that really causes me to doubt its grounding in a thorough evaluation of 2000s comedy, and that name is Adam McKay.
ReplyDeleteAlso Scot Armstrong. Odd they don't mention the writer of many Todd Phillips movies; he also wrote Starsky and Hutch and Semi-Pro. He didn't write Blades of Glory, but I wouldn't call any of those a character-based comedy.
Finally, f you're going to mention the Zuckers, you are in it with Seltzer/Friedberg. They're terrible, but they are financially successful, joke-based parodies. Overall, with these omissions, the whole point seems to be that Apatow has made looser, less punchline-based comedies more successful in development and box office. Welcome to 2007.
If you were to list your favorite comedies of the last five years...
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that I could. Have there been five good movie comedies in the last five years?
I don't really understand. Let's go back more than 5 years to figure out what fits in which box. I think Anchorman falls into Sternbergh's joke-driven column, but it's Apatow/McKay, so maybe it's character-driven. Borat, well, I don't know. It seems to fit Sternbergh's definition of character-based, but it seems pretty joke-based to me. It's pretty gaggy, bunc of quotable stuff. Was Arrested Development (outside the sample because it's TV, not movies, but I'm just testing the sensitivity of the selection criteria here) joke-based or character based? Both? Better Off Ted? The South Park and Team America movies? Hot Tub Time Machine? Is a high-concept movie like HTTM automatically joke-driven, or does it need to have set-piece gags? But what if the funniest stuff is just the characters playing off each other? It's not a useful dichotomy if you can argue that everything significant (good or bad) can be put in either box.
ReplyDeleteHere are some other movies that don't seem to fit in the boxes (I'm stretching the years here, but anything after 2004 should count)
ReplyDeleteBlack Dynamite --
Dodgeball --
Hamlet 2 --
Hot Fuzz --
Hot Rod --
Idiocracy --
Dinner for Schmucks --
Jody Hill movies --
Strangers with Candy --
Zombieland --
Tropic Thunder --
Walk Hard --
<span>Here are some other movies that don't seem to fit in the boxes (I'm stretching the years here, but anything after 2004 should count)
ReplyDeleteBlack Dynamite
Dodgeball
Hamlet 2
Hot Fuzz
Hot Rod
Idiocracy
Dinner for Schmucks
Jody Hill movies
Strangers with Candy
Zombieland</span>
<span>Tropic Thunder
Walk Hard </span>
Some would argue whether it's even funny. I never believed manatees were great comedy writers.
ReplyDeleteI can't even figure out what belongs in which category. Way too many close calls. Maybe one is the "screwball" category and the others are "not quite screwy enough to be screwball"? Anyway, the line I remember from the Hangover is, "I didn't know they gave out rings at the Holocaust."
ReplyDeleteSo the argument is that Andy in T40YOV is realistic? And the things that happen to him are reasonable? I mean, I guess Andy's realistic enough but the movie takes a sharp turn into absurd before it settles into a character-driven comedy, per these definitions. I would say Ron Burgundy et al bridge the two as well.
ReplyDeleteI watched The Hangover. I liked The Hangover. I laughed hard at The Hangover. I don't remember a funny line or gag from The Hangover. Maybe this is a failing of mine.
Was Hot Tub Time Machine gag-driven or character driven? Or am I giving it too much credit?
ReplyDeleteThe grace scene from Talladega Nights (five years ago) is hilariously joke based, and jokes from Anchorman continue to get quoted regularly in my circle. And I'd put all of Sasha Baron Cohen's stuff (the tv shows especially) as joke based. Sure, it's character driven, but it's a character telling jokes.
ReplyDeleteI watched it on Streaming Netflix very late at night, so I may not be remembering that well, but it was both. The concept is a gag, there are a lot of anachronism-based gags, and there are a few set-piece gags. There aren't that many three-beat jokes like 80s comedians used to tell (and like they use on SNL and 30 Rock and Big Bang Theory still), but those haven't really worked in film since, I don't know, the 80s. There are set-piece gags (like Craig Robinson blowing everybody's mind with ahead-of-its-time music). A lot of the comedy just comes from the characters interacting -- not unlike Sternbergh's example of non-gaggy jokes, the Seth Rogen/Paul Rudd stuff from 40YOV -- which I guess is naturalistic, even if it's naturalistic in the context of a contrived and absurd situation.
ReplyDeleteThe more I think of it, the more I think that all Sternbergh is saying is that writers don't compromise characters or the characters' reality for gags nowadays. He's not saying there are no jokes or no gags or that the jokes or gags are poorly constructed or unfunny; he's lamenting that all of the jokes and gags have to be things that the characters would actually say about things that are actually happening. So character-driven comedy is Henny Youngman saying "take my wife, please" (which, Sternbergh, is a joke, duh), and joke-driven comedy is somebody saying "take my wife, for example," and then somebody coming and physically kidnapping the speaker's wife and nobody noticing that that's weird.
So smm is dead-on -- Sternbergh is just choosing to ignore the stuff this is out now, namely the Seltzer/Friedberg stuff, which is very much in the here-comes-somebody-to-take-somebody's-wife vein. Is there really less of this stuff now than there used to be? Including the one coming out this year, there are 6 of these movies from Seltzer/Friedberg within the last five years. Sure, there were a few Airplanes, a couple of Naked Guns, and a Top Secret over the course of 10 or 15 years, but that means that the rate has increased, not decreased. And I don't really care to argue that we're suffering from a lack of this stuff.
Just to expand on something Isaac alluded to, the class of movies that we don't make any of? from 1971 to 2000 (Bananas to Meet the Parents, which leaves out the Meet the... sequels, naturally). And the class of movies that we're supposed to compare? Five years. These are the days that NYT makes me want to bang my head against the wall.
ReplyDeleteI do disagree with the suggestion that three-beat structure is falling out of fashion. That's basically how sketch/improv is taught these days, and I'd venture 80% of comedy writers/performers hired in the last ten years were thoroughly grounded in the principle (this is one of the reasons why I think SNL is more objectionable to people these days, because it's more formally written as three beats rather than a shaggier character/actor jazzy thing. But I digress). It's still there in form, it's just more obvious in jokier formats.
I know three-beat jokes are still there, but I think they're popular in television and not in film. I'm having a hard time thinking of a movie that did a lot of three-beat jokes. There's nothing inherently wrong with the structure -- it's pretty much all 30 Rock has ever done, and Better Off Ted did a lot of it, and those are two pretty funny shows. It's also what some pretty unfunny shows use exclusively, but a true craftsman doesn't blame his tools. Anyway, maybe the scale of the three-beat joke requires the intimacy of improv or a cramped set. Or maybe film comedies are using more actors and fewer standuppy comedians. I don't know.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I'd bet that comedy writers who came from improv/performance were trained that way, but comedy writers who came from writing backgrounds weren't necessarily. The Lampoon types who went to work at SNL probably had it beaten into their heads there.
Forgive my ignorance and drone "three beat"?
ReplyDeleteThe Hangover is forgettable cotton candy without a catchphrase, but it never struck me as grounded in realism.
The funniest movie in the last five years was "The Other Guys," and it has elements of both boxes, suggesting that it's not a very good classification system.
Er, "define," not "drone."
ReplyDelete<p>I am the guest above. It's a variation on the rule of three. It's referring to an iteration, if you're talking about a joke. I.e.,
ReplyDelete</p><p>
</p><p><span> "Abortions for all!"</span>
</p><p><span>(Booing)
Kang: "Very well - abortions for none!"
(More booing)
Kang: "Hmm...abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!"
(Cheers)</span>
</p><p>
</p><p>In sketches, it is referring to an iteration of what is the "game" or pattern or premise of the scene. In the more cowbell sketch, every time Gene Frenkel asks for more cowbell and Will Ferrell dances around, that's a beat. Usually if you're following this structure, the first beat should set the stage, the second beat should heighten (Ferrell should dance even *more* manically) and the third should incorporate a twist (the band gets into it, too). Stefon, or the majority of WU sketches, really, have three iterations of their premise. "What's Up With That" does three musical performances, etc.
</p>