COMMENTARY : No Laughing Matter : With so many funny people in show business--and an audience primed to laugh--why can’t Hollywood make better comedies?
Summer is traditionally the time the movie studios unpack their loudest whoopee cushions, and some of the loudest this season will go by such names as “City Slickers,” “Life Stinks,” “Naked Gun 2 1/2” and “Soapdish.” So this might be a good time to ask: Why is it so difficult for Hollywood to make a good comedy?
There has probably never been an era since the Depression in which more bright people were panting to go into professional funny-making--as stand-up comics, actors, writers, directors, producers. Turn on the television and you have your pick of yock fests, from the talk shows and sitcoms to the cable TV stand-up comedy hours and solo performer specials, even a cable comedy channel.
In the more unbridled live atmosphere of the comedy clubs, you can, on any given night, hear some of the funniest (and filthiest) humor around. Many of the best of these comics are not even the headliners; they show up onstage, vaguely recognizable from bit work in the movies and TV, or from commercials, and their audacity, even when it’s wrongheaded and snide and insufferably self-absorbed, floors you. It’s as if they were in a fever to run through everything that’s wracking their minds, because where else will they get the chance to be so uncensored before a captive audience?
Certainly not in the movies. The whole nation, it seems, has been primed to laugh, and yet, in films, we’ve had almost nothing to laugh at--I mean really laugh at, something on the order of “Tootsie”--for years. The movies have even fallen down in their joke-book function--it’s been a long wait between “Naked Gun” and “Naked Gun 2 1/2.”
There have been some wonderful comedies, of course: In the past year, for example, there have been “L.A. Story” and “The Freshman” and “Gremlins 2” and “The Tall Guy.” Flawed as many of them are, they all try to make you laugh in ways that make them different from other comedies. They delight in their ticklishness. There’s an innocence in that delight, and innocence, more than anything else except a cutting edge, is what is lacking in most of the studio-engineered comedy jobs.
Movies like “Oscar” and “The Marrying Man,” to take two current examples, try to make you guffaw by assaulting you; they’re about as innocent as laugh meters. And this is largely true even of the new Blake Edwards comedy “Switch,” although it at least has a star--Ellen Barkin, playing a macho pig inhabiting the body of a slinky tootsie--whose performance is well worth the assault. With many of the new comedies, audiences are so primed to be whacked over the head with a bladder that they may have forgotten how to respond to the tickle of a feather.
If there are so many gifted funny-makers in show business right now, how come the movies have so little use for them?
Part of the reason is that, as the movie business becomes increasingly expensive, it is far less available to the kind of audacity and “personal” touches that make for memorable comedy. Like much of popular culture now, Hollywood is functioning as custodian of the don’t-rock-the-boat status quo. Satire is barely a blip on the screens these days; in an era when even Roseanne Barr’s goofball wailing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” can provoke a lather of outraged Op-Ed pieces, what chance is there that studio heads will green-light a sustained satire of religion, politics or sex?
One reason that television, in the “Simpsons” era, has lately been absorbing the best and the brightest is that TV is a quicker, less expensive medium than the movies. It’s more prone to censorship, certainly, but it’s also without the kind of megabuck impediments that stifle creativity in the movies--and not just in comedies.
Like television, but maybe even more so, the major studio movies are beholden to corporate decision-makers who test-market ideas before they even make it to script form; every element is scrutinized for maximum profitability. Certain studios, like Disney, have developed almost a “house style”: Its comedies, from “Ruthless People” to “Three Men and a Baby” to “Three Fugitives” to “Pretty Woman,” are engineered as ruthlessly as a high-powered sports car, though the inspiration that drives them is often low-octane. And these are the kinds of comedies that the industry holds up as shining paragons.
The test-market approach to comedy has resulted in some strange melanges. Comedies are increasingly outfitted with incompatible dramatic elements, like “Kindergarten Cop,” which was marketed as a kiddie romp but actually contained gobs of routine Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-’em-ups.
The commercial thinking behind this kind of bait-and-switch ploy is very different from the work of artists like David Lynch and Ron Shelton and Pedro Almodovar and Tim Burton and the Jonathan Demme who made “Something Wild” and the Paul Mazursky who made “Enemies, A Love Story.” These directors collide tones and genres as a way of voyaging into the human comedy. They mix things up because they recognize, and want to capture, the grab-bag quality of modern life, which they see as essentially, if darkly, comic.
Not so long ago there were dozens of filmmakers and actors one might have predicted would change the face of movie comedy. Instead they have gone in other directions, or punked out.
Steven Spielberg, who has perhaps the most galvanizing visual comic sense of any director who has ever lived, has become overly fond of his self-anointed role as the industry’s premier movie-movie fabulist; his the-world-is-my-theme-park rambunctiousness has begun to seem crotchety. John Waters, in “Cry-Baby,” has become disconcertingly strait-laced; Stuart Gordon (“Re-animator”) hasn’t topped himself. Ron Howard seems farther away from “Splash” with every picture; these days he’s putting out wide-screen fires. Albert Brooks, who with “Lost in America” became one of the few filmmakers to take aim at the great unexplored comic theme of the ‘80s--yuppie yearnings--seems sweetly blissed out in “Defending Your Life.” Brooks used to be described as a post-analytic Woody Allen, but in his new movie he seems post-consciousness. Say it ain’t so, Albert.
Brooks, as the director and solo star of a number of “Saturday Night Live’s” famous short films, is also connected to that show’s first generation of stars, who were supposed to transform the movie comedy world. Instead, more than a decade later, most of those who remain active have settled into the kind of conventional show-biz careers that, on television, they were famous for lampooning.
“SCTV” alumni like Martin Short (who later did a stint on “SNL”), Rick Moranis and Catherine O’Hara have fared a bit better, but Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas and Andrea Martin are woefully underused, while the great John Candy, alas, is woefully overexposed. He seems to be in every new comedy by John Hughes and Carl Reiner and just about everybody else.
Who would have thought a decade ago that Chevy Chase would become a dotty family comic who stars in Benji and National Lampoon movies, or that Eddie Murphy would refashion himself into a jive Sylvester Stallone? It may also have been impossible to predict that Dan Aykroyd would give such a sensitive and astute performance in “Driving Miss Daisy,” but he followed it with his directorial debut, “Nothing But Trouble,” a deliriously unfunny comedy that deserved one of his own Leonard Pinth Garnell stinko awards.
These comics have made fortunes turning themselves into caricatures of what we loved them for. They wander in and out of one slovenly movie after another; their disdain for the business that rewards them is palpable. Most Hollywood folk severely overestimate their talents. The first- and second-generation “Saturday Night Live” crowd--with the exception of Bill Murray, who as he demonstrates most recently in “What About Bob?” often puts some feeling into what he does--severely underestimates their talents. The self-trashing has a certain irony: It’s like their final goof on the celebrity they never thought they would achieve anyway.
“Saturday Night Live”-style humor has always derided, almost obsessively, mainstream show-biz success. Surely there must be an element of envy in the derision, and so maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that, when success visited the show’s comics, they embraced the mainstream, family-entertainment values that would most safely perpetuate their careers. Like Woody Allen, whose early, hilarious Ingmar Bergman parodies turned out to be warm-ups for his later, serious Ingmar Bergman imitations, the “SNL” bunch, in their early days, may have protested too much.
It didn’t help, though, that they came into the movie scene while the industry was skewed to teen comedy. In the ‘90s, as the average age of moviegoers appears to be inching upward, we’re supposed to be seeing more “adult”-oriented comedies. But it’s still true that many of the hit comedies--”Home Alone” leads the pack--are essentially kid fests. The reason John Hughes is comedy king is he’s king of the demographics.
This juvenilizing of the movies is teamed with Hollywood’s avoidance of any kind of romantic byplay that might dramatize the messiness of modern relationships. Sex-role disarray is too threatening to the status quo; it doesn’t lend itself conveniently to the kind of cut-and-paste formulas the studios bank on. The result is that one of the great, hallowed Hollywood genres--the adult romantic comedy--is approaching dodo status.
What we get instead--manufactured clunkers like “The Marrying Man” and “He Said, She Said,” or snow-job fairy tales like “Pretty Woman”--can be so far removed from our lives that they seem to be taking place on a sound stage on the moon.
It’s no accident that many of the wildest and most original comic talents in film came up in the early ‘70s, when the American movie was at its highest creative peak since the silent era. (And when, not coincidentally, studio controls were a lot laxer.)
It wasn’t just because of directors like Paul Mazursky, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Brian De Palma, Mel Brooks, Hal Ashby and Steven Spielberg.
It was also performers like the young Robert De Niro and Al Pacino and Elliott Gould and George Segal and Barbra Streisand, performers who were so explosively alive that even their darkest renditions had the impact of harrowing full-throated burlesque. Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon” and De Niro in “Mean Streets” were insanely comic; the jumble of moods they conveyed blurred the usual distinctions of comedy and tragedy, and that’s what made them so exciting.
The movies desperately need that kind of excitement again. They need new themes. Perhaps, with the wave of upcoming black-oriented films, some new subjects will emerge, and with them new styles of comedy to shake us up and make us laugh in new ways. A visit to any top-rank comedy club will tell you: Audiences today want to be challenged and shaken up. What the bottom-liners running the studios don’t realize is that, if the comedies were more challenging, many more of the adults who have given up on the movies would come back to them.
Maybe a new generation of independent filmmakers will come along and discover alternative techniques for showing off the bright new generation of hip, improvisatory comic actors who are loitering on the fringes of the industry. That’s what happened in the early ‘70s, and it rejuvenated pop culture. But for now, comedy has lost its subversiveness in the movies, and no one seems very eager to retrieve the fallen lance. Do we want Andrew Dice Clay to have the field all to himself? That’s really a case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.