Anyone who is knowledgeable about comedy will tell you that it is subjective. Different people just laugh at different things. There is no right or wrong answer to what someone finds funny.
I mean, sure, it’s easy to get mad at someone who keeps sponsoring Adam Sandler’s half-assed attempts at comedy, or Melissa McCarthy’s tired overweight routine. But they are not wrong per se. That’s just their preference. Personally, I like my comedy dry and witty, dark or absurd. But I know for a fact that there are things I find hilarious that many people look at with a blank, confused face.
With that in mind, however, there’s definitely something to be said about how comedy weaves itself through culture. Vaudeville led the way to silent comedy and slapstick. The invention of sound in films led to quick-witted humor and mile-a-minute joke telling. Later, comedies like There’s Something About Mary paved the way for seemingly thousands of R-rated comedies involving different bloody fluids.
Nowadays, there seems to be a new trend in pop culture comedy, but it may be one that comes at a price down the road. It’s self-aware comedy; comedy that prides itself in not only knowing it is a joke, but making a joke of how much of a joke it is.
When applied well, there are certainly times where this works. Looking at some examples from the past few years, 21 Jump Street capitalized on the crappiness of its genre with fast wit and tongue-in-cheek aplomb, while The Cabin inthe Woods is, in my opinion, one of the better horror comedies to grace the screen of late—if just for its delightfully gory third act.
But now, it seems that any and every (successful) movie with comedy has self-referential comedy in it. There was The Lego Movie, which — to its credit — needed this awareness and still serves as the best comedy of the year. And then there was Muppets Most Wanted, which was fine, solely because the Muppets have always been self-aware, and are funny about 95 percent of the time anyway.
But after those, it started to get a little irksome. Just this summer, there was Neighbors, A Million Ways to Die in the West, 22 Jump Street, They Came Together, Let’s Be Cops and Guardians of the Galaxy —all of which took pride in saying over and over, “Oh, don’t worry. We get the joke.”
For the most part, the strategy works for most of these movies, which makes criticizing them something of a bizarre, backhanded compliment. But it’s not about the films so much as it’s about the approach. The reason why self-aware comedy worked in its traditional sense was because it dealt with a select few being aware of the joke.
It was like the one guy in class who was able to see through the BS and get away with sarcastically making fun of it. But if everyone is laying back and being sarcastic, there is no rhyme or reason to everything. There’s no joke, because nobody is out of the picture. It’s just preaching to the choir, and then it is no longer self-aware comedy. It’s just the norm.
So, perhaps this isn’t a criticism but a warning: Slow down on the self-aware stuff. It’s cute, but the wear and tear is starting to show. If you don’t slow it down now — and considering how much money some of these movies made, they won’t — comedy is going to become stale.
But hey, maybe that will be when self-aware comedy will be funny again. Someone will finally see the joke within the joke within the joke.
Will Ashton is a senior studying journalism and a writer for The Post. Email him at wa054010@ohio.edu.
