4

Is comedy a dead genre for movies?

posted by jobes on AskPhuks

I was having a discussion with my brother last night, and it was actually extremely difficult for us to come up with a relatively recent comedy movie that either of us truly liked, or liked enough that we would watch it a second time. We decided to scroll through all of the comedies offered by Netflix and HBO GO, and after ~15 minutes of looking came up with only about a handful of available movies we would watch...4 of which we had already seen multiple times.

What do you think? Am I just living under a rock, or are all of these new comedy movies generally terrible? I fear we will never have another comedy great like Rodney Dangerfield making movies because of all of this PC nonsense that has been spreading like a plague.

I was having a discussion with my brother last night, and it was actually extremely difficult for us to come up with a relatively recent comedy movie that either of us truly liked, or liked enough that we would watch it a second time. We decided to scroll through all of the comedies offered by Netflix and HBO GO, and after ~15 minutes of looking came up with only about a handful of available movies we would watch...4 of which we had already seen multiple times. What do you think? Am I just living under a rock, or are all of these new comedy movies generally terrible? I fear we will never have another comedy great like Rodney Dangerfield making movies because of all of this PC nonsense that has been spreading like a plague.

12 comments

[–] jobes [OP] 2 points (+2|-0)

That does a good job of explaining a lot of types of content that are missing from so many movies. The constant dialog-only comedy is very bland in so many movies. I'd rather watch Rodney Dangerfield sitting in a chair telling jokes for 6 minutes than almost any recent American comedy.

[–] TheRedArmy 2 points (+2|-0)

In terms of big budget comedy movies, I completely agree. Things like Pop Star and Office Christmas Party is the most basic, slapped together shit you'll find in Hollywood movies, for the most part. "Oh look, a guy did something crazy and hi-jinks ensued. It's so funny!" No thanks.

There are some smaller movies that come out - as recently as last year - that are primarily comedies and actually look rather good, but they don't get wide released at all, and there seems to be little to no marketing for these things, so I don't even hear about them until after the fact. So I think decent US comedies exist, but you have to look for them, and you won't find them in most theaters.