Whatever happened to comedy!

Subtle, sophisticated humour of the 1960s and 1970s has been
replaced by slapstick, puny, gross, below-the-belt jokes

WHATEVER happened to the Hollywood comedy? If the two recent releases Grown Ups and Dinner for Schmucks is any indication, well they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. In fact, we’ve not seen a good comedy in years.

Guess, humour itself has undergone a sea change and we seem to be back to slapstick (of the silent era), puny, gross, below-the-belt jokes that are unbearable and sick, like a five-year-old going to his mother’s breast for milk. Isn’t anything left for the imagination?

Where have scriptwriters like Billy Wilder and I.A. L. Diamond gone. And what about subtle, sophisticated humour as subtle as the ‘b’ in subtle. Surely not in the two above films, at least. Steve Carell is a weaker version of the old Jerry Lewis but even Lewis had Dean Martin to balance the act. Today, there are no famous comic pairs. May be, it is tougher to stick together in these times and climes.

Flashback to the late 1960s and 1970s and we had a wealth of talented comedy writers and classics like The Odd Couple (1968) Cactus Flower (1969), The Goodbye Girl (1977), Foul Play (1978) and The Front Page (1978). It was about the time that playwright Neil Simon was most prolific and his wife-of-the-time Marsha Mason starred in one of them The Goodbye Girl in which Richard Dreyfus won the Best Actor Oscar.

The renowned duo of Billy Wilder and Diamond also brought out a string of box-office hits like The Odd Couple, Out of Towners and Buddy Buddy among others. All these were above 7 on a scale of 1 to 10 whereas our two current ones would not climb to over 3. Surely a sad comment.

If Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were a regular pair, so were Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase and their first two efforts Foul Play and Seems Like Old Times really brought the house down. The first one is about two innocents in San Francisco getting involved in a plot to kill the visiting Pontiff. The next one is not far behind and established Chase as a comedian to be reckoned with, who then worked with others. But most of the talent was in the scripts, which today are totally lacking in both form and content.

Then too, subjects were well researched, like for example The Front Page which shed considerable light on journalism in the post-Watergate era. Gene Sacks directed Cactus Flower, which is a real scream with an ageing Ingrid Bergman in the lead supported by Walter Matthau and then newcomer Goldie Hawn. The variety of players and the content of the script matched to provide a non-stop laugh riot. Sacks also directed The Odd Couple which was among the early Lemmon-Matthau comedies.

Fast forward to our current times and what do we have?

Grown Ups, an avoidable dose of Americana, where the death of their basketball coach is the occasion for a reunion after 30 years. So far, so good. But the piffle they go through and the puerile manner in which they do it is surely irksome to say the least. There is much scope for nostalgia and warmth of the good old times but Adam Sandler has a way of running riot unless he has a good director and director Dennis Dugan is none the wiser. He goes with the flow, if you call this flow. All this was excusable in the silent era. Not today where the script is the thing.

Dinner for Schmucks is no better. Imagine a dinner to pick the biggest idiot. Steve Carell is bad as Adam Sandler, one who knows no restraint, As for the story, it plods on most pedestrian way and the only to look forward to is the end, precisely because it is the end. After all of 100-odd minutes, it finally comes, mercifully.

Why this deterioration, you may ask. Is it the easy access to the medium? Or the lack of professionalism? Or the absence of process of checks to ensure quality? Or just the know-all, do-all attitude without the desire to learn? May be a mix of a number of reasons but they have to get it right and fast if they want to compete with TV and home video.

HOME