So now I move on to Part 2 of my series about dead comedy in cinema. Obviously like all comedy sequels it will be significantly worse than the first but you’re here now and you might as well read on, just be thankful that at least I warned you in advance unlike ‘Hangover 2’ or ‘Ted 2’ or any other less than stellar comedy sequel. Last time I looked at screwball, but the other dead form of comedy today seems to be parody. Where did all the parody films go?
Satire goes as far back as Charles Chaplin (because by the 1940s he was formal and grown up, slightly) with his first talking film ‘The Great Dictator’ that originally spawned because someone made a remark that Chaplin looked a bit like Hitler, and given that he was famously an outspoken critic of the Nazis long before World War 2, when war finally arrived in Europe Chaplin made his satire film about a dictator who was almost, not-quite-but-we-all-know-that-he-really-is, a complete caricature of Hitler. It was a huge hit (even more so today as back then there was some criticism, mostly from Germany) not just because of the jokes or the mockery it was due to the fact that Chaplin really did look like Hitler, a dictator reigning over an entire country, and this just made the idea of him being a complete buffoon even more hilarious, like giving a warlike speech that just turns into uncontrollable coughing or juggling an inflatable globe but all in the shape of someone so notorious.
Then the next serious parody was Mel Brooks’ ‘Young Frankenstein’. This had a similar brilliance to it in the sense that it took something very frightening and familiar in people’s minds and made it hilarious. Once again it came from the fact that Brooks was able to recreate the atmosphere and the mood of the original ‘Frankenstein’ so well that any silly or humorous modifications to it weren’t just amusing, they were hysterical. If you could sum it up in one way, I wouldn’t even say the comedic figures are idiots, they just happen to display some of the more notable flaws of humanity in the most serious of circumstances. You’ve got the fact that Igor is in such denial he does not even know he has a deformed spine, or instead of being called Frankenstein the Doctor insists that his students pronounce his name as Frank-en-steen. The contrast pf putting something so humorous next to such a detailed recreation of horror is what makes it truly special.
Mel Brooks had yet more success by parodying westerns with ‘Blazing Saddles’ and ‘science fiction with ‘Space Balls’. Then there were new arrivals with the Zucker Brothers/Abrahams team that would make ‘Hot Shots’, ‘The Naked Gun’ and of course ‘Airplane!’ They were all huge successes and seen by many as a new age in comedy that would last for a long time, they were seen as money makers came out as fast as they could. And that is exactly what killed them. Many imitators sprang up and thought they could nail this success with a simple formula; some references, slapstick, a bit of satire and you had it. In fact that first one seemed to be especially important, as it was theorized that the more references you could get into a movie, the more money it would make.
The problem with this tactic was that there wasn’t always something interesting or funny to say about these references, they were there for the sake of making it look like another movie instead of having something genuinely comical to do with it. Furthermore it made the movie feel crowded, more episodic and more like a TV series than a movie. The comedy was not focused, clever or very comedic. The result were poor efforts such as ‘Spy Hard’, ‘Wrongly Accused’ and even Mel Brooks seemed to be lacking in ‘Dead and Loving It’. Then the Zucker/Abrahams team went their own ways and found little success on their own, gradually making less and less money.
And so, parody movies were dead…. Until the summer of 2000 with ‘Scary Movie’. This one was different, not only did it make fun of horror films it paid special attention to the horror films of recent years to the movie’s release. They didn’t bother to see if the film would stand the test of time, they just went after it specifically while it was still fresh in people’s minds. Watching ‘Airplane!’ today, it’s still funny, watching ‘Scary Movie’, I don’t even remember half of the jokes or references. As well as this they weren’t just going after a specific genre either, sure they had parodies of horror like ‘The Exorcist, ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘The Shining’ and ‘Scream’. But they also threw out references to ‘Thelma and Louise’, ‘Boogie Nights’ and even ‘Schindler’s List’ (yeah because that’s a subject that’s ripe with potential humor). It also took a leaf out of the ‘American Pie’ book and injected a lot of gross out humor (and I mean really over the top, s**t in your face kind of gross out). But it was a huge success, so regardless of whether its quality rivalled Mel Brooks or not this was how parody movies could be successful again.
The only problem is it launched imitator after imitator and I will say now, I hate ‘Scar Movie’ even as a singular film. What I hate even more is what it launched, a decade of horrible comedy movies and the worst franchise in cinematic history ‘The Movie Movies’. They were all hastily made, horribly written, terribly acted and deliberately outrageous. By now they were not satirizing any particular film, any specific movie series or even a certain genre. They just threw in references to everything that was popular. None of it was clever or funny. Just look at this as an example, Epic Movie combines satires of ‘Borat’, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, ‘Narnia’, ‘X-Men’ and ‘Harry Potter’. What do any of those movies have in common other than the fact that they were all popular in 2007? Then you had ‘Disaster Movie’ that referenced ‘Juno’, ‘Iron Man’, ‘Amy Winehouse’ and ‘Kung Fu Panda’. Finally I’ll give you ‘Vampires Suck’, you’d think it would be pretty easy as there’s a lot of ‘Twilight’ and recent vampire craze related topics to poke fun at. But instead you have references to ‘Saturday Night Fever’, The Kardashians and Barack Obama. Why are they related, does ‘True Blood’ go hand in hand with the President of America, or am I just missing something?
I heard rumors that the writers didn’t even watch the movies they were parodying. They just saw production photos and made it look like that, then threw in every lazy, obvious, easy and zeitgeist related joke they could, maybe throw in an excrement or penis joke while you’re at it. This links in to another massive problem I have with these films, there’s just no love for the source material. Mel Brooks loved westerns and horror movies and even went as far as to ask George Lucas’ permission to make a ‘Star Wars’ parody. With the ‘Movie Movies’ the style just feels, if anything, mostly spiteful, as if the makers are hoping to use their films to demean the work of more talented filmmakers. Whereas the Zukcer Brothers had an affectionate and appreciating attitude towards their source material, they seem to make movies out of disdain, a contempt that they’ll never make anything as good as ‘The Shining’, ‘Inception’ or ‘Pulp Fiction’.
So parody may be dead on film, but it is still alive online. You have great comedy groups like ‘How It Should Have Ended’ or ‘Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers’. Then there are TV shows like ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘Mock the Week’, or the terrific work Dan Harmon is doing with ‘Community’ and ‘Rick and Morty’. Movie makers could really learn a lesson from them, as the best satires come from a real understanding of your source material, knowing what makes it work to capture its métiers while playfully recognizing its imperfections.
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