Last week I did music. This week, as I wheel around the limited range of themes I address in my blog, I find myself delighted to land on grumpy again.
I love my grumpy posts. I feel like these are the times when I get to expose the real me – the man behind the mask. So here we go. It’s time to get grumpy. And the target for my grumpiness is possibly the least likely topic you could think of. Funny movies.
Funny movies shouldn’t get you grumpy. Funny movies should have the opposite effect. Funny movies should make you laugh and feel happy, and elevate you away from the tedium of the world.
I can’t tell you how grumpy funny movies make me.
Every time I see a new release movie that purports to be funny, one thing hits me. I feel like there’s a very minimal vein of humour that stretches across most of these movies. The humour of bad behaviour.
What do I see when I watch those movies? Adults behaving badly. Kids behaving badly. Authority figures behaving badly. Parents behaving badly. Pretty much just everyone behaving badly.
It seems the basic assumption underpinning all of these films is the idea that bad behaviour, in and of itself, is inherently funny. The worse the behaviour, the funnier it must be.
Well I’m here today, in all my grumpy glory, to say it isn’t.
It can be. Like everything else, there’s a time and a place for bad behaviour. When it’s part of a good mix of other funny stuff, bad behaviour can be very funny.
But when bad behaviour becomes the only driver of humour, it stops being funny. It ends up being, kind of, just, bad.
I remember back in the good old days, when funny movies had so much more than bad behaviour. They had wit, and they had dialogue, and they had cleverly designed set-ups and well-structured payoffs. They might have had a bit of bad behaviour here and there, but they had so much more.
But hey, what would I know. Obviously people are going to see these movies. Presumably, enough of those people going to see these movies think they’re funny, because they must keep going back and seeing more. Otherwise, why would they keep making them?
So yay! That’s my grumpy rant for today. Funny movies are so full of little more than bad behaviour that they’re just not funny anymore, at least not in the grumpy old world that I inhabit.
But I will say one good thing about them. They’ve given me a topic for a right old grumpy post, and that’s got to be a good thing.
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