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Welcome to my first Rushfield Rant, a new series where I talk open smack about an industry, with takes too hot to write down.
Of all the plagues bedeviling the industry, none is as infuriatingly self-inflicted and pointless as the complete and total retreat of the film studios from the comedy genre.
Comedy — one of Hollywood’s original genres; purveyor of its greatest stars for a hundred years: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, The Marx Brothers, Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, Marilyn Monroe, on down to Kevin Hart and Melissa McCarthy, with a thousand in between.
The story of the cinema cannot be told without comedy. The films we remember, quote repeatedly and refer to often are heavily weighted towards comedies — think Caddyshack or Anchorman. Decade in and decade out, new comic talents were born to create another wave of hits — and with relatively cheap movies. Especially compared to multiversing CGI spectacles, comedies are almost free.
So, of course, Hollywood stopped making them. Entirely.
Didn't just cut back the output or slow it down. Actually disappeared them from the screen as a genre of its own.
I’ve written about this probably 40 times in the past few years, assuming that as soon as we call it to the studios’ attention, the people in charge will realize the oversight and fix it. (Excuse me! Don’t want to bother, but you seem to have forgotten to greenlight half the cultural spectrum.)
But after all the complaints, all the letters in the suggestion box, all the money being made on live touring by comedians and stand-up specials, nothing.
Actually, not nothing. This weekend, we got The Naked Gun, and sitting on a Sunday afternoon in a sold-out auditorium with a room full of people laughing from start to finish was such a foreign experience, I wondered if I should summon the mall medical staff to see if something was terribly wrong here.
But a theater full of people leaving in delight from the shared experience — that’s the sort of thing a medium fighting for its life should want more of, right? At least one more of?
Well…...
