Is Comedy Dead?
It’s a lousy time to be a comedy film. Once a reliable pillar of Hollywood box office revenue, the comedy has watched itself become almost entirely insignificant. Nearly every giggle-adjacent film to come out this year has bombed, from Booksmart to The Beach Bum to Long Shot to Late Night and so on. When Good Boys became only the second comedy film this year to debut at number one, the industry was shocked. As Comscore media analyst Paul Dergarabedian put it, “This is like a unicorn sighting.”
The overall trends confirm that sentiment; total box office revenue for comedies shrank from 2.5 billion in 2009 to a scant 1 billion in 2018, and in the same year, comedies accounted for only 8.4% of all domestic box office revenue. So, what’s the deal with comedy films? Is comedy deader than a bad yo’ mama joke?
Currently, consumers have more options for watching content than ever before, from sing-a-longs on TikTok to streaming whatever your heart desires on Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Vudu, and a slew of other platforms. As a result, fewer people are dragging their butts off the couch to go to the movies, and studios in the United States are taking a major hit. The only way to deal with this is to start selling your stuff elsewhere; as in, overseas. Right now, studios are peddling their wares in places like China, Japan, India, and France. This is reflected in the numbers: In 2018, Warner Brothers earned $1.9 billion in North America, compared to a far more substantial $3.6 billion overseas.
Making a movie that appeals to an international audience is kind of a no-brainer: Big budget, spectacle-driven action and superhero films tend to translate pretty well. They’re less dialogue-heavy, which means less dubbing or subtitling, which also means less squinting at the screen. In contrast, comedies are typically pretty dialogue-driven, and rely substantially on cultural specificity. Just consider the way The Office migrated from Britain to the United States, transforming substantially to match America’s unique brand of humor. That’s before it was exported to India, Chile, Finland, and more, to be changed all over again. Comedy is really hard to get right, and it’s nearly impossible to get right in a cross-cultural context.
But, as anyone who has seen It Chapter Two knows, theaters across the ‘ol US of A are still booming with laughter. Marvel movies earn their share of giggles, and Jordan Peele’s created a new market of serious comedy-horror. All of which is to say… something funny is amiss.
Film scholar Geoff King’s book Film Comedy perfectly articulates the phenomena we are currently seeing in American film. Specifically, King proposes that the term “genre” is too limited a lens for understanding comedy, which is “so widespread as to be difficult to locate as a single or stable generic… form.” He argues that comedy actually functions more like a mode. The difference is subtle but meaningful.
Quite simply, a genre is a category of film. For instance, the classic American musical will typically contain songs woven into the storyline, choreographed dancing, and a love story. If a film has all three of these qualities, it’s probably a musical. In contrast, a mode is a “manner of presentation.” A mode evokes a mood, and try saying that five times fast.
For example, both Get Out and Shazam! use a comedic mode, even though the former is a horror film, and the latter is a superhero flick (or at least that’s what it was going for). The point is that since any genre has the potential to contain comedy, comedy is more of a mode than simply a genre.
While the comedy as a genre might be floundering at the box office, we’re still laughing our butts off at the theater. This suggests that comedy is alive and well — but as a mode. In King’s description, comedic modality doesn’t just mean fart jokes — it also includes music, sound, opening sequences, and even movie posters. Every element of filmmaking can contribute to comedy, from Tim Heidecker’s kickass performance in Us to the high-school powerpoint at the beginning of Spider-Man: Far From Home.
That’s not to say that the recent box office returns of overtly comedic films isn’t troubling. The idea of a world without Dumb and Dumber is too disturbing to even contemplate. But we can all take solace in the knowledge that, even though the genre may be going away, the laughs sure won’t.
This article has been adapted from a Wisecrack YouTube video.
