Has Hollywood woke-ism killed comedy? Consider a couple of lists of the greatest comedies. While I’m not impressed with any list that rates the frankly boring, one-joke This Is Spinal Tap as the greatest comedy (The Bad News Tour is a much better comedy on the same theme), the rest of the list is pretty solid. IMDB’s list is better, while Empire’s has too much dreck mixed in with the gold. Still, as comedy is probably more subjective than most genres, you’re never going to please everyone.
But there’s one thing notable about every list of comedy greats: there are no movies from the last decade in any of them. In fact, the most recent are often nearly 20 years old.
Perhaps that’s just a function of rose-tinted nostalgia. If comedy is tragedy plus distance, comedic greatness may be comedy plus distance.
But it doesn’t seem like it. It seems much more likely that something else has happened — that comedy really is dead.
And wokeism killed it.
Hollywood has forgone to produce anything that could be considered non-woke, according to comedy stars Theo Von and Adam DeVine.
In a video from Theo Von Clips, Von and DeVine sat down and talked about the demise of comedy in the movie industry. DeVine attributed much of its decline to left-wing undertones and Marvel movies.
Is that because Marvel movies have become so bad that they’re inadvertent comedies? If only it were so. The reality is that they’ve become so bad that they’re just bad.
But they are expensive — and that’s a level of spectacle that comedy by its nature can’t match.
“Superhero movies kind of ruined comedies, because… you go to the theater and you expect to watch something that costs $200 million to make and comedy movies aren’t that,” DeVine said talking about customers.
But, beyond inuring audiences to anything that isn’t non-stop, CGI flash-and-bang, Hollywood has done something much more insidious to comedy.
The two detailed that the entertainment industry has been shrinking the amount of comedy produced and suppressing non-woke content. Instead, Hollywood has been spreading left-wing undertones about “global warming” or to “recycle more.”
They joked that if Von made a movie about “transportation” (emphasis added) where vehicles change their identity, along with a scene where a “short bus admits that he’s a skateboard” and it was pitched to executives, the idea would be taken seriously.
“They wouldn’t laugh you out of the room,” said DeVine said.
Ren and Stimpy creator Jon Kricfalusi tells of how executives were puzzled by test audience reactions to his cartoons. They scored the lowest on every test-card metric. But there was something else: “People laughed more at yours”.
“Whatever happened to just ‘We want to make people laugh’?” DeVine asked.
Because, as Orwell said, “A thing is funny when it upsets the established order”. And if there’s one thing the ruling order in Hollywood cannot bear, it’s being upset.
And Von and DeVine have noticed the same thing I did: comedy seems to have died about a decade ago.
They named Superbad and The Hangover as examples of the last portion of comedy movies that made you laugh just because they were funny. The Hangover came out in 2009 and Superbad was released two years prior.
It’s not that some companies aren’t trying. But the offenderati are having none of it.
A recent example was of an attack on Dave Chappelle‘s Netflix special in 2021, the Closer, which made jokes about transgender people.
Outrage over the special was seen from multiple activist organizations and outlets condemning it for what one organization called, “anti-LGBTQ diatribes.”
Lines from the show included, “Gender is a fact” and “Every human being in this room, every human being on earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman.”
The Post-Millennial
As Orwell also said, “You cannot be really funny if your main aim is to flatter the comfortable classes”.
And that’s all Hollywood is in the business of doing, these days.