Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler in 'Grown Ups'.
Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler in 'Grown Ups'.
Opinion by Alexander Larman
In 1998, the great film critic Roger Ebert saluted the release of There’s Something About Mary by writing: “What a blessed relief is laughter. It flies in the face of manners, values, political correctness and decorum. It exposes us for what we are, the only animal with a sense of humour.”
Ebert went on to describe the Farrelly brothers’ comedy as “an unalloyed exercise in bad taste” – affectionately – and praised it for containing “five or six explosively funny sequences”. He went on: “I love it when a movie takes control, sweeps away my doubts and objections and compels me to laugh. I’m having a physical reaction, not an intellectual one. There’s such freedom in laughing so loudly. I feel cleansed.”
Ebert died a decade ago, but it is inevitable that the joy that he felt in taking such pleasure from the gleefully tasteless likes of There’s Something About Mary would today be deeply compromised. Last weekend, the adult-oriented canine comedy Strays was released in cinemas, which concerns a group of abandoned dogs who reunite to take revenge on one of their neglectful owners. It received mixed reviews from critics, but most agreed with the Telegraph’s Tim Robey that the doggy antics constituted “the crudest comedy of the year – roughly, Jackass for canines, with all the genitalia and poo-based punchlines that might imply”.
In the not very distant past, this level of excessive messiness would have ensured talking-point status; Robey even commented that it’s “sometimes simply too gross for its own good”. Yet audiences appear no longer to care about such kennel-based comedy. Despite a starry voice cast including Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx and the now-ubiquitous Jamie Demetriou - and a surreal cameo from Dennis Quaid - the film is flopping at the box office, making a mere $8.3 million (NZ$14m) in its opening weekend in the United States. Inevitably, unless something changes over the coming weeks from positive word-of-mouth, this $46 million-budgeted (NZ$77.4m) picture is destined for the box office pound.
Strays has, at least, joined some distinguished company. The Jennifer Lawrence sex comedy No Hard Feelings has, on paper, been a reasonable box office success, making $86m (NZ$145m) worldwide on a budget of $46m (NZ$77.4m), but it has also been suggested that its actual production budget was as high as $70m (NZ$118m).
Its central conceit, of a 30-something woman being paid to take a shy young man’s virginity, has also attracted criticism. As one anonymous studio executive told Vulture: “I think this concept is terrible. When the first trailer came out people were like, ‘What the f***? Really? She’s going to sleep with some guy?’ It was so distasteful and weird that it just didn’t seem like a great idea.”
Others have simply flopped altogether. The much-hyped Joy Ride was expected to be the next Crazy Rich Asians, but despite decent reviews, it has stuttered to a mere $15m (NZ$25m) so far. Next up is the unfortunately named teen sex comedy Bottoms; despite being produced by Elizabeth Banks, it might be that its status as a “campy queer high school comedy in the vein of Wet Hot American Summer but more for a Gen-Z queer audience”, in the words of its writer-director Emma Seligman, will end up being too niche for mainstream audiences.
After all, if you can’t laugh at a group of foul-mouthed dogs voiced by A-list celebrities, what chance does a comedy about unpopular high school students trying to seduce cheerleaders by setting up their own fight club really have?
The great screenwriter William Goldman’s most quoted maxim about Hollywood is “nobody knows anything”. By and large, the late Goldman has been vindicated handsomely in this supposition. Yet for decades, there was one exception to this, and it was the certainty low-budgeted, adult-oriented comedies would almost inevitably make a lot of money.
The 1981 teen sex comedy Porky’s may have been crude and crass, but it was a vast hit – making $160m (NZ$269m) on a budget of a mere $5m (NZ$8.4m) – and even its increasingly dismal sequels, culminating in the absurdly named Porky’s Revenge!, were profitable, although to nowhere near the same extent. It followed on from the frat house farce National Lampoon’s Animal House, which made John Belushi a star and became the highest-grossing comedy of its time, making $141m (NZ$237m) on its budget of $3m (NZ$5m).
Audience tastes appeared to change little over the coming decades. After the enormous success of There’s Something About Mary, which grossed $370m (NZ$623m) worldwide (only $10m (NZ$16.8 million) less than the same year’s vastly hyped Godzilla, which had a budget six times the size) and American Pie and its two sequels, there seemed to be a guaranteed, riotous audience for films that combined traditional, even old-fashioned romantic comedy tropes with eye-popping scenes of gross-out revulsion: a strange combination, perhaps, but a hugely successful one. The guy may have got the girl, but he had to wade through all manner of bodily fluids first.
Thomas Ian Nicholas, Eddie Kaye Thomas and Jason Biggs in Universal's 'American Pie 2'.
The formula was successfully refined by Judd Apatow in the middle of the 2000s, with his pictures revolving around men-children being reluctantly dragged into adulthood, even as they impotently take refuge in recreational drugs and pop cultural allusions. The likes of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall were all critically acclaimed, commercially successful and hinted at a new maturity for the genre, where the female characters were as multi-faceted and believably flawed as the male ones.
This came to its fullest fruition in the 2011 Apatow-produced Bridesmaids, which proved women could handle gross-out comic duties with every bit as much aplomb and commitment as their male counterparts, and deservedly received an Oscar nomination for its script by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, too. Not bad for a film that contains, as its centrepiece, a moment when the assembled cast graphically succumb to food poisoning, and Melissa McCarthy, dressed in a designer gown, shouts, “It’s coming out of me like lava!”
It was soon followed by Seth MacFarlane’s 2012 Ted, revolving around the friendship of sorts between Mark Wahlberg’s immature slacker and the gruffly profane talking titular teddy bear (voiced, naturally, by MacFarlane). The film made a staggering $550m (NZ$926m) at the box office, suggesting audiences lapped up obscene words being spoken by a cuddly soft toy.
Melissa McCarthy, Ellie Kemper, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig star in 'Bridesmaids'.
Yet after the peerless success of Bridesmaids and Ted, the adult-themed comedy seems to have stuttered. None of Apatow’s subsequent films have enjoyed anything like the same critical or commercial success, and would-be edgy sex comedies like No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, each of which made around $150m (NZ$252m) at the box office, have proved harder to replicate in the post-#MeToo environment, in which filmmakers and audiences are both alert to anything that might smack of exploitation or misogyny. Ted’s sequel made considerably less than half the gross of the original. There has not been a third film.
The R-rated comedy did not disappear altogether – take the excellent and underrated 2018 picture Game Night, which moved away from sex in favour of a comic thriller plot – but it has proved harder and harder to sell. 2018′s Blockers, starring Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann and revolving around a trio of parents attempting to stop their children from losing their virginities on prom night, was a modest success, but its $94m (NZ$158m) gross was a world away from an American Pie or There’s Something About Mary. Even the 2008 Apatow-produced stoner comedy Pineapple Express made more money.
There are, of course, other ways of amusing audiences. Although the big-budget Tropic Thunder has attracted controversy ever since its release in 2008 and would almost certainly not be made today, it made a lot of money on release; nearly $200m (NZ$336.6m) to be precise. Sacha Baron Cohen has faded somewhat in recent years, so it is easy to forget what a phenomenon the first Borat film was on release, combining the (male) flesh-baring antics audiences expected with a subversively sly satire on race, ethnicity and America itself.
Brandon T. Jackson, Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black and Steve Coogman in Tropic Thunder.
In 2006, it proved hugely, ludicrously successful, giving millions of bores the opportunity to say “Is nice!” and not be pilloried for it. Its 2020 sequel bypassed cinemas due to its Covid-era release, but still managed to attract attention due to a scene in which Rudy Giuliani appears all too willing to be seduced by Maria Bakalova, the actress playing Borat’s teenage daughter. It was envelope-pushing, risky and controversial, and it worked; it is testament to the film’s success that Baron Cohen subsequently announced he would retire the character for his own safety, saying, “I’m going to stay with the scripted stuff.”
The Oscar-nominated Borats and Tropic Thunders remain exceptional, however. In their place are many more films like Blockers and Strays, which may, or may not, meet with decent reviews but seldom linger in the memory. The chances of another genuinely break-out hit – an Animal House or a Porky’s – in the genre seem virtually nil, and it isn’t hard to see why. For all its professed liberalism and adherence to socially conscious, even woke, ideology, Hollywood remains a conservative place, where the primary aim is for its pictures to make money.
If offensive comedies fail in this aim, they will stop being made, and their writers and directors will migrate to streaming services instead. Certainly, Rob McElhenney – the co-creator and star of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – seems to have no regrets about eschewing cinema altogether, although his Wrexham FC co-owner Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool superhero spoofs are some of the few adult-themed comedies that make any money right now. In their place, we can expect tamer, brighter comedies – the PG-13 rated gags of Barbie, rather than the considerably more louche humour of Joy Ride or No Hard Feelings.
Joy Ride.
The phenomenal box office success of Oppenheimer shows audiences are not put off by a film being aimed at adults (nor, indeed, three hours long), but also that they are keenly discerning in what they will pay money to go and see. The Barbenheimer phenomenon aside, 2023 is littered with flops; superhero films nobody cares about, the umpteenth instalment in franchises that should have died years ago and, it would appear, adult-oriented comedies adults don’t want to go and see and which even teenagers can’t be bothered to sneak into underage any more.
It would be easy to suggest to studios that they simply try to make better films, using little-known actors, innovative scripts and hungry directors. It was a formula that paid off time and time again in the past. But now, as the industry fears stagnation and potential terminal decline, even this form of risk-taking seems to be out. And this is a tragedy, both for anyone who cares about the future of cinema – or simply wants to go out for a ribald laugh on a Saturday night.
