What's wrong with today's comedies (Part 2)

Yesterday I theorized that the reason today’s movie comedies can’t hold a candle (or a bell, or even a book) to the comedies of 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s is that the comedies of today star and, in large part, are produced by second-rate comics (Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock—you all know who you are) who are not great shakes as actors. On the other hand, all the great comedies of yesteryear featured excellent dramatic actors. I used Dr. Strangelove as an example only because this notion struck me while watching Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece yesterday.

Well, I watched it again today and I realized that why great actors are needed to make comedies work is because they inherently know you must play the part straight to make it truly funny. They don’t play the scene for laughs — they trust their ability enough to know the laughs will come. Look at the above scene. If you read that dialog on a piece of paper it isn’t funny. I had the opportunity to read the M*A*S*H film screenplay. It is painfully unfunny. Yet, played by the actors cast in the picture under the direction of the master, Robert Altman, M*A*S*H becomes one of the funniest films ever made.

Today’s comedians think comedies are nothing more than a series of gag reels and so they rely on physical humor—too often crude physical humor— to try to make you laugh. A turd in a bowl of soup is less funny than the written dialog in M*A*S*H or the written script from the above Strangelove scene, but what today’s comedian/filmmakers don’t realize is that type of physical humor is just as unfunny when transposed to the screen.

As the great Philip Wuntch so wisely pointed out, it also helps that yesteryear’s comedies had the benefit of superior scripts. And they did. But let’s look at who wrote those scripts. Bringing Up Baby, considered the height of screwball comedy, was written by Dudley Nichols. I’m not sure he wrote another comedy in his illustrious career that included such screenplays as the original Stagecoach, Scarlet Street, And Then There Were None, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Hurricane, The Informer, The Lost Patrol, just to name a few. The extremely literate script of The Lady Eve is the work of Monckton Hoffe as in, “Who in the hell is Monckton Hoffe?” His Girl Friday was written by Charles Lederer who also wrote Kiss of Death, the film that illustrated the need for handicap ramps.

The point I’m trying to make here is even the great comedies of yesteryear were cast with great dramatic actors but also featured screenplays by writers who made their mark mostly with dramas (if they made a lasting mark at all).

In other words, they all knew how to play it straight. They knew it was best not to try to force or try to illicit laughter from the audience, but to let it flow naturally from the situation. Today’s writers/comedians ought to follow their example.