Laura Merrell
With Johnny Knoxville’s Bad Grandpa number one at the box office right now and the release of Anchorman 2 right around the corner, I find myself wondering if good comedy is dead. It isn’t extinct yet, but the likes of comedians such as Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler are dragging it down. If anyone takes issue with my authority to render verdicts on these comedians, I will counter by mentioning that I have sat through multiple films by both “actors.”
My largest problem with their comedic style is that they fall back on crude sexual humor for lack of other options. I have no problem with explicit humor such as Louis C.K.’s standup, but there are standards. Will Ferrell, the comedic genius driving Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Semi-Pro, relied on delivering sexually explicit phrases while scrunching up his face. The humor in his movies is forced. Other actors or comedians know they’re funny, he feels that he has to prove it to you by saying lines such as, “Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which, of course, in German means a whale’s vagina” from Anchorman. Picking a word and saying what it means in another language seems to be one of Ferrell’s go to moves, but it gets stale very fast. He is a one trick pony.
I’m not arguing that all humor has to be smart. The performances of Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber, John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles and anything involving The Three Stooges can attest to this. But stupid humor can’t be one-dimensional. It requires a varied approach. Ferrell’s versatility seems to be the volume at which he speaks, which fluctuates from a whiny yell to a loud roar. Or his ability to pick a profession such as a race car driver, basketball player, or news anchor, try to parody it in a half-assed manner and cover up any deficiencies with immature, awkward humor and some references to genitalia sprinkled in for good measure.
Adam Sandler, who brought us You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Jack and Jill and Click, also suffers from similar problems. Take the first movie, for example. The opening scene centers on Sandler as Zohan catching a fish in between his buttocks to a round of applause. I saw this in theaters during high school and recall that while there was shock value during that cinematic moment; nobody actually laughed.
I came across a review of the movie by David Edelstein of New York Magazine that said: “Like Will Ferrell, Sandler has layers of tenderness under layers of irony under layers of tenderness.” Were we watching the same movie?
There’s nothing ironic or unforced about either of their styles. They rely on a few tired moves for lack of other options. Their saving grace could be if their comedy ultimately tried to deliver a political or social message. Other than toying with the subject of sexism in the workplace in Anchorman and the messy realm of election politics in The Campaign, Ferrell has stayed away from both.
Comedy greats, such as Peter Sellers and Groucho Marx, were successful because they were multi-faceted comedians. They could do accents, impersonations, witty word play, facial expressions and physical comedy. While those two examples aren’t current, modern comedic actors such as Robin Williams and Amy Poehler carry on that same ability to be funny in a variety of different ways. Stupid comedy doesn’t have to be smart, but it does have to be good.