Recently the popular film website Indiewire published a list of the greatest comedies of the 21st century. As with many similar attempts, it was widely derided. At the very top was Alexander Payne’s Sideways (that famous laugh riot about two lonely wine buffs who, in the course of alienating everybody around them, offer up a bleak portrait of existential desperation) while Lost In Translation and The Grand Budapest featured in the top 10.
These films aren’t devoid of the odd amusing moment—for instance, this writer was memorably seated right next to Michael Portillo for Lost In Translation, and can report that the politician guffawed during the famous “lip my stocking” scene—but something seems to be amiss.
Though the lower reaches of the list are populated with more obviously "funny" stuff (such as Girls’ Trip, or The Death of Stalin), in 2021, the very idea of comedy films has an intangibly archaic feel.
In the United States, two discrete eras of film comedy stand out: the 1930s and 1940s, which saw the arrival of screwball comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday; and the late 1970s and 1980s, which inaugurated the heyday of stand-up comedians and graduates of television sketch comedy. They famously transitioned to cinema in films such as The Jerk, Coming to America or Three Amigos.
This model of comedy would endure for years, with In Living Color alumnus Jim Carrey ruling the 1990s and Saturday Night Live breakout Will Ferrell taking up the baton in the 2000s. But that model has become increasingly fragile. Recent comedies with SNL stars such as Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (with Kristen Wiig), and Palm Springs (Andy Samberg) have ended up as streaming fodder. Admittedly, the pandemic has heightened—or hastened—what was already a trend for films to head to streaming, but the tendency has been present for a while. The films have been admired, but are far from becoming anything approaching a cultural touchstone.
Why the death of film comedy? The dual explosions of television and the internet are in large part responsible. Cable television towards the end of the 1990s attracted ambitious comedy writers and performers, leading to what has become known—perhaps a little too uncritically—as the golden age of television. Television comedy had always existed, with studio-produced sitcoms like Roseanne and Seinfeld being held as classics of the form (the UK’s rough equivalents being Blackadder or Absolutely Fabulous), but there existed a pervasive sense that the two forms—cinema and television—were discrete. Television was enjoyed in the home—films called for a Friday night out at the cinema.
That is no longer the case in the age of streaming, when a TV series like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and a standalone comedy like The Forty-Year-Old Version are competing for your attention on the same platform. The explosion of ambitious, single-camera television comedies in the US, such as Sex and the City, must have contributed to this state of affairs. Indeed, putting together a similar list of era-defining TV comedies would be a doddle. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fleabag, Arrested Development, Catastrophe and The Office all feel like more accurate representations of our time than the disparate screen comedies of cinema. Perhaps because television comedy can invest in building a world, adding to jokes incrementally, which then become beloved reference points in our culture—from Arrested Development's “It’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost? Ten dollars?” to the “what the fuck?” reaction shot, from Veep.
Also fighting comedy films for our attention are the sketch comedians of the modern era, who have taken to distilling the very essence of humour into bite-sized vignettes. For instance, the comedian Elsa Majimbo posts miniature skits, several times a week, to 2.3m followers on Instagram; Oneya D’Amelio, also known as Angry Reactions, posts to 20.7m followers on Tiktok.
In these videos, comedy is not a complete story with a beginning, middle and end—it has become something else. It is an interstitial performance, a nugget that slots into the course of your day. It makes a great lumbering dinosaur out of a 120-minute screen show. Furthermore, the internet—with its dizzying variety of shows, videos and users—has splintered viewing habits and reference points across generations. Screen comedies relying on group excursions surely have a harder task ahead of them in bridging the gap and bringing people together.
Film comedies haven’t disappeared—Borat 2 still got made in 2020 (albeit for far smaller returns than the first instalment)—but the form itself is in transit, evolving and branching out into a multiplicity of approaches that reflect the diverse and pulsating world we now live in. The big screen has more to give, once cinemas reopen after this long pandemic, but inarguably they no longer represent the prime home for comedy.
