The Decline and Fall of the Gag Comedy Film

What ever happened to the gag comedy? It seems to me that the genre had a golden age in the '70s, evident in such hits as the Mel Brooks and ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) had in that period (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Airplane!). Both remained productive even after, of course (Brooks at least having cult hits with History of the World, Part I (1981) and Spaceballs (1987), ZAZ bigger films like The Naked Gun), while others got in on the action, like Carl Reiner with The Man With Two Brains (1983), and Keenan Ivory Wayans in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988).

Still, by the '90s the genre was looking tired--in part, one supposes, of the approach having been exploited for so long, in the main by the same filmmakers (even if here and there you saw someone have some success, as Mike Myers did with Wayne's World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)). The genre had a bit of a revival with Wayans' Scary Movie (1999) by the end of the decade, but so far as I know no one seems to think the next wave of movies could really be compared with the first, with, quite the contrary, the most conspicuous producers of such film, the Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer team, not getting a particularly favorable treatment by the entertainment press. (Indeed, at the time of this writing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article regarding their critical reception reads: "The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been overwhelmingly negative.") The movies still get made, of course--but you are far more likely to find them on streaming than at "a theater near you."

What happened? Apart from the way the genre ran down, or particular "bad movies" turning the public off of the form, I think the culture changed. Gag comedies tended to be structured around a parodic narrative spoofing some well-known cinematic genre. In doing so Brooks and ZAZ had the benefit of an audience they could assume to share a longer pop cultural memory, all as pop culture continued to churn out material that, on some level, at least had some claim to novelty, enough of it to launch if not a new genre then a new wave of films that would make its own clichés off of which to play rather than reusing those of another era. Thus Brooks and ZAZ offered parodies of the Western, Universal Studios-style horror, the old-time historical epic, the post-Star Wars space movie boom, exploitation films, the Airport-style disaster movie, and so on (while in 1980 ZAZ could expect an appreciable number of their viewers to remember who Ethel Merman was). By contrast Friedberg and Seltzer, limiting themselves to what they could expect a relatively young audience to personally recall, in a time in which pop culture has become more fragmentary, and more ephemeral, and tended to rework the old rather than coming up with the new (arguably to diminishing returns), leaving them that much less to work with--just grab-bags of recent pop cultural material they often ended up merely referencing rather than mining for comedy, probably because no more could be done with it.

As that pop culture changed it may have not only deprived gag comedy-makers of material, but also obviated their approach, because now, in at least some degree, everything was a parody, everything was a gag comedy--to the point that the deadly serious Daniel Craig Bond films brought in a new Q who quipped that they don't make the old-style gadgets anymore, while Star Wars: Episode VIII was a long exercise in flippancy toward the saga. Listening to the throne-room dialogue I imagine a good many people must have thought: "This isn't Star Wars. This is Spaceballs!" And how do you make a Spaceballs out of a movie that is already Spaceballs? Would it be worth bothering to do so even if you could?

One may say that not just the niche that gag comedies had occupied disappeared, but so had the whole pop cultural ecosystem of which they were a part.

NOTE: This item is a follow-up to my earlier post about "The Rise of the Gag Comedy."