This shit is exactly what brooks and the zuckermans used to do. Cheap laughs on pop culture rips with outrageous bits in R-Rated fashion. But times change.
I don't care much for shit made after those planes slammed into the world trade towers either. It's as if those events sucked all creative expression out of the united states overnight. Movies. Music. Games. It all went to shit. Reality television took over. The news threatened to let your family die if you didn't watch their nightly special on whatever was going to kill it next.
But god damn it- stuff like this is in the spirit of the 80's cheese that people consider "classics" these days. You can't say something is great just because it's old and then discount it's modern day counterpart as trash. Well you could. You'd be an asshole though.
Except Brooks did actual funny things. Why are those movies considered funny when "Meet the Spartans" is considered terrible? The main reason is Theme.
Spaceballs: A movie making fun mostly of Star Wars. There were other things thrown in, but it was almost entirely Star Wars jokes and related humor. What wasn't Star Wars was still sci fi humor.
Meet the Spartans: Mostly pop culture references, and jokes made about several different movies that had come out in the years preceeding. They did a much better job of sticking with thier theme but still watered it down with just random shots of references.
But also, the Brooks movies were funny in and of themselves. You can have completely missed Star Wars and still get Spaceballs. Yet you probably weren't going to see "Meet the Spartans" unless you saw 300. Spaceballs had comedy that related to stuff, and just comedy, while Spartans had just dry humor that tried to work from itself.
These movies try to do too much at a time. They should try more to focus on one thing, and then throw in an occasional laugh or two. The old spoofs had a bit of sillyness in them, but they were regulated. It was cartoony, Looney Tunes type humor, but it was reigned in before going to far, and they were usually subtle with it. The new spoofs seem to almost have a man in a silly hat jumping up and down and pointing at thier joke going "Look! Laugh! LAUGH!"
I don't usually go out for comedies but sometimes I do. I love Spaceballs, Robin Hood:Men in Tights, Hotshots, Loaded Weapon,ect...but I doubt I'd even WANT to see this movie if it were free. But to each his own I guess.
The theme of "you can't parody comedy" has become central to this thread. I want to harp on that, because of how very true that is.
Parody (see wiki entry [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody] for further enlightenment) is at the heart of much of comedy. Consider Tom Lehrer's song, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY]. It's light, it's cheery, it talks about being in love and enjoying the spring and taking in the beauty of nature and KILLING INNOCENT CREATURES FOR YOUR OWN AMUSEMENT. There's not specific parody in there, but the spirit of parody is present. It imitates love songs and celebrations of nature, but it destroys them as well, and that is where the humor lies.
This works because it's jarring. It takes something we find serious or normal and perverts it, and the contrast spurs the laughs.
Now, how are you supposed to parody this? The result would be an imitation of an imitation, a twist of a twist. It's too meta. The clashing contrast is all gone. All the humor has been sucked out.
Of course, not all comedy is parody. To quote Mel Brooks, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." He also said: "Humor is just another defense against the universe." The first quote explains the other essence of comedy, and the second reveals why that works. We laugh at pain, at failure, at pathetic attempts to overcome. Look at Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Do they parody something? I can't say for sure. Do they present pain and failure for our amusement? They certainly do.
Now, consider trying to parody a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. How would you make it funny? For that matter, how would you make it any different from the source material and still have it be recognizable as a parody? You can't twist it, spoof it or pervert it, because there's nothing to twist. You can imitate it and reference it, but you can't parody it.
While we're on the subject of comedy, let's talk about what comedy is intended to provoke: laughter. Laughter is infectious, but it's also predatory. People laugh at a joke, but not forever. I would say that laughter is the equivalent of digesting humor. Comedy's job is to to find humor, extract it, and feed it to us, and we gulp it down with a chuckle. Making a parody of a comedy is like trying to extract nutritional value out of feces. All the humor has already been digested, and any remaining pickings are very slim indeed.
As I wrote this, there was a thought in my mind: you could make a very effective parody of a comedy if you didn't intend it to be funny. Mel Brooks called humor our defense against the universe. What if we took the painful elements of comedy and stripped away the protective humor? It would hurt, and I believe it could be made to hurt in a good way. After all, I have watched and enjoyed many films with sad endings, and I think that comedy has a tendency to treat subjects with a flippancy that the subjects do not deserve. A non-funny parody could serve nicely to shed a harsh light on the things that comedy prefers to gloss over.
Excuse me while I let my mind wander, but this talk of non-funny parodies reminded me of Batman: The Killing Joke [http://www.comicvine.com/the-killing-joke/39-40503/]. Consider the following images:
If comedy is our defense against pain, and all of life is pain, then the best thing to do is laugh a lot, right? Right?
Sometimes, no amount of laughter can protect you. How could you possibly laugh at something that mean, that close to you? Better to never laugh again.
The quintessential image of Alan Moore's Joker, and a great example of predatory laughter. I can almost feel him devouring all the humor in the universe.
Yes, here we can see both the point of comedy and its dark side. It protects us from pain, but it also delights in it. A parody of a parody takes away all the protection from pain and puts all the emphasis on delighting in it. Little wonder, then, that trying to play the result for laughs so often fails.
In conclusion, Tom Lehrer is funny, the Joker is awesome, tragedy is good for the soul, an expose of comedy would be nice, and "The 40 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It" is the worst idea since Operation Northwoods [http://www.smeggys.co.uk/operation_northwoods.php].
EDIT: It is real. Who the fuck keeps giving these guys funding?! None of their movies are any good! What makes Hollywood think we're going to see this shitfest of cinema?!
Seriously... These parodies of movies are getting worse and worse. The production company that makes these things needs to shut down. Their movies are stupid, vulgar, and did I mention stupid? There's no real humor in them.
EGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG...
(clicks play button)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...
(turns to look again)
WHY DO I KEEP DOING THIS TO MYSELF GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
I hate you hollywood. These movies have sunk to sub-Troll 2 level proportions of quality, and have about as many funny jokes as schindler's list (apologizes to everyone involved in that movie for comparing them to a genre movie).
This is real [http://www.google.com/search?q=The+40+Year+Old+Virgin+Who+Knocked+Up+Sarah+Marshall+and+Felt+Superbad+About+It&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-29,GGGL:en].
Those movies are so damn lazy. All they do is recycle jokes from the movies they are "parodying," adding little additional humor, more often times simply making the jokes cringe-worthy. I feel bad for the actors, I'm fairly certain starring in one of those pieces of shit guarantees they will never be allowed to participate in a serious movie.
Why was this abomination allowed to be created? This is gonna be exactly like Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans, two of the worst movies ever made. This is just another attempt to cram as many pop culture references in as possible and not make a SINGLE GOOD JOKE! Words escape me. This is clearly a Soviet humor movie, i.e. the only way you could ever laugh at any of this crap would be if a Russian gentleman with an AK-47 stood behind you and gently poked the barrel into the back of your neck in order to encourage you to laugh. If any movie deserves to bomb at the theaters, it's this one. My faith in humanity just dropped by 45%.
I chuckled at the nipple joke in this. Then again, I also laughed at the slo-mo titty twister in Meet the Spartans... I gave four of my friends purple nurples today... I'm seeing a connection here.
This is what happens when Judd Apatow is allowed to film 8 movies in 2 years(Exaggeration) ...
Also, This film is going to bomb harder than Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie and all the other fucking retarded parodies they make, where is the fucking originality in cinema these days?!
You sir make a very good point and I agree with you. I think thats part of the problem with all these parrodies. Hey is that when Barbara Gordon became handicapped? And why was the Joker Melting?
lodo_bear said:
The theme of "you can't parody comedy" has become central to this thread. I want to harp on that, because of how very true that is.
Parody (see wiki entry [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody] for further enlightenment) is at the heart of much of comedy. Consider Tom Lehrer's song, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY]. It's light, it's cheery, it talks about being in love and enjoying the spring and taking in the beauty of nature and KILLING INNOCENT CREATURES FOR YOUR OWN AMUSEMENT. There's not specific parody in there, but the spirit of parody is present. It imitates love songs and celebrations of nature, but it destroys them as well, and that is where the humor lies.
This works because it's jarring. It takes something we find serious or normal and perverts it, and the contrast spurs the laughs.
Now, how are you supposed to parody this? The result would be an imitation of an imitation, a twist of a twist. It's too meta. The clashing contrast is all gone. All the humor has been sucked out.
Of course, not all comedy is parody. To quote Mel Brooks, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." He also said: "Humor is just another defense against the universe." The first quote explains the other essence of comedy, and the second reveals why that works. We laugh at pain, at failure, at pathetic attempts to overcome. Look at Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Do they parody something? I can't say for sure. Do they present pain and failure for our amusement? They certainly do.
Now, consider trying to parody a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. How would you make it funny? For that matter, how would you make it any different from the source material and still have it be recognizable as a parody? You can't twist it, spoof it or pervert it, because there's nothing to twist. You can imitate it and reference it, but you can't parody it.
While we're on the subject of comedy, let's talk about what comedy is intended to provoke: laughter. Laughter is infectious, but it's also predatory. People laugh at a joke, but not forever. I would say that laughter is the equivalent of digesting humor. Comedy's job is to to find humor, extract it, and feed it to us, and we gulp it down with a chuckle. Making a parody of a comedy is like trying to extract nutritional value out of feces. All the humor has already been digested, and any remaining pickings are very slim indeed.
As I wrote this, there was a thought in my mind: you could make a very effective parody of a comedy if you didn't intend it to be funny. Mel Brooks called humor our defense against the universe. What if we took the painful elements of comedy and stripped away the protective humor? It would hurt, and I believe it could be made to hurt in a good way. After all, I have watched and enjoyed many films with sad endings, and I think that comedy has a tendency to treat subjects with a flippancy that the subjects do not deserve. A non-funny parody could serve nicely to shed a harsh light on the things that comedy prefers to gloss over.
Excuse me while I let my mind wander, but this talk of non-funny parodies reminded me of Batman: The Killing Joke [http://www.comicvine.com/the-killing-joke/39-40503/]. Consider the following images:
If comedy is our defense against pain, and all of life is pain, then the best thing to do is laugh a lot, right? Right?
Sometimes, no amount of laughter can protect you. How could you possibly laugh at something that mean, that close to you? Better to never laugh again.
The quintessential image of Alan Moore's Joker, and a great example of predatory laughter. I can almost feel him devouring all the humor in the universe.
Yes, here we can see both the point of comedy and its dark side. It protects us from pain, but it also delights in it. A parody of a parody takes away all the protection from pain and puts all the emphasis on delighting in it. Little wonder, then, that trying to play the result for laughs so often fails.
In conclusion, Tom Lehrer is funny, the Joker is awesome, tragedy is good for the soul, an expose of comedy would be nice, and "The 40 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It" is the worst idea since Operation Northwoods [http://www.smeggys.co.uk/operation_northwoods.php].
Yet another pile of shit from the movie franchise? Oh god. scary movie was alright but now there's been date movie, meet the spartans, epic movie, superhero movie, disaster movie and now this, non of them are funny. The reason these keep getting made is because of people like my friends, who saw epic move 3 years ago, thought it was funny then decided to watch disaster move (and dragged me along, biggest waste of £7 ever) only to realise that neither where funny they where just immature back then. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=af08 perfectly sums it up.
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