Lol me looking at this list and thinking 2018 was a great year for comedy for having "Blockers", "Game Night", and "Tag". I can't tell if you actually watched these or they just didn't deserve mention, but if not you should give one of them a watch. Game night barely beats out blockers on RT at 85%
Here to recommend "Blockers" as well - was a highlight of that year. It's about teen girls trying to lose their virginities *and their overprotective fathers trying to stop them*. In retrospect I think it avoided many of the pitfalls you laid out here.
Sure, it's a female-led story and a superficial analysis would call it gender-bent American Pie, but so much of the laughter comes from John Cena and crew stumbling around, chasing the rest of the cast around the whole movie.
I had been reading this thinking you must not have kids. Then I get to the end and you say maybe you're too busy with your 3 kids. Huh. I feel like animation is where the funny films are at these days. The Bad Guys is a fantastic comedy heist movie that happens to star talking animals. The Croods and its sequel had some hilarious moments. My family recently rewatched Flushed Away and I was delighted by some of the very clever humour in that.
Or are you taking a definition of comedy that excludes animation and/or family films just on principle?
I didn’t like the Bad Guys. Croods had charm. I mention Minions at the end - which is a better example. Great series.
But I do think they are a different kind - the family comedy. No obvious down tick, I agree, though for my money Monsters Inc and Shrek are the best and their days are behind them also (and query whether you could make the original Shrek today)
One tangential question I have asked before is: why does Disney have *zero* quality sequels, yet other animated sequels are some of the best out there?
The Bad Guys was great, but it’s a movie aimed at children (my wife and I liked it; our kids liked it). He’s talking about adult comedies, exploring themes for grown-ups (including wacky gross-out stuff). I can’t think of any at all since, yes, Bridesmaids.
However good The Bad Guys was, if people are watching it with their buddies in college, comedy (and the culture in general) is in serious trouble.
Strong case for the decline of comedy. One show that I think bucks the trend is Big Mouth. It has been consistently one of the funniest things I've seen on TV in years. And I continue to laugh at episodes I have now seen 6 or 7 times. It is coming of age and boy meets girl and gross out comedy and a whole lot more, and with some of the funniest people in the business right now. I can't gush enough about it, but I've said my piece. Thank you for interesting breakdown.
Concurrent with the "decline" of comedy in cinema is a golden era in television. The best comedic minds of the 2010s and onwards have flourished in the 30-minute serialized medium (Atlanta, Fleabag, Hacks, Key & Peele, Barry, Veep, What We Do in the Shadows, Ted Lasso, Ramy, Bojack Horseman... I could go on!). There's so much variety and diversity of perspectives!
Comedy is thriving in this medium because creative voices are being embraced and entrusted and are allowed to cater to niche audiences without consideration of how to monetize in theaters and / or globally.
To me, the biggest "loss" in the shift of great comedy moving from cinema to TV is the intimate scale of it; there's nothing like being in a packed theater sharing in laughs.
Would be interesting project to separate original comedies like "Mrs. Doubtfire" (1991) or "The Producers" (1967) from "meta" comedies like "Community" (2009-2015) or "21 Jump Street" (2012). My vague sense is that meta comedies have gotten more common and original comedies less even though the mass culture of mid-20th century America has disintegrated into a large number of media fandoms. Perhaps this is another driving force in the decline of comedy - another intra-genre trend (like feminization that you wrote about in point 1) popular with comedians, writers, directors, etc that isn't popular with audiences.
I was born a month after The Simpsons aired, so for the entirety of my life meta comedies have been hugely prominent. From early childhood onward I had a meta sensibility and now writers rooms are entirely staffed by people like me. I fear early exposure might be a deterrent to good comedy writing, as rather than developing that style in college (like a National Lampoon writer) you're in an ironic, referential, and straining to be clever loop that can't be broken.
I think that a lot of comedy has shifted to YouTube and podcasting. New talent will seek the easiest way into a field, especially transgressive talent. Transgressive talent will often favour new media because it has less of the rules that the existing media has. For example, Doug Stanhope prefers podcasting because he doesn't have to accept the content and form rules of radio.
It's also the case that comedy works fine in this media. Comedy isn't a high capital media like superhero movies. A talented comedy writer can make something with few costs except their own time. And by not working within a large system like TV, they get to keep all of the rewards.
You can even see this in previous eras, like painting lost most of the best talent in the 1940s as more people moved into fields like film making. Musical theatre declined in the late 60s as people went and became pop songwriters (Benny and Bjorn would have been like Rogers and Hammerstein if born 30 years earlier).
I consider myself a big fan of the comic arts. Or at least I once did.
I think there’s a certain “back in my day, the kids would get off my lawn” aspect to this article. I’m 58 and, like the majority of people in the prosperous West who have time to reflect on such things, I feel like the pop culture of my youth was the best, including the comedy. TV comedy? Saturday night on CBS (MTM, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett) in the 1970s, Thursday night on NBC (Cheers, Buffalo Bill, later Seinfeld and Frazier), Late Night with David Letterman (the 1980s show), never (other than The Simpsons) anything on TV as funny as that. Films? How could one top Mel Brooks of the 1970s (plus The Producers) and the Zucker/Abrams works (Naked Guns, Top Secret)? Or so I think anyway.
My oldest child was literally born the day after the last “Seinfeld.” And, of course, everything changed in my life after that. I have enjoyed some newer comedy since then — Chris Rock, Judd Apatow films, South Park, these are all “newer” to me at any rate. And when we were on vacation and I had time and access to cable TV, I used to really enjoy watching Sponge Bob with my own then-small children.
There is probably something to the complaint that Big Woke in its relentless dourness and dumbness has damaged comedy. But mostly I think it’s just that we are getting older.
Perhaps not useful to the thesis, but for some to watch: I've enjoyed recent OSS 117 movies and various "Cunk on X" series. Neither of them terribly creative in form or even type of humour, being arguable retreads of Austin Powers and Ali G, but both have shocked me and made me laugh out loud. More than I can say for "Atlanta", "Barry", "Bojack" -- more examples of the moralising "does comedy need to be funny" trend. But who has heard of Cunk, even with Charlie Brooker being a household name?
The conservative in me wants to say it's a "left can't meme" thing, that _real_ transgression can't get funded, but I don't really believe it. Your "great man" and "Marvel" ideas ring truer, and can reinforce each other. Success requires both talent and support, and without one the other will find other opportunities.
The business has changed. It used to be that movies made most of their money in the US and other English-speaking countries. Now it's all about the foreign markets, especially China. Comedy just doesn't translate well to a foreign language with a different culture. So instead they double down on the visual spectacle.
Boy, you are so right about the terrible sound & dialogue mixing. Makes one wonder exactly why it is so bad considering the - Great ? ... Tech available nowadays. It also seems to me it is both Movies AND TV. Now I gotta go & read the Slashfilm link you put up.
(Dang - so many good things to read today, I am never going to get to my own Music & Recording issues slated for today)
I think the takeaway from that slashfilm link is that there isn't one specific problem, but movie making is a complicated process, and sound and dialogue mixing is considered a low priority, so it just gets stepped on at every stage of production.
>I watched Wedding Crashers (2005) twice in cinemas. I could not stop laughing, the whole cinema was erupting. Have you seen Wedding Crashers lately? Watch it. You’ll feel like you’ve smuggled in a fresh pair of jeans into the Soviet Union circa 1969, straight from the Home of the Brave and Land of Free.
I'm (probably) a bit younger than you are, so here is my take: having never seen "Wedding Crashers", I decided to watch it. Meh. I had absolutely no "fresh pair of jeans in the USSR" feeling whatsoever. Any other Will Ferrell movie is funnier, and plenty of movies that are stylistically indistinguishable are still being made, and on Netflix. Maybe it was the first romantic comedy of its type or something, but whatever it is doing is now in the water supply.
If comedy's cultural progression stopped after the 90s, and it died in 2012, why were the best shows produced after the 90s? Evidence: HIMYM, which is objectively speaking the funnier "Friends"- started in 2005, Arrested Development, which is almost a class to itself (2003-2019), or Parks and Recreation (2009-2015), not to mention absolute giants like "The Office" (2005-2013). Even after 2013, plenty of funny comedies are being made, and there absolutely is a progression between what a youtube "comedy" looks like and what 90s/00s comedy looks like.
As far as I'm concerned, by the 90s Hollywood had already forgotten how to make certain styles of great comedies - where is the new "Airplane!" or "Monty Python"?
Probably the interesting question here isn't the one asking about comedies, but the one asking why you wrote this article ;)
Yes some great TV shows after 2012, although arrested development doesn’t count (last season or two didn’t work), Parks and Recs petered out on the previous wave…
I disagree about the last two seasons of AD, don't remember enough about Parks and Rec to comment on its final seasons. But there absolutely are *hilarious* comedies made after 2012. If you haven't seen it already, watch "Tag" from 2018 - I was crying from laughter when I watched it this morning.
Oct 24, 2022·edited Oct 24, 2022Liked by Misha Saul
Kids now will be talking about the golden age of YouTube and Twitch streamers, and if you think those are a lot less funny and a lot more filler, you could say the same about those Comedy Movies and TV shows you love compared to the classic cartoons of the 30s and 40s.
You are right there was a creative boom that chased a few successive business models for a few decades and petered out a decade ago, but whether the current comedy situation overall is worse than in other languages or time periods before that boom I wouldn't be sure.
I don't know if Substack tolerates anonymous comments, but here goes nothing ...
While all of these takes, in the comments and the article both, identify visible trends that have doubtlessly have played some part in the national decline of comedy, as a johnny-come-lately who straddles the line between being born Millennial and Gen Z, there is a unique perspective here I can contribute that can bring attention to something so far overlooked: it is damn HARD to write comedy for today's audiences.
Hard, that is, if you want to recoup your expense at the box office.
High brow critics and niche consumers have a shared grievance against "the lowest common denominator" but before approximately 2014 at least one could be said to EXIST. In brief, throughout their childhoods, preteens and young adulthoods, Millennial audiences and those of elder generations (Generation X, Baby Boomers, and even retirees) could be counted on to laugh at roughly the same material. Comedians could draw inspiration from the precedent of their forebears and then build on top of it with their own insightful brilliance, and Americans up and down the age brackets in their families and friend groups could set their clocks by a regular injection of new humor and subversive takes that they had never thought they would hear. It was a healthy relationship that kept the door open for new comic voices to enter the scene from the general population while ensuring that there would be a guaranteed support base for promising talent, so long as it was good enough to stand out from the crowd.
That feedback loop has fallen apart, and it is no coincidence that the wave of American comedy crested and began to recede from its high water mark in the years that followed the inflection point of 'Me Too'. That would be the time that Millennials and Boomers stopped sharing the common perception of how the nation around them functioned, let alone what was legitimate to find funny about it. Millennials have been through several unprecedented economic body blows in less than two decades; while other Americans also saw their mortgages go underwater, then struggled through the snail's crawl of the Obama recovery, then were thrown out of equilibrium by Covid measures, before finally facing the present inflation, Millennials have grown discontented with a societal response to these obstacles that appears to not only ignore but actively dismiss their input and beliefs. As the largest generation since the Baby Boomers yet the one that feels they still have the least political and financial voice, Millennials have laid their ire at the feet of the other largest American generation (said Boomers), and so have put basically every other potential competitor for their attention on hold until they have wrested what they consider to be a proportionate share of control over the direction of the country away from people they believe ought to have passed the torch to them yesterday. Essentially every scrap of pop culture produced by that age cohort and their allies will actively reflect that anxiety about the gap between the reality of the country and their wants, and it perpetuates itself, because if a person in a position of production does not contribute in some small part to the solution, then they are denounced as part of the problem and opportunistically replaced.
Still, America has been locked in generational culture wars intermittently, to the extent it could be considered a national past time. Comedy passed through the nineteen sixties transformed but intact, it could have also weathered this.
What really killed the golden goose of American comedic film was the parallel growth of Generation Z.
If two incompatible separate senses of humor was difficult to chart but still navigable, then to the professional or career comic writers and stand-ups Gen Z probably looks like staring into the business end of a dizzying kaleidoscope. Unlike Millennials, who get to brag that they made the internet cool, mainstream, and indispensable, Gen Z grew up immersed in it, with it already interpenetrating every portion of their development. That would include a backlog of the entire recorded comedic tradition of the country one tap away at all times, and they burned through decades of what would have been enormous innovations in material before they graduated from elementary school lunch lines. It got mentioned in passing here a few times that the humor of Generation Z is surrealistic and absurd, self-referential and meta-contextual to an extreme; having guzzled at a young age the compressed cliff notes summary of the complete collected works of english language humor like a keg stand at a college sorority Tour De Franzia would be why. Unless you can place a new spin on something they have already seen, and they have seen EVERYTHING, Gen Z is unimpressed.
I should know. I was there for it.
And that doesn't take into account that Gen Z is most ethnically diverse generation of Americans yet, and in a country where Black American humor is at odds with mainstream White American humor, that matters. And there's more. There are larger and larger portions of second generation immigrants who think their own preferences deserve a place at the table. In an internet without borders and low barriers to participation in the competition for popular awareness dominated by random viral stardom explosions, citizens from other countries and cultures have a louder voice in the public square, and larger vote in what we call funny. Most relevantly of all, a significant proportion of American citizens communicate near exclusively in Spanish, and the two pools of comedians and their comedic legacies hardly overlap.
So under those conditions, where a shared standard for humor no longer exists, telling a studio that they can make their money back at the box office when there are no predictably safe bets is a real dubious proposal. The national appetite for dinner-table, water-cooler comedy has been pulled apart into separate, smaller courses that if served up together would taste like tofu ... or vomit. And when there are a number of methods for up-and-coming talent to cultivate a following within a niche they understand, why make an effort to corner the market in a medium that seems to have trouble at the moment staying solvent?
How much what I outlined here was responsible, compared to any of the other causes contributors submitted, probably can't be determined to any real degree. But its my opinion, put together from experience, and I have a hunch that it has been an important trend.
P.S. Most of the movies that got presented as poor comedies are actually the missing "comedy adjacent" movies that are discussed under the next header. I would guess that with a lack of real comedies, the closest substitutes have to fill the absence.
Lol me looking at this list and thinking 2018 was a great year for comedy for having "Blockers", "Game Night", and "Tag". I can't tell if you actually watched these or they just didn't deserve mention, but if not you should give one of them a watch. Game night barely beats out blockers on RT at 85%
haven't seen, will check out, thanks...
Here to recommend "Blockers" as well - was a highlight of that year. It's about teen girls trying to lose their virginities *and their overprotective fathers trying to stop them*. In retrospect I think it avoided many of the pitfalls you laid out here.
Sure, it's a female-led story and a superficial analysis would call it gender-bent American Pie, but so much of the laughter comes from John Cena and crew stumbling around, chasing the rest of the cast around the whole movie.
I had been reading this thinking you must not have kids. Then I get to the end and you say maybe you're too busy with your 3 kids. Huh. I feel like animation is where the funny films are at these days. The Bad Guys is a fantastic comedy heist movie that happens to star talking animals. The Croods and its sequel had some hilarious moments. My family recently rewatched Flushed Away and I was delighted by some of the very clever humour in that.
Or are you taking a definition of comedy that excludes animation and/or family films just on principle?
I didn’t like the Bad Guys. Croods had charm. I mention Minions at the end - which is a better example. Great series.
But I do think they are a different kind - the family comedy. No obvious down tick, I agree, though for my money Monsters Inc and Shrek are the best and their days are behind them also (and query whether you could make the original Shrek today)
One tangential question I have asked before is: why does Disney have *zero* quality sequels, yet other animated sequels are some of the best out there?
The Bad Guys was great, but it’s a movie aimed at children (my wife and I liked it; our kids liked it). He’s talking about adult comedies, exploring themes for grown-ups (including wacky gross-out stuff). I can’t think of any at all since, yes, Bridesmaids.
However good The Bad Guys was, if people are watching it with their buddies in college, comedy (and the culture in general) is in serious trouble.
Strong case for the decline of comedy. One show that I think bucks the trend is Big Mouth. It has been consistently one of the funniest things I've seen on TV in years. And I continue to laugh at episodes I have now seen 6 or 7 times. It is coming of age and boy meets girl and gross out comedy and a whole lot more, and with some of the funniest people in the business right now. I can't gush enough about it, but I've said my piece. Thank you for interesting breakdown.
Will check out…
Concurrent with the "decline" of comedy in cinema is a golden era in television. The best comedic minds of the 2010s and onwards have flourished in the 30-minute serialized medium (Atlanta, Fleabag, Hacks, Key & Peele, Barry, Veep, What We Do in the Shadows, Ted Lasso, Ramy, Bojack Horseman... I could go on!). There's so much variety and diversity of perspectives!
Comedy is thriving in this medium because creative voices are being embraced and entrusted and are allowed to cater to niche audiences without consideration of how to monetize in theaters and / or globally.
To me, the biggest "loss" in the shift of great comedy moving from cinema to TV is the intimate scale of it; there's nothing like being in a packed theater sharing in laughs.
Would be interesting project to separate original comedies like "Mrs. Doubtfire" (1991) or "The Producers" (1967) from "meta" comedies like "Community" (2009-2015) or "21 Jump Street" (2012). My vague sense is that meta comedies have gotten more common and original comedies less even though the mass culture of mid-20th century America has disintegrated into a large number of media fandoms. Perhaps this is another driving force in the decline of comedy - another intra-genre trend (like feminization that you wrote about in point 1) popular with comedians, writers, directors, etc that isn't popular with audiences.
I was born a month after The Simpsons aired, so for the entirety of my life meta comedies have been hugely prominent. From early childhood onward I had a meta sensibility and now writers rooms are entirely staffed by people like me. I fear early exposure might be a deterrent to good comedy writing, as rather than developing that style in college (like a National Lampoon writer) you're in an ironic, referential, and straining to be clever loop that can't be broken.
Saw a preview clip from the new reboot of Inside Amy Schumer and it was wretched. Not even in the least bit funny.
I think that a lot of comedy has shifted to YouTube and podcasting. New talent will seek the easiest way into a field, especially transgressive talent. Transgressive talent will often favour new media because it has less of the rules that the existing media has. For example, Doug Stanhope prefers podcasting because he doesn't have to accept the content and form rules of radio.
It's also the case that comedy works fine in this media. Comedy isn't a high capital media like superhero movies. A talented comedy writer can make something with few costs except their own time. And by not working within a large system like TV, they get to keep all of the rewards.
You can even see this in previous eras, like painting lost most of the best talent in the 1940s as more people moved into fields like film making. Musical theatre declined in the late 60s as people went and became pop songwriters (Benny and Bjorn would have been like Rogers and Hammerstein if born 30 years earlier).
Game Night (2018) was hilarious and not derivative. But may be the exception that proves the rule.
I consider myself a big fan of the comic arts. Or at least I once did.
I think there’s a certain “back in my day, the kids would get off my lawn” aspect to this article. I’m 58 and, like the majority of people in the prosperous West who have time to reflect on such things, I feel like the pop culture of my youth was the best, including the comedy. TV comedy? Saturday night on CBS (MTM, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett) in the 1970s, Thursday night on NBC (Cheers, Buffalo Bill, later Seinfeld and Frazier), Late Night with David Letterman (the 1980s show), never (other than The Simpsons) anything on TV as funny as that. Films? How could one top Mel Brooks of the 1970s (plus The Producers) and the Zucker/Abrams works (Naked Guns, Top Secret)? Or so I think anyway.
My oldest child was literally born the day after the last “Seinfeld.” And, of course, everything changed in my life after that. I have enjoyed some newer comedy since then — Chris Rock, Judd Apatow films, South Park, these are all “newer” to me at any rate. And when we were on vacation and I had time and access to cable TV, I used to really enjoy watching Sponge Bob with my own then-small children.
There is probably something to the complaint that Big Woke in its relentless dourness and dumbness has damaged comedy. But mostly I think it’s just that we are getting older.
Did you forget The Big Lebowski?!?!?
Perhaps not useful to the thesis, but for some to watch: I've enjoyed recent OSS 117 movies and various "Cunk on X" series. Neither of them terribly creative in form or even type of humour, being arguable retreads of Austin Powers and Ali G, but both have shocked me and made me laugh out loud. More than I can say for "Atlanta", "Barry", "Bojack" -- more examples of the moralising "does comedy need to be funny" trend. But who has heard of Cunk, even with Charlie Brooker being a household name?
The conservative in me wants to say it's a "left can't meme" thing, that _real_ transgression can't get funded, but I don't really believe it. Your "great man" and "Marvel" ideas ring truer, and can reinforce each other. Success requires both talent and support, and without one the other will find other opportunities.
I actually loved Atlanta and Bojack (latter more uneven, but at times sublime). Barry is ok
They’re funny and wonderful artistic creations, but they’re almost surreal-comedy or tragi-comedies
The business has changed. It used to be that movies made most of their money in the US and other English-speaking countries. Now it's all about the foreign markets, especially China. Comedy just doesn't translate well to a foreign language with a different culture. So instead they double down on the visual spectacle.
Along the same lines, a lot of movies now have absolutely terrible sound mixing, to the point where you can't even understand the dialogue: https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/. But if the audience is just watching the visual spectacle and reading translated subtitles, it doesn't matter anyway.
All the real energy for comedy is in smaller, niche productions where they know their audience and can target it accordingly.
Boy, you are so right about the terrible sound & dialogue mixing. Makes one wonder exactly why it is so bad considering the - Great ? ... Tech available nowadays. It also seems to me it is both Movies AND TV. Now I gotta go & read the Slashfilm link you put up.
(Dang - so many good things to read today, I am never going to get to my own Music & Recording issues slated for today)
I think the takeaway from that slashfilm link is that there isn't one specific problem, but movie making is a complicated process, and sound and dialogue mixing is considered a low priority, so it just gets stepped on at every stage of production.
>I watched Wedding Crashers (2005) twice in cinemas. I could not stop laughing, the whole cinema was erupting. Have you seen Wedding Crashers lately? Watch it. You’ll feel like you’ve smuggled in a fresh pair of jeans into the Soviet Union circa 1969, straight from the Home of the Brave and Land of Free.
I'm (probably) a bit younger than you are, so here is my take: having never seen "Wedding Crashers", I decided to watch it. Meh. I had absolutely no "fresh pair of jeans in the USSR" feeling whatsoever. Any other Will Ferrell movie is funnier, and plenty of movies that are stylistically indistinguishable are still being made, and on Netflix. Maybe it was the first romantic comedy of its type or something, but whatever it is doing is now in the water supply.
If comedy's cultural progression stopped after the 90s, and it died in 2012, why were the best shows produced after the 90s? Evidence: HIMYM, which is objectively speaking the funnier "Friends"- started in 2005, Arrested Development, which is almost a class to itself (2003-2019), or Parks and Recreation (2009-2015), not to mention absolute giants like "The Office" (2005-2013). Even after 2013, plenty of funny comedies are being made, and there absolutely is a progression between what a youtube "comedy" looks like and what 90s/00s comedy looks like.
As far as I'm concerned, by the 90s Hollywood had already forgotten how to make certain styles of great comedies - where is the new "Airplane!" or "Monty Python"?
Probably the interesting question here isn't the one asking about comedies, but the one asking why you wrote this article ;)
Yes some great TV shows after 2012, although arrested development doesn’t count (last season or two didn’t work), Parks and Recs petered out on the previous wave…
I disagree about the last two seasons of AD, don't remember enough about Parks and Rec to comment on its final seasons. But there absolutely are *hilarious* comedies made after 2012. If you haven't seen it already, watch "Tag" from 2018 - I was crying from laughter when I watched it this morning.
Everybody Wants Some (2016) is a funny horny college students movie that I’m not sure how got made but kills
Kids now will be talking about the golden age of YouTube and Twitch streamers, and if you think those are a lot less funny and a lot more filler, you could say the same about those Comedy Movies and TV shows you love compared to the classic cartoons of the 30s and 40s.
You are right there was a creative boom that chased a few successive business models for a few decades and petered out a decade ago, but whether the current comedy situation overall is worse than in other languages or time periods before that boom I wouldn't be sure.
I don't know if Substack tolerates anonymous comments, but here goes nothing ...
While all of these takes, in the comments and the article both, identify visible trends that have doubtlessly have played some part in the national decline of comedy, as a johnny-come-lately who straddles the line between being born Millennial and Gen Z, there is a unique perspective here I can contribute that can bring attention to something so far overlooked: it is damn HARD to write comedy for today's audiences.
Hard, that is, if you want to recoup your expense at the box office.
High brow critics and niche consumers have a shared grievance against "the lowest common denominator" but before approximately 2014 at least one could be said to EXIST. In brief, throughout their childhoods, preteens and young adulthoods, Millennial audiences and those of elder generations (Generation X, Baby Boomers, and even retirees) could be counted on to laugh at roughly the same material. Comedians could draw inspiration from the precedent of their forebears and then build on top of it with their own insightful brilliance, and Americans up and down the age brackets in their families and friend groups could set their clocks by a regular injection of new humor and subversive takes that they had never thought they would hear. It was a healthy relationship that kept the door open for new comic voices to enter the scene from the general population while ensuring that there would be a guaranteed support base for promising talent, so long as it was good enough to stand out from the crowd.
That feedback loop has fallen apart, and it is no coincidence that the wave of American comedy crested and began to recede from its high water mark in the years that followed the inflection point of 'Me Too'. That would be the time that Millennials and Boomers stopped sharing the common perception of how the nation around them functioned, let alone what was legitimate to find funny about it. Millennials have been through several unprecedented economic body blows in less than two decades; while other Americans also saw their mortgages go underwater, then struggled through the snail's crawl of the Obama recovery, then were thrown out of equilibrium by Covid measures, before finally facing the present inflation, Millennials have grown discontented with a societal response to these obstacles that appears to not only ignore but actively dismiss their input and beliefs. As the largest generation since the Baby Boomers yet the one that feels they still have the least political and financial voice, Millennials have laid their ire at the feet of the other largest American generation (said Boomers), and so have put basically every other potential competitor for their attention on hold until they have wrested what they consider to be a proportionate share of control over the direction of the country away from people they believe ought to have passed the torch to them yesterday. Essentially every scrap of pop culture produced by that age cohort and their allies will actively reflect that anxiety about the gap between the reality of the country and their wants, and it perpetuates itself, because if a person in a position of production does not contribute in some small part to the solution, then they are denounced as part of the problem and opportunistically replaced.
Still, America has been locked in generational culture wars intermittently, to the extent it could be considered a national past time. Comedy passed through the nineteen sixties transformed but intact, it could have also weathered this.
What really killed the golden goose of American comedic film was the parallel growth of Generation Z.
If two incompatible separate senses of humor was difficult to chart but still navigable, then to the professional or career comic writers and stand-ups Gen Z probably looks like staring into the business end of a dizzying kaleidoscope. Unlike Millennials, who get to brag that they made the internet cool, mainstream, and indispensable, Gen Z grew up immersed in it, with it already interpenetrating every portion of their development. That would include a backlog of the entire recorded comedic tradition of the country one tap away at all times, and they burned through decades of what would have been enormous innovations in material before they graduated from elementary school lunch lines. It got mentioned in passing here a few times that the humor of Generation Z is surrealistic and absurd, self-referential and meta-contextual to an extreme; having guzzled at a young age the compressed cliff notes summary of the complete collected works of english language humor like a keg stand at a college sorority Tour De Franzia would be why. Unless you can place a new spin on something they have already seen, and they have seen EVERYTHING, Gen Z is unimpressed.
I should know. I was there for it.
And that doesn't take into account that Gen Z is most ethnically diverse generation of Americans yet, and in a country where Black American humor is at odds with mainstream White American humor, that matters. And there's more. There are larger and larger portions of second generation immigrants who think their own preferences deserve a place at the table. In an internet without borders and low barriers to participation in the competition for popular awareness dominated by random viral stardom explosions, citizens from other countries and cultures have a louder voice in the public square, and larger vote in what we call funny. Most relevantly of all, a significant proportion of American citizens communicate near exclusively in Spanish, and the two pools of comedians and their comedic legacies hardly overlap.
So under those conditions, where a shared standard for humor no longer exists, telling a studio that they can make their money back at the box office when there are no predictably safe bets is a real dubious proposal. The national appetite for dinner-table, water-cooler comedy has been pulled apart into separate, smaller courses that if served up together would taste like tofu ... or vomit. And when there are a number of methods for up-and-coming talent to cultivate a following within a niche they understand, why make an effort to corner the market in a medium that seems to have trouble at the moment staying solvent?
How much what I outlined here was responsible, compared to any of the other causes contributors submitted, probably can't be determined to any real degree. But its my opinion, put together from experience, and I have a hunch that it has been an important trend.
P.S. Most of the movies that got presented as poor comedies are actually the missing "comedy adjacent" movies that are discussed under the next header. I would guess that with a lack of real comedies, the closest substitutes have to fill the absence.