Some movies that were funny to me when they came out have failed to make me laugh on subsequent viewings. I know there are probably many reasons for this… Maybe the movie hit on a personal level for me once, but it no longer applies. Maybe I have a different sense of humor. However, funny is still funny to me, and many movies I laughed at 30 years ago still make me laugh.
I am sure I will have more for this list, but since I just re-watched it and it inspired the thread, I nominate
Wedding Crashers
I am a Vince Vaughn fan, i enjoy almost every Christopher Walken movie and Owen Wilson (aside from that 5 year-old surfer dude haircut) isn’t completely annoying. And I loved this movie when it came out.
I just saw this again the other day for the first time since it came out in 2005. I barely cracked a smile through the entire movie. The only moments that made me laugh were Vaughn-related. When he made the kid the balloon bicycle, and a couple of times when he was hurt during the family football game. But that was it.
Maybe it’s me… Maybe my sense of humor isn’t the same as it was 9 years ago. But this thing just laid a massive egg for me the second time around.
How old were you 9 years ago? Age/maturity make a difference. I’m old enough that I didn’t bother seeing it because I assumed I wouldn’t find it funny, mostly because I don’t find Owen Wilson or Vince Vaughn funny. Or Seth Rogan, James Franco, or any of the other current “funny” actors.
Most humor has a topical bent that doesn’t age well. Even Blazing Saddles loses much humor if the viewer wasn’t steeped in Westerns and doesn’t know who Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr were. And many comedies weren’t that funny to begin with. I have the cultural background (I watched TV in the 60s) to know and enjoy all of the actors in It’s a Mad, Mad,~ World and I recognize all the references and get all the jokes, but the movie is not the slightest bit funny to me, and wasn’t the first time I saw it.
Which brings us to familiarity. Humor requires surprise, and you already saw Wedding Crashers. Without a memory wipe you know what’s coming next, and a telegraphed joke just isn’t as funny.
I don’t think The Blues Brothers has aged especially well: the stereotypes are pretty old by now. You might be able to show it to a 55 year old who, for some reason, missed it, and the jokes might still resonate. I doubt that anyone under the age of 30 would crack a smile unless they’d grown up in Chicago.
Ace Ventura was on TV the other day and we were all watching it. Although we enjoyed most of the physical comedy, the whole storyline involved the police Lieutenant that isn’t biologically female (including all of the spitting once the men realized HORROR OF HORRORS that they had kissed someone that was born male) wasn’t just offensive, it was deeply horrifyingly offensive.
I haven’t seen The Blues Brothers recently, but I watched The Wedding Crashers not long ago and I thought it was still pretty funny.
Two comedies I’ve rewatched recently that fell flat were Stripes and Superbad. Stripes was almost agressively unfunny (and not just in the tacked-on final act, either). I think Superbad relied too much on shock humour to make for rewatching.
Oh, I just remembered another one – Clerks. When I watched it again, the terrible acting was much more noticeable since the jokes were less distracting.
I had that same issue rewatching Soapdish. I loved that movie when it came out, and now that I have a good friend who’s transgendered, I find the ending to be terrible.
A friend set up a Top 10 Bad Christmas Movie marathon the other weekend. Sadly, I couldn’t attend, but on his list was Rich Little’s A Christmas Carol. It was a holiday stable when I grew up, but he said none of the people who watched it with him (all much younger than me), had absolutely no idea who he was imitating and it fell completely flat.
Actually, I showed the movie to my 9 year old son last month, and he loved it. I needed to explain a few jokes, sure, but that’s what parents are for. Remember, the film may have some subtle touches to it, but it has tons of slapstick, too. Not to mention lots and lots of car crashes - truly the eternal language of humor.
I haven’t seen It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad world in a few years but I laugh out loud every time. When I was 10 and in my 30’s. I’m laughing right now thinking about it!
I guess that doesn’t really address the OP since I didn’t see it when it came out. Oops
Really? You didn’t like Will Ferrell’s cameo? I mean yes, it’s immature (like the whole movie, of course) but I found him funny the first time and when I rewatched it recently. “MA! THE MEATLOAF! FUCK!”. Ok, it was funnier the first time due to the element of surprise, but still a classic moment. Then again, maybe I haven’t matured much in the last decade.
I’ll nominate Hot Shots! - found it hilarious when I first saw it aged about 12, but on re-watching it recently it just didn’t recapture the magic for me, whereas comparable films (Airplane!, The Naked Gun) are still funny today IMHO. Can’t put a finger on why - maybe Hot Shots! is just too derivative (yes, I know that’s its whole premise).
Much as I loved Woody Allen’s What’s up, Tiger Lily? when it came out (and still laugh at individual segments), the movie as a whole seems to rely on too many outdated attitudes. And it suffers by comparison with MST3K. When I watched it a while back with Pepper Mill, she didn’t find it funny at all.
She had the same reaction to Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, too. I think she doesn’t care for Woody Allen. Even his earlier, funnier films.
But the Lieutenant wasn’t a MTF transsexual, he was simply a man in disguise. I don’t think he would even have qualified as a transvestite. He was just a guy in disguise who found an opportunity to work his way close to Dan Marino for his revenge.
A LOT of comedies haven’t aged well, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect poorly on the movies themselves.
Decades ago, I heard a comedian say, “A good song, you can listen to it a hundred times, and enjoy it just as much each each time. Maybe you hear someone else perform it in a new way, and you appreciate it even more. But a good joke? The first time you hear it, you laugh. The second time, you smile. The third time, you start to wonder why you ever thought it was funny in the first place.”
MANY comedies that I once loved don’t make me laugh any more.*** Blazing Saddles ***broke me up when I was a teenager, but the last time I saw it, it left me cold. I used to quote lines from This Is Spinal Tap, but the last time I watched it (with my Mom, who LOVED several of Chris Guest’s mockumentaries), neither of us laughed much.
There isn’t always a good reason that a comedy I once loved no longer strikes me as funny. Sometimes, it’s just that I’m not a teenage boy any more. Sometime, it’s that a particular set of jokes requires the element of surprise, and I’m no longer surprised by the jokes in comedies I’ve already seen.
Clerks wins the award for me. I remember it being hilarious when I first saw it. Some years ago, my wife said she hadn’t watched it so I figured I’d show it to her. Before doing so, I watched some myself just to see how it held up. Ugh, I didn’t even bother wasting her time with it.
It was definitely a “you had to be there” in the moment sort of film.
And this is true in a lot of what was once “comedy” literature. Alice in Wonderland is a good example. Today, it’s mostly seen as a bizarre fantasy. At one point, it was a topical comedy with a lot of references to 19th century education. Most of the poems in the book are actually parodies of works that children would commonly have to memorize in school. Nearly all of those original works are no longer taught to kids. The only poetry parody that a modern reader is likely to “get” is the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star parody. The other ones can only be found in dusty old books.
This is what leapt to mind when I read the thread title too. It’s a shame that a movie that’s so funny and clever (in fact I referenced a line just the other day), with such great actors, is so clearly a product of its prejudiced time.
Much of this is true, but a lot of the humor in Alice in Wonderland still holds up just fine: the puns, the twisted logic, the cartoon violence, and the solemn absurdity. I remember being surprised at how funny the book was when I first read it as a kid, and I still think it’s funny.
If people today mostly see it as a bizarre fantasy, it’s either because (1) they’ve never actually read it, or (2) they misread it because they don’t realize it’s supposed to be funny (imagine reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy or watching Life of Brian without realizing it was supposed to be humorous), or (3) their mind just doesn’t work that way—different people find different things funny.
Many of the scenes from Dudley Moore’s Arthur are still hilarious, BUT the drunk driving scenes are jaw dropping. Today they’d be picketed at the theaters from the moment they opened and every “news” show would have somebody who’s lost somebody to a drunk driver talking about how offensive it is.
(I don’t recall it being that big a deal when it opened, but I was a kid so perhaps it was.)
I don’t know if You’ve Got Mail hasn’t aged well or if it’s just the fact that now there are words like cyberstalking or catfishing in greater use, but I always thought Hanks’ character was creepy as hell and should be slapped with a restraining order and pushed into counseling. I think I’ve mentioned before that this movie, like The Notebook and several other romantic comedies and dramas, has a major “Lovitz substitution= Kill Him!” factor: imagine the same movie with Tom Hanks/Ryan Gosling/sexy male lead replaced with Jon Lovitz and the movie would end a lot quicker and with Lovitz face down on a sidewalk after being tazed while the audience cheered.