I’ve always found comedies that are 2 hours or longer tend to be significantly less funny than 90 minute ones. They always tend to have to add a lot of non-comedic elements to stretch that plot out which makes them feel less funny.
I really hate long comedy movies where the entire 3rd final act have almost no jokes because they have to actually settle the story.
Brooks’ Law - The optimum length of a comedy is 100 minutes because that’s when the audience runs out of Raisinets.
Well you missed all the good stuff then. Seasons 3-7 are peak Seinfeld.
Seinfeld is one of those that always comes up in discussions of the subjectivity of comedy. I wonder how anybody with a sense of humor could not find it funny, and others wonder how anybody could possibly find it funny.
For whatever reason, I think comedy is lot more subjective and hit-or-miss than drama. If there was a drama that I read a review of and the audiences and critics liked it and it was generally in a category that I like, I would be MUCH more surprised if I just didn’t “get into it” than for a comedy. And same for me recommending shows to others. If I really suspect that someone will like Breaking Bad, and they’re resistant, or maybe the first episode didn’t grab them, I’m much more likely to really urge them to give it a try and watch a few more; than for a comedy of similar quality.
(And to answer the OP, while I won’t quite say it had zero laughs, the current HBO comedy Our Flag Means Death is super highly rated and reviewed and showing up on best-of lists and so forth… and my wife and I just did. not. get. it. Maybe 1.5 laughs per 30 minutes of screen time? Was it supposed to be funny? Exciting? Romantic? Quirky? All of the above? Whatever it was supposed to be, we certainly didn’t find it so…)
…it can entirely depend on my mood. I’ve been “forced” to watch a comedy because someone told me it was the funniest-thing-ever and sat there stone faced from beginning to the end. Then I’ve revisited that movie/show a year later and it turned out to be the funniest-thing-ever.
As others have said: its subjective to the point where the very same comedy can both have no laughs AND plenty of laughs depending on when it is you watch it. Schrödinger’s comedy, one might say.
I know I was being kind of oblique, but that’s what I was hinting at when I mentioned having to watch a Shakespearean comedy in middle school.
That was exactly me with The Big Lebowski. Found it terribly unfunny the first time I saw it, then years later on rewatch wondered how in the hell I didn’t find it uproariously funny before.
It’s pretty rare that I find a comedy, even a bad one, that doesn’t conjure forth from deep inside of me a small chuckle or at least some small spark of warm amusement. I’m sure I’ve come across one that I didn’t find the least bit funny, but I’m hard pressed to remember a specific example.
Most recently? That Netflix asteroid movie probably. Some other notable examples were the remakes of Ghostbusters (not afterlife, the other one) and Vacation (does anyone even remember there was a reboot of Vacation?).
I have an example of a comedy TV series that I laughed not once but still loved, Joe Pera Talks With You
Didn’t laugh out loud once but watched the whole series happily. This kind of thing is what I thought this thread was about but obviously isn’t. I hope this isn’t threadshitting.
You have to situate the movie in the context of the time. It was directed by Joe Swanberg at the height of the mumblecore movement which emphasized realist, slice of life depictions of mundane life happenings. There usually isn’t a huge amount of plot because life doesn’t have a lot of plot. There aren’t written jokes because real people don’t shoot out perfectly written zingers. A lot of the dialogue is improvised and tossed off in a “naturalistic” delivery style with lots of ums and interruptions.
The comedy comes from it being a slice of life, observational comedy. It depicts a certain type of people and then amps their characters up by just a notch to show some of the inherent absurdity and contradiction in their self conceptions. If you’re not familiar with the type of person this movie is parodying or don’t particularly find their struggles comedic, it’s easy to see why the movie would leave you cold.
Mumblecore was also a movement that was reacting to a specific movie trend of the time and historical re-evalation seems to have landed on the consensus that, while there were some worthwhile practices to have come out of the movement and made a broader impact on film culture at large, the movement as a whole got out way over its skis and ended up making films that were more precious and self regarding than actually good.
…and the opposite of that are comedies that are drop-dead-hilarious when you first watched them but at best don’t make you laugh when you revisit them, at their worst (I’m looking at you, Revenge of the Nerds) just makes you want to curl up into a ball and die.
I didn’t even get past the first part of your sentence when I thought of Revenge of the Nerds. Cringe.
Much of the early Seinfeld feels almost like “experimental” comedy – trying to be quirky and different. It wasn’t even really a full series in the first two seasons – the first season had only 5 episodes, the second only 12. They really got into their stride with Season 3. It was still a bit polarizing, with some folks not seeing the humour or outright hating it, often because they found the characters unlikeable, but there’s certainly a big sector of the population that disagrees with you about it not being funny.
I thought you might be; but as there’s also quite a bit of stuff in Shakespeare that is intended to be laughed out loud at (though modern audiences are likely to miss a lot of the puns and references), I wasn’t sure.
That’s an example of a comedy that has now unfunny in 2022 due to the change in social mores and values since the 1980s and the fact many of its jokes have been repeated so many times they now seem old hat. The shelf life for even good comedy is shorter than that for popular music and seems to be shrinking at a faster pace.
…well yeah, but that’s just how comedy works. If you were to watch Revenge of the Nerds right now many wouldn’t laugh at all. But many will still find it hilarious. It’s entirely subjective and can depend on your mood, the environment you are watching it in, and the social mores and values that currently exist.
I’d wager that, on the whole, the people who still would find Revenge of the Nerds hilarious will be older than those who wouldn’t laugh at all.
I challenge anyone to watch Seinfeld’s “The Contest” and “The Marine Biologist” without laughing uproariously.
Back in 1975, I went to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail on the recommendation of a friend. The only prior experience I had had with the troupe was someone telling me about the Man with Three Buttocks.
I went alone to Saturday matinee. There were maybe a half dozen other people scattered around the cinema.
I didn’t find it funny at all. I laughed only once, when Lancelot (John Cleese) kicked the fat chick in the chest.
The second time I saw it was two weeks later. The only reason I went was because I was part of a group.
This time the cinema was packed, and I laughed my ass off. So yeah, laughter is contagious.