I understand. Humor is different for many people.
Hilarious- but due to the cast, not the plot.
Yeah, I ended up only watching like fifteen minutes of it. I don’t know if I was in the wrong mood for it or what, but I was bored. I’ll try again one day.
I mean, in the trailer for Drinking Buddies there were several jokes. I didn’t particularly find them funny, but a clear attempt at humor was made between the characters.
“That ring is huuuge!” *Looks at fiance: “What did you do wrong?”
That’s clearly a joke.
However, streaming services suck at categorizing things. I’ve seen things labeled as horror that aren’t even close. I think the people doing the categorizing just guess.
I think part of it is in the presentation. It was a lame joke between the characters- trying to get each other to laugh, so to speak, and not aimed at making the audience laugh.
It’s that slice-of-life style from upthread; the characters themselves were laughing and joking with each other, but it was all dad-joke kind of stuff, and I at least, took it more as realistic dialogue than something intended to draw the audience into the joking. Kind of like the inverse of a lot of sitcoms, where the characters are dead serious in-show, but the situations and reactions are absurd, thereby making the audience laugh.
I think I saw Drinkin’ Buddies. I agree it’s not exactly a comedy. To me, most comedies are not funny and some of the funniest moments to me happen in dramas or action films. To me there are only like 3 or 4 decent comedies ever made.
I like films to be realistic, for the most part, and real life has moments that are funny, sad, boring, dramatic, scary, etc. Films like Drinkin’ Buddies are from that realism group that are all about trying to show honest human interaction and life. Some, like Sideways, succeed amazingly, some, like Drinkin’ Buddies, do not.
Yeah, it’s definitely a good film for watching what people are like in the real world.
But I have to ask… why? I mean, we all live in the real world already. Who wants to watch more of the same? I can just go hang out with people at bars and see the exact same thing in real life as in that movie.
I think the original Out-of-Towners was purported to be a comedy. It’s been decades since I’ve seen it, and God willing it’ll be decades more until I see it again.
My SO likes the Disney Channel for some reason. I swear, the only laughs in those teen comedies are the ones from the laugh track – which makes Data’s audience in “The Outrageous Okona” seem smart.
Neil Simon was best known for light comedy but in The Out-of-Towners and Prisoner of Second Avenue (both starring Jack Lemmon, one of my favorites) he wrote characters so annoying as to not just inspire no sympathy but to wish them to be struck by an out-of-control speeding bus. Both are considered comedies but you couldn’t prove it by my reaction. I saw The Out-of-Towners when it was first released (and I was 18) and thought it was dreadful even as a black comedy. Sandy Dennis was one the most irritating actresses that ever lived.
I recall The Knack…and How to Get It (1965) being remarkably humor-free, including the rape “jokes.”
Pretty much all movies with Jerry Lewis, as his grating, idiot-persona ruins any humor; his cameo in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was almost funny until he mugs at the end of it.
Too soon.
As to ‘The Out-of-Towners’ you gotta’ admit, viewed today, the notion/expectation of landing at LGA airport and checking in to a hotel in midtown Manhattan 30 minutes later is kind of comedic.
Whimsy rarely does much for me. Bill Forsyth made a bunch of movies about Brits (mostly) experiencing very light and wispy life changes, and that kind of thing just puts me to sleep.
At the other end of the critical acclaim spectrum, there are the utter garbage parody films foisted upon us by the Friedberg/Seltzer duo (Epic Movie, Date Moviue, Meet the Spartans). I slogged through Date Movie and I was stunned at how little “there” there was. They can’t even be arsed to actually parody a trope or a scene, they just figure that referencing it is enough to sell the point. That the great Fred Willard debased himself by appearing in one or two of these is depressing beyond belief, but a paycheck is a paycheck, I guess.
Sure, but they’re trying, and you can tell when they attempted.
What I was talking about were movies where the attempts at getting laughs from the audience were either extremely subtle or flat-out absent, and yet the movie is advertised as a comedy.
Of course not everyone is going to find everything funny. Some people like Jerry Lewis, and some don’t, for example. Some people love cringe comedy, while others find it painful. And so forth. In all those examples, one can tell when the writers/actors are trying to make the audience amused in some fashion.
Yeah, I much prefer “quieter” films, slices-of-life. I wish there was a category that said “Light, maybe comedic, but so much more than a comedy.”
I often judge a movie by how much of it sticks with me decades later. If I were ever locked in solitary, I could probably replay Napoleon Dynamite on the back of my eyelids, scene-for-scene.
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And there’s the flip side, perfect definition of a film that didn’t work for me.
It’s a Mad Mad Mad…World is completely unfunny in every aspect. (And it’s waaaaaay too friggin’ long, to boot.). Whenever I hear someone say it’s hilarious, I can’t understand what’s going through their heads. It’s like I was talking to a Martian.
Also, it’s not much fun watching Spencer Tracy dying.
Here’s a bit of trivia:
There was a TV series made a number of years ago that was a comedy, but did not have a laugh track, and I’d be very surprised if anyone laughed out loud while watching it. 120 episodes were made.
Finally! This movie is LOUD and FRANTIC, which doesn’t equal funny to me. And it seems to go on forever. I saw this once all the way through in 1964, when I was 12 years old, and didn’t find it funny even at that age. I’ve tried a couple of times since to understand what people see in it that I apparently don’t, and I realize I’m in the minority.
There’s a blogger I read, Mark Evanier, no slouch in the comedy writing department, and he LOVES this movie. He writes about it at least once every couple of weeks.
Stanley Kramer was a great Producer/Director of heavyweight dramas with social import, but like Steven Spielberg, he had no touch for comedy.
I think we often give too much credit to “they” for actually being movie experts. I’ve read “reviews” of movies that I’ve watched that show the reviewer definitely did NOT watch the movie in its entirety or even any more of it than a long trailer or two. On the other hand, I’ve watched movies that have a lot of violence but that also have numerous funny moments bordering on hilarity. “Bullet Train” is the most recent example of that.
Come to think of it, my favorite movie ever might qualify. I Heart Huckabees is meant to be funny, and it is, usually I describe it as “A comedy about existentialism.” But whenever I force people to watch it, I get blank stares. Its humor is in its absurdity, but it seems absurdity is not de-facto funny for most people.
God I love that movie though.
“Have you ever transcended space and time?”
“No. Yes. Uh, time not space. No. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Nitpick: Jimmy Durante.