I can’t believe it took a half hour for someone to deliver the punch line.
I think in some cases, it’s because you, and what you find funny, and the cultural context, have all changed, so that, if you were seeing it for the first time now, you’d find it “meh.”
In other cases, it’s the repetition that kills the comedy.
There’s such a fine line between “ni!” and “meh”.
Sorry. I have a cold.
I’ll go now.
RE: Stripes. You are not wrong, My Friend! Damn near unwatchable unfunny. Most of Murray’s movies are, actually.
Animal House: The second time I was thinking “What would it be like to live next door to these self-centered screwballs.” “Couldn’t Belushi’s character just have asked the folk singer to stop instead of smashing his guitar?”
Alas, Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on First” – well, maybe it too ten times to become “meh”
I’ve still never seen all of Animal House, only excerpts including that scene, and then only as an adult. I’m missing the funny. Either it’s of-its-time, or you gotta care about the characters for it to resonate, or it’s just not my haha.
The “yellow light” scene, though? I’ve also never seen a full episode of Taxi, but that scene (especially this fuller version of it) absolutely cracks me up, still. It’s right up my alley.
I think it’s a lot this. Either that, or you had to have been a certain age to appreciate it, and that age has long passed for most of us.
One of my favorite movies as a teenager, but from what I recall the race-based bits alone would now put it firmly in the not-funny-at-all category.
No love for the rape jokes? I confess it’s still a favourite of mine but I’ve moved from the 18-yeard-old “wow, that’s funny because those guys sure know how to party” to “wow, that’s funny because those guys are such assholes.”
Like Stripes, you get a good opening 20ish minutes then you can probably turn it off. I think the first time you see it, you’re riding off the humor-high of the opening and remember the sum of the movie being better than it was. The second time, you notice that only the opening was actually good.
For me it’s the repeated use of blackface. I’ve been a Python fan forever, and every few years I rewatch the original episodes. Did it twice in the past year because just as I finished up, the remastered BluRay set came out. I know I’m just forgetting, but it feels like every time, I notice more and more unsettling racial humour.
I’ll also go out on a limb and say that, from all the sketches in the original 45 episodes, there’s probably a solid ffifty minutes of genuine, never-gets-old, I could rewatch forever, absolute classic material, and a staggering amount of utter dross.
Not comedy movies, but this perfectly describes my original watching of Battlestar Galactica (1978), Buck Rogers, Logan’s Run (the series)…well, any post-SW TV science fiction. And ST:TMP, RotJ, Battle Beyond the Stars…
We really wanted them to be good, but even then, we knew they weren’t.
A newer one like that is Mystery Men. When it first came out, I loved the characters, the style…and the second time I watched it, I was like “what was it I liked about this?”
Thanks. Found it now…
At other times, Grant recalls when he was a young journalist who lacked experience:
I remember in the early ‘40s back there when I was a kid working on the city desk in the Detroit Free Press . It was Sunday 4 o’ clock in the morning, somebody phoned in a story, and I had no way to check it out. It was either print the biggest story of the century and beat every paper in the city by hours or kill it. I was a gutsy kid so I decided to print it. Do you want to know what that story was? I will tell you what that story was. The Japanese had just bombed…San Diego. So I was wrong. It takes guts to be wrong, doesn’t it?
When it first came out, Monty Python was definitely hit and miss, but you waited until a good moment came along, and it did. When I see any reruns now, I notice the duds more often, and the good bits lose their punch due to so much repetition. It’s like that Monty Python live show recently, where the audience seemed to know the lines better than the original comedians.
Maybe I missed something, but where is the racial humor in Monty Python?
I saw Benny Hill in the Sixties and early Seventies, and it was mostly funny then, but a rerun with an older Benny Hill when the show had become overly formulaic was just painful.
Often comedy becomes very dated, or at least, personally. It was great at a certain time in life, and maybe with a clique that like that particular show. Those things do not last.
This, definitely. Humor is largely built on surprise (and other things) and the older you grow the less surprised you are likely to be by a lot of comedy even when it’s new to you – because it or something like it has been done before.
The Peter/Chicken fights on Family Guy. The first one was pretty funny (Expired coupon?! You son of a …) but totally skippable on rewatch and later fights are just more of the same.
I’m missing a few, but off the top of my head…
- “The Attila The Hun Show” sketch, Eric Idle in blackface, doing a minstrely servant named Uncle Tom (“There’s a whole horde of them marauding Visigoths to see y’all.”)
- “Jungle Restaurant” sketch, Michael Palin in blackface as the waiter. That same episode has an interminable sketch (“Erizabeth L”) with Terry Jones as a Japanese film director who flips the R’s and L’s in all his words and has his cast do the same (“He has ordeled the whore freet into the Blitish Channer!”)
- They go back to the yellowface bit in “The Cyling Tour” with Graham Chapman as a Chinese spy in the British Consulate, all buck teeth, squinting and pidgin English.
- And there’s a character in episode 28 whose name I won’t type here, even with asterixes.
There are a few others. I know it was a different time, but I don’t even get much intentional irony from the portrayals, just cheap, ugly meanness.
I still find that character’s name funny, because it perfectly (albeit, crudely) described several old aunts of my acquaintance. No one would dare name a character that today, but Mrs. Racebaiter would not have been as funny.
I’m not talking so much about “dated” humor. And teenage sex movies of the 80s seem pretty lame to me now. Or mildly amusing sitcom that is no longer mildly amusing to me now.
But Bugs Bunny cracked me up when i was 5 years old, and at 50 years old. And I’ve probably seen every episode 100x.
But, the “what does a yellow light mean” scene killed me only the first time.
Knowing the punchline obviously takes away some of the power of a joke. But some jokes keep working on me. I know full well that Daffy Duck’s bill is gonna go spinning around when Bugs convinces Elmer Fudd it is duck season.
I rotfl’ed the first time I heard this. In the years since, I’ve had people recommend it to me, both online and IRL, and I’ve had to tell them that It Was Only Funny The First Time, to me, anyway.
