I remember watching a lot of Looney Tunes growing up, and I recall a lot of the episodes ending with a character putting a gun to their head and shooting themselves. Now that’s something you definitely don’t see anymore - cartoons full of zany suicide. They’ve even gone so far as to edit the endings of the reruns. Anyone else remember this?
I’ve seen a number of cartoons where they’ve edited out the violence to make them more “P.C.” The truth is that when you take the violence out of a roadrunner cartoon, it’s just a bunch of shots of a really fast bird…
Racial humor is still funny, and it’s still out there.
Remember “Rush Hour 2?” With Chris Tucker screaming about how he’s being discriminated at the craps table, to distract security while Jackie Chan sneaks into the casino? How about when he breaks into the “I have a dream” speech? Isn’t that racial humor?
Then there’s Eddie Murphy telling the bar in “48 Hours” that “I’m your worse nightmare: a nigger with a badge.” And Richard Pryor teaching Gene Wilder how to act black (complete with blackface, rainbow hat and ghetto blaster) in “Silver Streak.” Jeeze, most of “Blazing Saddles” is nothing but race humor.
Granted, the more vicious stuff’s gone, thank God, and I’m sure that’s what y’all are talking about. No more Amos ‘n’ Andy or Stephin Fetchit. And so long as the two characters are portrayed as equal, they can trade all the racial barbs they want. But race humor plays a big part of movie humor.
Real quick hijack. I just wanted to present a comic by one of the funniest cartoonists ever, Sam Henderson.
The Always Funny Drinking Game!
Well, that’s over.
I agree with the AIDS jokes. I was watching an old Sam Kinison tape which was very, very funny. However, near the end of the tape he gets into an anti-homosexual rant about AIDS. The humor thudded to a complete stop. He was just wrong in almost every way. Not just in his anti-homosexual bias, but in the very facts of AIDS and its spread. I think Sam Kinison was a very funny man, but these bits of his simply will not make you laugh. Laughing at ignorance is funny, ignorance itself rarely is.
Has anybody seen any funny impressionists lately? I sure haven’t.
Laugh-In was the “Seinfeld” of its day (everyone at work talked about it the next day).
With a couple of minor exceptions (Martin’s idiocy), it’s painful to watch.
I comedy about the differences between men and women painful to watch. (Sadly, for some reason, this comprises the entirety of many female stand-ups’ acts.) The old “Ya just can’t understand women/men are so clueless” thing is so hackneyed and cliched it just can’t make me laugh anymore. Every joke’s been done to death.
Sitcoms are the same thing but in script format. Eery sitcom focusing on the “battle of the sexes” is the same, every character identical. The guys are well-meaning but clueless, self-centred oafs who have no social graces; the women are socially aware but bitter, panicky martinets. Invariably, the women gets the man to see the importance of being aware of the existence of other human beings, while the man gets the woman to see beyond nitpicky details to the Big Picture.
Yawwwwwwwn.
A lot of physical humor doesn’t age well. I find it interesting to look at the Marx Brothers - with the exception of a few absolutely brilliant bits (the Stateroom Scene, the Mirror Scene), much of the pratfall stuff is just irritating. Most of the time, you could safely lose Chico and Harpo (I just accidently wrote Charco, who I suppose was their long-lost black cousin - oh, what was that about racial humor again? I’m going to get so flamed for that. As it were.)
Where was I?
Oh, Chico and Harpo. Yeah, you could digitally edit them out without missing much.
Or Looney Tunes. About half of the reason the 50s were such a high point was the quality of the writing. Previously the humour was very broad, physical comedy, but somewhere around 1948 everything suddenly jumped a level. [Alistair Cooke]The wordplay of the Duck-Rabbit-Duck series will, I’m sure, remain classic for generations.[/Alistair Cooke].
I don’t know if this qualifies as “not funny anymore,” since even when I was a little kid I didn’t get what was supposed to be funny about it.
In some comedies (I remember it specifically being done on Not Necessarily the News, The Gods Must Be Crazy, and perhaps also Laugh In), they would run a film of something forward, then run it backward for a second, then run it forward again. A film of someone walking would have him suddenly back up a step, then walk forward again, perhaps to make it look like he was doing a double-take. I could gather from the laugh track that this was supposed to be funny, but it never seemed like anything but a particularly stupid and unoriginal camera trick.
Seriously, was this ever considered a brilliantly witty form of comic expression?
[Hijack]
I beg to differ. Try doing the Tutsi Frutsi routine from “A day at the Races” or how about “Why a Duck”?
Harpo also had some funny moments too, especially the bit with the peanut stand in “Duck Soup”
[/Hijack]
Back to the OP:
Those seventies movies where merely swearing was thought to garner laughs. (See Kentucky fried Movie) They dropped any real humour or clever dialogue. Instead they thought that if a character said sht or fck that was enough to get a laugh.