As anyone who’s frequented this space knows, if there is one fundamental belief that I live by, it’s that Tyler Perry is not funny. The fact that his terrible show House of Payne has recently been teamed with fellow waste of human resources, Bill Engvall, is a crime against humanity equal to anything going on in Tibet. Seriously, if I see the commercial with the following exchange:
Mom: “Go to your room, no TV, no ipod, no video games…”
Son: “What are we supposed to do?”
Mom: “Read!”
Son: “No! Seriously?!”
…one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists with my Blue Collar Comedy Tour DVD. Now the commercials for House of Payne are claiming that it’s “the most popular comedy in history”. Where the hell do they get these statistics? You have to start assuming that’s been taken completely out of context, like the original quote was actually, “The most popular comedy in television history…to score a negative Neilsen Rating,” or “The most popular comedy in television history…to be written by students with Down Syndrome.” House of Payne makes Alf look like the first season of Saturday Night Live.
Which brings me to my main point. All of these terrible comedies that are apparently getting viewers and renewed seasons made me start to wonder what happened to all the funny comedians. Where are all the guys who used to crack me up when I was growing up? Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey…they’re all still around. How come I can’t remember the last time I got excited to see a movie by any of them? The terrifying thing is they’re all still working. Sandler and Myers just released new movies and Carvey just had a new comedy special on Comedy Central.
But does You Don’t Mess With The Zohan or The Love Guru whet my appetite to go spend ten dollars at the theater? Not one bit. And as far as Carvey goes, my friends and I caught about twenty minutes of his comedy “special”. To sum it up, it made me throw up a little bit in my mouth. My friend Matt wasn’t even there and was able to sum it up. “Let me guess; did he do some old worn out impressions from the early 90s, fail in an attempt to relate them to current events, and tell stories that nobody could relate to or find amusing?” Check, check and check. Instead of laughing, we were wondering things like “Did they have to lie to people to get them into the theater?” “How many of these paying customers are directly related to Carvey?” and “Do you think they enforced a drink minimum for people before they got to the show just so they could tolerate it?” Comedy specials usually have punchy three word titles like “No Rules Apply” or “One Night Only”. Carvey’s could have been called, “No Audience Necessary”.
I started to think back and did some research. Just look at the movies that have been produced recently by that seminal early 90s Saturday Night Live cast they defined comedy movies as recent as ten years ago:
Adam Sandler: 
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry aka How Many Gay and Homophobic Jokes Can We Cram into 90 Minutes?
Click (didn’t see it, didn’t hear anything great)
Anger Management (could’ve been based on my demeanor after seeing it)
Little Nicky (Oh god)
Eight Crazy Nights
Dana Carvey:
The Master of Disguise (I didn’t know that the death of someone’s career could actually be heard, but here it went on for 2 hours)
…and then the poor little guy doesn’t have anything else noticeable outside of cameo in Little Nicky since Wayne’s World 2
David Spade:
The Benchwarmers
Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
Joe Dirt
Myers was able to stave off the buzzards for awhile with his clever work as Shrek (which if you haven’t noticed has been absolutely bled dry at this point: Shrek, Shrek 2, Shrek: Smash n Crash Racing video game, Shrek The Halls for TV, Shrek the Third, and Shrek Goes Forth in preproduction), but The Love Guru is not a good sign. I argued with my friends that cocaine and ham and bacon sandwiches were the best thing to happen to Chris Farley since he died before the fallout could begin, but Dan aptly pointed out, “Clearly you haven’t seen Beverly Hills Ninja”. I stand corrected.
Think about other major comedians from Saturday Night Live and otherwise. Eddie Murphy has released Norbit, The Haunted Mansion, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Showtime, Holy Man, Metro, Life, and Vampire in Brooklyn. I purposefully chose not to include Bowfinger because unlike most people I thought it was hilarious, but he’s got a new one coming out called Meet Dave which looks absolutely abysmal.
The worst is poor Rob Schneider, who now can’t get a job unless one of his buddies does a favor for him, but I guess you can’t be picky when you’re recent resume includes The Benchwarmers, both Deuce Bigalows, The Hot Chick, The Animal, and Down Periscope. That’s not even mentioning all his spot roles in the above mentioned crapfests. Hiring Rob Schneider to star in your movie at this point is like hiring Pete Townsend or Gary Glitter as a babysitter.
Does this look like a guy with steady work?
What happened? Did they just stop being funny, or are they the same and we’ve changed what we think is funny? The answer is probably a little bit of both. Bill Simmons once pointed out that comedians are successful because they make jokes about things that everyone can relate to. When they get successful and famous, they stop hanging out with regular people and start “acting like a celebrity”. They lose touch with what’s funny to the rest of us. I thought it was a very astute point. Another problem is that Hollywood isn’t concerned so much with how funny they actually are as to how much money they can make off of them. So they see one formula work for them, or one type of character, and they start offering lucrative scripts that are nearly identical in content, just with different names and places. The viewing public may be stupid enough to pay to see them, but isn’t stupid enough to get fooled into thinking they’re different from the previous movies. The same shit just isn’t funny anymore.
At the same time, comedy is almost always changing. Now shows with more subtle awkward humor like The Office are gaining popularity and the guys who used to be funny, well, that’s just not what they do. It’s not so much about hilarious characters that dive into the ridiculous physical humor like Austin Powers or Wayne and Garth or Billy Madison. We like smarter, wittier characters now, like the Vince Vaughn type.
But again, what we like is always changing. This leads me to my greatest concern: Will Ferrell. I own most of his movies and his Best of Saturday Night Live Volume One will always be one of my favorite DVDs. He could make a movie where he was just Harry Caray asking questions for 2 hours and I would see it four times in theaters. But you have to be concerned about his recent developments. I thought Talladega Nights was funny (not everyone did) but then they put that same characters in tights and called him Chazz Michael Michaels for Blades of Glory. Then the same character became Jackie Moon in Semi Pro. It’s the kinda smarmy, inappropriate jackass. Funny, but we’re not buying it more than once. You really have to hope he doesn’t continue down this road. His next movie is Step Brothers, where he is reuniting with John C. Reilly and Adam McKay, the writer of Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and the hilarious video of Pearl the Landlord. Can it be a winning team again? We’ll see.
How does one avoid such a career tumble? Well, Dave Chappelle started getting too famous and hid in Africa for awhile. Um, that works? Jerry Seinfeld, with the exception of a couple projects, has stayed relatively low key in that he stopped his show when it was on top and now just tours doing stand up. Jim Carrey did enough mediocre to good serious movies that he’s no longer just seen as a comedian and more of a legitimate mainstream actor (not easy to do, Bill Murray and to a much lesser extent Sandler have had success doing this as well).
I guess all that really matters in the end is that we have as few Dane Cook’s as possible. Nobody’s career blazed upward and flamed out as fast as his. He went from being underrated, to the funniest man on earth, to overrated, to absolutely sickening to watch in like 10 months. It was incredible, really. After Vicious Circle and Tourgasm, I wouldn’t hire him to mow my lawn. We haven’t seen a more dramatic crash since JFK Jr. was piloting small aircraft.
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In the end, all I can do is dream of a world where less people watch “very funny” shows on TBS and start to watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the actual funniest show ever on FX (new season September 18th; I think I just creamed my cargo shorts).
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