The long whimpering finish of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week confirmed a sad truth. Hollywood killed comedy. A century of laughter provoked by comic geniuses — Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Fields, Hope, Brooks, Martin, Carrey, and Saturday Night Live alumni (Belushi, Aykroyd, Murray, Murphy, Sandler, Ferrell, Myers, Stiller) ended in the first decade of this one. Mirth has either been missing from the screen since 2010 or reduced to conservative man-bashing, as on every late-night show. The latter is questionably rewarded by “clapter,” the former depends on mocking the now unmockable — to Hollywoke if not the audience.
And there’s no end in sight to the comedy. Next year, Random House is coming out with Connie, a feminist sequel to The Godfather.
The last great comedy film was Tropic Thunder in 2008, directed and co-written by the brilliant Ben Stiller, before the Hollywoke Strain broke his mind and spirit. Tropic Thunder lampooned everything and everyone, including Asian communist terrorists and Hollywood, with a hilarious Tom Cruise as amoral studio executive Lee Grossman (“I don’t know what kind of pan-Pacific bullshit power play you’re trying to pull here,” Grossman snarls at the commie leader. “But Asia, Jack, is my territory!”). The gem also features Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface uttering the classic politically incorrect line, “Never go full retard.” Any part of the picture would melt down real studio execs today — and, sadly, Ben Stiller.
The highest rated, and funniest, sitcom of the 2010s was Two and a Half Men. Every episode featured the hedonistic Charlie Sheen not only enjoying the Male Gaze on a bevy of ridiculously sexy underdressed women but acting on it. And viewers of both sexes loved it, making the show number one for the whole decade. The audience for such humor hasn’t disappeared, only the producers of it.
The Hollywoke Strain is fatal to the comic mind. Will Ferrell, for instance, is responsible for some of the biggest howls and hits of the 00s — Elf, Old School, Anchorman, Blades of Glory, others. His last major film, however, was Will and Harper, a documentary about a road trip he took with his ex-SNL writer friend Harper Steele after he “came out” as a trans woman. Mostly groans replaced laughs. Ferrell’s most recent appearance on the Saturday Night Live season finale as the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein yukking it up with “old pal” Trump, was cringeworthy.
Meanwhile, the once uproarious Jim Carrey never recovered from Trump Derangement Syndrome. He was all over Twitter insulting the President during his first term, and composing anti-Trump cartoons. Trump’s 2024 election must have totally broken Carrey. He’s been absent from any screen during the man’s second term.
But if Hollywood players can no longer provide intentional laughs, they’re inspiring plenty of unintentional ones, so thoroughly have they beclowned themselves with wokeness. And thanks to Elon Musk’s free speech-saving purchase of Twitter, formerly blocked movie critics are providing the wit and humor absent from professional entertainment. Take the response to the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow trailer showcasing a drunken, depressed superwoman — not even a superheroine — in Jame Gunn’s latest uncalled for comic-book demystification: Drunk frat girl Supergirl.”—@BobDigi69. “They took Supergirl … that bright, hopeful, and pleasant lady, and turned her into yet another brooding, edgelord wearing her trauma on her sleeves, with massive attitude problems, zero charm, and the personality of a rotten wet cardboard” — @AI_EmeraldApple. “It’s hilarious that those behind this film sat down and said, ‘Movies are in dire trouble. We have to bring people back to theaters… by making Supergirl unattractive and unlikable!’” — @TheBrokenMap
More people reposted these comments than will likely go see Supergirl. So, once again, like the Keystone Cops, who were intentionally funny, leftwing showbiz rag Variety tried to come to the doomed movie’s rescue, via an interview with the titular starlet, “‘Just F—ing Go for It’: How ‘Supergirl’ Star Milly Alcock Learned to Ignore the Trolls and Became a Punk Rock Superhero.”
Predictably, and unfortunately for the project, Milly Alcock knew just who to blame for her movie’s imminent failure. It wasn’t screenwriter Ana Nogueira, co-writer of the essay “An Independent Media Center of One’s Own: A Feminist Alternative to Corporate Media.” That would be silly. It was Christian dads.
“It’s from a lot of people whose profiles have no photo, who are burner accounts,” Alcock said of the commentary. “Or someone’s name and then ‘Dad of four, Christian,’ which is hilarious to me. But I mean, whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”
Because in the Hollywoke bubble, Christian dads wishing to take their daughters — no average boy wants to watch Supergirl — to see a positive role model instead of an unglamorous burnout are the wrong kind of people with ignorable opinions. The Industry’s woke intransigence is no longer annoying, now it’s amusing. You can almost see the in-crowd tossing the banana peel they themselves are going to slip on, and wreck their habitat.
And there’s no end in sight to the comedy. Next year, Random House is coming out with Connie, a feminist sequel to The Godfather. It will feature Connie Corleone, Don Vito’s daughter and Michael’s sister, with a movie already in the works. From Random House: “Connie is a novel about how a woman works to forge her own way in a world that’s already decided who she is, what she’s about, and how she should be treated.”
If The Godfather book and film are any indication, we know how she gets treated by her husband, Carlo. Maybe in the new story, she beats him up. Now that would be funny.
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