Does Anybody Remember Laughter?

[Note: I know I said this issue would be about The Crown, but I still have two episodes to go in Season 5 and didn’t feel like bingeing it.]

This week, Glass Onion, Rian Johnson’s sequel to his hit 2019 film Knives Out, will arrive in theaters. It’s funny, clever, raucous, and will be great to see with a crowd.

It will also only be in theaters for one week only.

Glass Onion and its untitled sequel are part of a two-picture deal Johnson made with Netflix for $400 million. The deal was essentially a hedge for Johnson. On the one hand, he could stick with theatrical distribution (presumably with Lionsgate, who distributed Knives Out and was likely pleased about its $312 million worldwide return off a budget of $40 million) and see how far the domestic box office took him. Or, as he decided in March 2021 with theatrical looking shaky in the fallout of the global pandemic, take the sure money with Netflix. Johnson took the latter, but presumably part of the deal was to give his movie some kind of theatrical release.

You may wonder why Netflix would only give the movie a week in theaters. Granted, it’s the week of Thanksgiving, which tends to do well for multiplexes (or at least it has in the past), but beyond that, they’ll snatch it back and then put it on the streaming service starting December 23rd. For Netflix, they essentially get a strong word-of-mouth from the one-week release (a kind of strategy the multiplexes rejected pre-pandemic but has become a new norm), and then settle in for where you make your money, which is from subscriptions and accounted for in viewing time. If folks see Glass Onion in a theater, they may be less likely to watch it on Netflix.

Simply assuming Netflix could get a strong return from box office showings is based off the notion that people want to see a funny movie in theaters. Yes, Knives Out was a hit, but if any genre has struggled in past years, it’s the theatrical comedy. More often than not, if these movies are released into theaters at all, it’s done quietly and without much fuss before shuffling them over to a streamer. It’s an odd turn for a genre that has not only been a staple of cinema, but one of its founding sensibilities with icons like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin knowing how to make audiences laugh without even uttering a word.

So what happened? Why has comedy disappeared from our theaters when people still like to laugh? I’d like to point to three factors.

Comedy Is Everywhere

While it’s tempting to point to the fact that Hollywood has largely abandoned the mid-budget movie (and we’ll get to that in a bit), we also have to consider that comedy doesn’t inherently carry a large budget or a microbudget. Furthermore, a low-cost genre like horror continues to thrive, so the notion that only blockbusters can thrive at cinemas seems to miss that there is a market for movies outside of VFX-driven spectacle.

Instead, I’d like to argue that if we look at comedy as the need to laugh, then there is no time like right now where everyone is a comedian. The rise of social media has made it so that if you’re quick-witted enough or have the right comic chops, you can amass a following, or at the very least, go viral. I don’t want to diminish that success because comedy is very hard! One of the most aggressive sentences in the English language is, “Make me laugh.” Trying to suss out what will tickle someone’s funny bone, when comedy can be so personal and built on different sets of experience, is exceedingly difficult.

And yet because algorithms know what we like, it’s not too difficult to have Twitter (at least for the time being) or TikTok serve you up the kind of jokes and memes that can have you howling. More than that, you’ve already paid the fee (i.e. you let social media apps absorb data about you and then they then sell that data to advertisers so companies can serve you more accurate ads) so you may as well sit back and watch a dog or a baby do a funny thing or let someone appeal to your weird sense of humor. That’s on top of the fact that there’s no shortage of comedy series and performances on streaming. If you’re looking for a laugh, it’s never been easier to find one. From that perspective, why would you drive to a theater and shell out $15 for something you may or may not find funny? Isn’t that a risk, especially when there’s arguably no more grueling cinematic experience than sitting through a film where the jokes land with a thud?

That’s not to say that social media can replace cinematic comedy. However, cinematic comedy thrives in an age of monoculture. For a joke to work, it has to land on some kind of common experience. Algorithmically, you can get your joke to an audience that will appreciate it. But cinemas don’t work that way. You are, in a sense, trying to be broad yet precise so that the premise is understood while the jokes still have specificity and craft. So you take something like The Hangover where it’s broadly understood that bachelor parties can go awry and Las Vegas is “Sin City” and then you pepper it with jokes and scenarios like getting punched out by Mike Tyson or having a naked man jump out of your car trunk.

That’s not to say every joke in The Hangover is gold, and more importantly, that’s not to say that every joke in The Hangover can last. What I’m saying is that the movie made $469 million worldwide in 2009 because its comic setup, premise, and conflict were both understood and executed well enough that people lined up to laugh hysterically at the antics of three guys who were trying to piece together what happened to the groom they lost two days before the wedding.

The Limits of Setting

If I run a major studio, then my goal is to make as much money on my movies as humanly possible. I can pay lip service to The Magic of the Movies or Artistic Integrity, but I’m here to make money for shareholders who demand to see a line that goes up year-after-year no matter what. If I make a comedy in 2022, then I have to consider the landscape it will enter into, the comedic voice it’s uplifting, if those jokes could stand the test of time (what if it, gasp! ages poorly), and if they’ll be understood to overseas audiences. If I green light a $40 million comedy, there might be a joke that becomes a lightning rod for controversy as other platforms seek to make their money off culture wars and angry clicks. But if I go too tame, no one will even bother with what I’m doing. And it’s kind of a wash anyway because my shareholders don’t want to double a $40 million investment. They want to double a $400 million investment. A comedy isn’t going to make a billion dollars worldwide. But if I make an action movie that has jokes in it, then I don’t have to worry about making an unfunny comedy with controversial jokes that doesn’t even make that much money to begin with. Considering that studio heads are, by nature, extremely cautious, you can see why comedies aren’t a thrilling proposition right now.

This is all compounded by the fact that while comedy has been in Hollywood’s blood since its inception, the industry has always felt uncomfortable with the genre. When it comes time to hand out the Academy Awards for acting, we’re programmed to think that what makes a great actor is how much pathos they can wring from a performance. The Oscars have always been about Hollywood trying to show that they’re serious people and that making movies is serious business, and yet I’m supposed to believe that Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond or Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness are harder than what Sacha Baron Cohen had to do for Borat? If acting is all about how far you’re willing to go for your performance and DiCaprio talked about eating raw bison liver for The Revenant on his way to winning a Best Actor Oscar, then what of the actor who runs naked into a crowded ballroom and gets into a naked wrestling match with his co-star? At least the Academy would recognize Cohen’s co-star Maria Balakova in the 2020 sequel, although, naturally, she didn’t win because comedy can’t be taken seriously.

Cinema Only for the Sacred and the Spectacular

If you’ve been to an AMC theater in the past couple of years, you’ve probably seen the ad featuring Nicole Kidman. The sentiment of the spot is that movie theaters are sacred spaces (although, in one of the darker aspects of the spot, the theater is completely empty except for Kidman). They are shrines where we come to marvel at Oscar-winners like La La Land and applaud new talents like Michael B. Jordan in Creed. The big screen exists to be heralded, and you will only get that at AMC Theaters (or their competitors, but for the sake of the spot, it’s AMC).

What strikes me about that spot is how it conveys our current thinking about movie theaters. Major chains like AMC know they’re under threat from streaming and rather than do anything remotely tangible to address that (top-notch projection, more ushers to enforce theater etiquette), they’ve huffed and moaned and tried to get distributors to keep movies in theaters longer despite massive drop-offs after opening weekend. Now, even AMC seems to cop to the fact that all their screens can really do are offer spectacle or potential Oscar contenders (and even the latter is in doubt as streamers make inroads to the point where last year’s Best Picture winner, CODA, came from AppleTV+).

Between those two poles—blockbusters and prestige pictures—you lose sight of the communal experience. Horror thrives not simply because it’s on a big screen, but because it’s in a dark room and you can’t easily leave. The best you can do is cover your eyes. But I fear that with the loss of theatrical comedies, we lose how valuable it is to laugh together in the same space. Sure, you’ll still have standup shows and funny plays, but those have typically been a pricier ticket. It’s no less magical to go to a movie, sit in a room full of strangers, and end up cry-laughing at the same thing on screen. That’s not to say comedies always work. I’ve been at middling comedies in packed houses, and I’ve seen comedies that should have been massive hits that died at the box office.

But with the genre in retreat at the box office, we’re losing a piece of the landscape we should treasure. The loss of the monoculture is a double-edged sword where we get more voices with fewer gatekeepers, but we’re also losing a collective community where we can engage with art that manages to capture the Zeitgeist. We see that we’re not itty bitty subgroups that can be pitted against each other in a never-ending battle for culture supremacy, but people who may come from different walks of life but still find ourselves laughing together when Kevin McAllister lights Harry on fire or a bridesmaid dress fitting goes horribly wrong or when we learn that there’s no fighting in the war room.

We come to this place to laugh and to cry and see the dazzling images and the sound that you can feel and all that. But we also come here because it feels good to laugh with other people.