I namedrop 19 movies and 5 tv shows you should totally read this article about comedy

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Oct 5
7 min read

the Comedy Movie: a biography by a non-expert

It’s Any year from the 2000s. The air is cold like the self-proclaimed frozen hearts of all the myspace emos, Snape wives stalk fanfiction.net for fanfiction with horrible paragraphing and even more egregious punctuation. Club penguin exists. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the most defining characteristic of the 2000s, the Comedy Movie is at its peak. Like a 19 year old boy who just discovered the concept of protein powder, or a nerdy girl in one of these said comedy movies who finds out her glasses can be taken off, the 2000s was the Comedy Movie’s TOP physical form.

Unlike Michael Jordan’s professional baseball career, the list of box-office home runs the Comedy Movie was hitting was seemingly endless. Mean Girls, Anchorman, The 40-year old Virgin, Superbad, it appeared as if Hollywood had finally found its footing in the comedy genre. From commercial success and cult followings, to just the sheer amount of pure comedies being put out, the Comedy Movie was on a high, one that was sure to never end….

spoiler alert it didn’t ‘never end’

.. So what happened to the pure comedy? Some people say assassination, others say aliens came in the middle of the night some time around 2017 and just took it. While I’m not exactly an expert on the inner workings of Hollywood, I’d offer three reasons: capitalism, quality and perception.

But first, let’s get into some context. In the 2000s, comedy movies were simple and unapologetic. (Granted, many were also offensive or aged incredibly poorly, but at least they were unafraid in that regard.) Many comedy movies were just that: Comedies. Sure there’d be the seasonal rom-com or action-comedy as there always have been, but there were still good, pure comedies.

Movies such as Zoolander, School of Rock and Napoleon Dynamite not only saw great commercial success, with ROIs (Return on Investment, basically the profit) of 2.2 times, 3.75 times and 115.3 times respectively, but also became iconic household names and “must-watches” that still make the lists of countless cinephiles today.

However, in the 2010s, these pure comedies slowly started dying out or decreasing in quality to the point of being unwatchable. As this trend continued, it became hard for the Comedy Movie to turn a profit. Even pure comedies near and dear to my heart, like Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) cost $20 million dollars to make but grossed only approximately $9.5 million worldwide.

As audience preferences shifted and pure comedies got less and less profitable, Hollywood stopped betting big on pure laughs, preferring to blend comedy in action, drama, or romance to “hedge its bets.” Just like Michael Jordan’s professional baseball career when he quit after a year to go back to basketball, pure comedies became a blip on the career timeline of Hollywood. Cast away in the corner to be forgotten about, never to be revisited.

back to the triple list

Sorry for the diversion. Let’s go back to capitalism, quality and perception. They’re kind of connected in a vicious cycle. Comedy movies were really popular in the 2000s, so obviously we wanted more of them to get made. But technically, all writers had to do was make people laugh, so plots were often seen as a setup for cheap gags rather than the backbone of the movie, characters became predictable and one-note, and story logic often forgot to make an appearance. Quality was foregone in favour of big name stars; studios banked on celebrity appeal rather than clever scripts, assuming audiences would laugh at a familiar face even if the jokes fell flat. More movies also meant more room for bad jokes and poor writing and more visibility for bad jokes and poor writing like ‘Girl with large breasts has large breasts’ or ‘Nerd guy is nerd’.

All this means comedy movies are now being seen as lazy, poorly made and “less prestigious”. The Oscars stops caring so much about them, which means investors stop caring so much about them, which means Hollywood has to stop caring so much about them because there’s just no more money to make them anymore. Less money means less time to make the movie and less writers to write witty jokes and fleshed out characters. So they fall back on the most basic levels of comedy archetypes: fart jokes, falling down, ‘Girl with large breasts has large breasts’, ‘Nerd guy is nerd’, ‘Overtly racist and problematic statements go here’. Quality goes down, so demand goes down, so Hollywood doesn’t want to give money to make them anymore, and the cycle continues on and on until the Comedy Movie dies in a suffocating sweat of Nerd guy is nerd and Hot girl is hot.

Movies that fall under this genre of bad comedies I like to call the ‘fallen soldiers’ include rotten tomatoes fails like The Ridiculous 6, Loqueesha, Jack and Jill and Dirty Grandpa are all unfortunate and cursed creations that fall under this list. We also have the poorly-written sequels to popular 2000s comedies contributing to this genre, like Zoolander No. 2 or The Hangover Part 3.

I can only imagine it’s around this point that Hollywood calls a big important meeting. They need a way, any way, to resuscitate the Comedy Movie and bring it back to life because damn it Joe people need to laugh again. They were forced to watch Movie 43 and now we have to apologise to Everyone on Earth for having to witness that one scene of Hugh Jackman with that vat of soup.

spoiler alert it dies

There’s only one logical solution, Hollywood decides. They kill the pure comedy almost entirely, dismember it and chop up all its parts to be put with other genres. This way the comedy movie can still live on in fragments of other movies. It’s good for the Comedy Movie, Hollywood says, now we can still have funny movies, but there isn’t as much pressure to write good jokes! It’ll have actual plots to latch onto! Behold: the birth of the franken-dy genre babies. (aka, a mixture of other genres with comedies.) Romance-comedy, Action-comedy, Fantasy-comedy, Drama-Comedy, Fantasy Action Romance Musical Adventure Drama-Comedy, it was a perfect solution. Now, every movie could be funny. Every funny movie could have some substance, some fallback, some security—even if the movie wasn’t funny, it would be justifiable, because technically it’s an action/fantasy/romance/drama/ twelve thousand other things BEFORE being a comedy.

The franken-dy genre babies churn out some solid classics like 21 Jump Street, which is an action comedy, or even Everything Everywhere All At Once, which befittingly is simultaneously a sci-fi and a drama and comedy. The format works, perhaps because now the excuse of “it’s a comedy” can no longer be used by production houses to justify lazy writing, offensive rhetoric and shock-value humour.

And of course, it would be remiss of me to conclude this article without mentioning that during the Comedy Movie drought (or graveyard) of the 2010s and 2020s, its sister the Comedy TV (television) has been well and thriving. There have been countless fantastic sitcoms, mockumentaries and all other forms of comedy television that have replenished the comedy movie-shaped holes in our hearts. To list a few of my favourites, The Good Place, Arrested Development, Community, Fleabag, and Barry are all examples of comedy television made in the 2010s and 2020s that are witty and funny, yet emotionally engaging and have complex characterisations.

I present this as evidence that comedy is not and has never been a cheap and easy way to make media. Yet, it is not entirely fair to say that production houses purposely made comedies with lazy jokes and half baked plot lines. Comparing the medium of television and film can reveal to us some reasons why the Comedy Movie failed while the Comedy Television succeeded. This includes lower stakes for TV shows, smaller budgets needed for production, longer run times allowing for world-building and development of niche humour, and the general digestibility of one 30 minute episode of TV being much easier than a 2 hour movie.

Thus, as franken-dy and Comedy Television take over, the Comedy Movie fades out of existence forever, leaving behind a mountain of good films and an even bigger Everest sized mountain of at best unfunny and at worst deeply offensive eyesores.

Hollywood deciding what to do with the comedies

spoiler alert it didnt die

Just kidding. Much like Michael Jordan’s unprofessional baseball stint as a school boy reviving itself as his one-year long professional baseball career, the Comedy Movie is making a comeback. (or at the very least, making a comeback in my hopeful dreams)

After giving ample time for the victims of the ‘fallen soldiers’ to grieve the people they were before Adam Sandler and Netflix connected on LinkedIn, we’ve started to see more both indie and big house production companies produce pure comedies, or comedies more akin to comedy-action as opposed to action-comedy gain cult followings and commercial praise in the past few years. Some of my personal favourites are Bottoms (2023), and a new release that managed to break out of not just the bad comedy scene but also the bad remake-sequel scene, Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun (2025).

The Naked Gun 2025 Rotten Tomatoes Score

When comparing the success of these newer comedies to the failure of the many that came before it, it’s easy to see what comedies must do in order to regain their title as movies worthy of the two thousand dollars it would cost to see it in a cinema nowadays: Good, clever writing instead of falling back on tired tropes. Well developed plot lines and worldbuilding, likeable characters, steering away from racism and homophobia and any kind of joke Shane Dawson would have made in a now-deleted video…

All this to say, it’s been a great few years of film. I’m excited to see where the Comedy Movie will go next, and I hope you’re excited too.