HEAD TO HEAD: Karl MacDermottargues that what was once a sophisticated genre has become gross, coarse and lazy over the last 15 years, while Donald Clarkethinks that crude, low-brow comedy isn't a modern intention but goes back to the first time a man slipped on a cowpat.
YES
DID LAUREL and Hardy ever fart on screen? It was a question that entered my mind as the closing credits rolled on the new Will Ferrell comedy film Step Brothers. Did Groucho Marx ever use the "f" word in any of the Marx Brothers movies? Did we ever catch a celluloid glimpse of Danny Kaye's prostheticly recreated genitals? The answer to all the above? No.
Maybe I'm just getting old, I thought, and there have always been crowd-pleasing, lowest common denominator comedies produced by Tinseltown. But then I thought hang on - there were also other comedies made in the past that weren't low-brow, cheap and vulgar. Comedies aimed at . . . adults. And they seemed to be in the majority. Not any more. Then a follow -up question entered my mind. Why has most American film comedy become so gross, coarse and lazy over the past 15 years? To find a solution to this conundrum, we have to go back. In the 1940s, the great comedy writer-director Billy Wilder had a sign above his desk that asked "What would Lubitsch do?"
Ernst Lubitsch was Billy Wilder's mentor and like Wilder, he honed his skills in the German film industry of the 1920s. By the early 1930s, Lubitsch was an established director of sophisticated comedies in Hollywood. These comedies dealt with sex, adultery and relationships, but given the enforcement of a strict censorship code, the Hays Code, things had to be inferred and implied as opposed to spelt out and shown. Though dated - comedy being the most perishable of all the goods in that fridge called the arts- a lot of these films are still amusing and the joke is very often what is left unspoken or what is not seen. Wilder lived under the same censorship restrictions — hence the sign above his desk. He had to work round what he couldn't show. He had to come up with ingeniously devised scenarios to overcome the speed bumps of the Hays Code. He had to work on the "funny" because he couldn't take the easy route.
By the early 1970s, film censorship had ended, but for a few years most film comedies were still quite literate. This was because the new generation of comedy writers who were dominating American film comedy, including Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon and Woody Allen, had perfected their craft working in the early days of American television and also had to operate under severe constraints - this time, prudish impediments imposed by the television companies and their sponsors.
So we enter the 1980s, and once again American television spawned a new generation of comedy writer-performers, the first generation whose world view was formed not by reading books but by watching television. Foreplay to the decline. One show in particular, Saturday Night Live, churned out writer-performers who after gaining television acclaim made the leap, sometimes successfully, to film comedy. People like Chevy Chase. Chevy's movies were never that funny but they were never coarse. So what is that missing ingredient in the last 20 years, that reverse evolutionary link, that has turned comedy vehicles into coarse comedy vehicles? Enter Peter and Bobby.
I lay most of the blame on the decline of the great American comedy at the door of the Farrelly Brothers. In the 1990s, when "gross-out" became "out-gross" at the box office, and movies like Dumb and Dumber(1995) became enormous hits, it gave the green light for movie companies to explore every possible comedy angle for loose-bowelled, bodily-fluid spewing, foul- mouthed comedy cretins.
Nowadays, every big studio comedy film release seems to be marketed towards a smirking, giggling, insecure yet slightly knowing 15-year-old adolescent male. But what bothers me is that no one seems to mind. No one seems to miss those other comedies. Comedies with heart, soul, and integrity. Where are the modern day equivalents of The Fortune Cookie(1966), Tootsie(1982) and Groundhog Day(1993)? And why aren't movie critics up in arms? Instead they seem to be suffering from a collective amnesia while lauding the latest "boundary-breaking, envelope-pushing" comedy.
Borat (2006), is a case in point. Sascha Baron Cohen is a great comedy actor, but the universally overwhelming, positive reviews for the movie left me astounded. When most critics agree that the comedy highpoint of a film is a nude wrestling match that climaxes with the hero having his nose up the anus of his fat hairy sidekick in all its gory glory, call me a film comedy luddite, but is it really that funny? I'm not sure. I think it's easy, lazy and actually rather boring. But then again, why try to come up with something intelligent and original when you can get a laugh sticking your nose up someone's anus?
Which brings us back to Billy Wilder. Nowadays movie-makers don't have to work on the "funny" because they can take the easy route. What would Lubitsch do? He'd hold his head in despair.
Karl MacDermott is a writer and avid moviegoer
NO
IN THE last week of August, Step Brothers, a broad comedy starring Will Ferrell and John C Reilly, took somewhere in the region of €400,000 at the Irish box office. In general, about 10 per cent of the combined British and Irish takings for a movie are generated on this side of the Isle of Man. But a glance at Screen International magazine confirms that €400,000 constituted a full 20 per cent of the British and Irish earnings for Step Brothersduring that week.
We love contemporary mainstream comedy. In 2005, Meet the Fockers, a fitful sequel to Meet the Parents, somehow became the biggest film of the year in this country.
In virtually every other territory, Revenge of the Sith- a Star Warsfilm, for Pete's sake - ate the box office alive, but we preferred to watch Barbra Streisand doing lubricious things to poor Dustin Hoffman.
I know what you're thinking. If success at the box office were any objective measure of quality, then we might as well do away with film critics (an appalling prospect, you'll agree). I kicked nine colours of ordure out of Meet the Fockersin this newspaper and would do so again if given the chance.
The question, however, is not to do with the critical respectability of modern comedy; it is to do with the ability of films to make punters laugh. To survive past its first weekend and prosper - Fockersremained in the top 10 for two months - a comedy must spread at least a few chuckles about the cinema.
More dubious statistics than these appear regularly in newspapers to prove the efficacy of homeopathy or the carcinogenic nature of red wine. I, therefore, declare the case closed.
Okay, okay. This facetious defence demands, I grant you, an overly literal reading of the argument. Any sane critic would, surely, accept that crudity - whether funny or not - has overtaken contemporary film comedy and made a stranger of wit, subtlety and nuance. Not quite. The most ecstatically reviewed mainstream film of this year, Pixar's Wall-E, is very definitely a comedy and, like all its maker's dazzling animations, it generates laughs without directing its attention towards the lower orifices.
You think it's cheating to include animated films? Well, in recent years, a school of accessible, independent comedy has blossomed in America and delighted audiences with such sharp, sophisticated entertainments as The Squid and The Whale, Little Miss Sunshine, Sidewaysand Juno. There are plenty of laughs in that list.
Ah, yes, but we don't want to talk about little films by little people; we want to talk about the stuff that creates empires. Let's do that, then. The class of twee British comedy perfected by Working Title Films - films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hilland Love, Actually- are not much to my taste, but they definitely fill cinemas and you can certainly take your grandmother to them.
I sense frustration among the fulminators. Stop changing the subject, they fume. This argument is about that particular class of "gross-out" movie invented by the Farrelly Brothers and perpetuated by such unlovely disciples as Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and Martin Lawrence. Belching, farting barbarians with heads full of sewage have overrun a comedy tradition that once took in the sharp satires of Preston Sturges and the nimble farces of Ernst Lubitsch.
Let me here offer a concession. It is certainly true that cinema is no longer as welcoming to sophisticated, verbally dextrous comedies as it once was. Since the arrival of television in the 1950s, the average age of cinemagoers has declined and it is now hard to imagine an era when films such as Sturges's untouchable The Lady Eveor Lubitsch's gorgeous The Shop around the Cornercould be mainstream smashes. The contemporary romantic comedy has become so debased - mutated into the patronising chick-flick - that it barely exists as a workable genre.
It is, however, wrong to conclude that crude comedy is some modern invention, concocted by illiterate, lobotomised video-game fanatics.
The lewd jokes, clattering pratfalls, silly voices and comic walks enjoyed by the likes of Sandler, Schneider and Lawrence were staples of burlesque and were later taken up by such successful film comics as the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello and Jerry Lewis.
By doing away with double entendres and bringing rampant scatology to their act, the contemporary comics are, in fact, returning to the well-reported, uninhibited filth of those burlesque pioneers. Don't forget that English comic Max Miller, born in the Victorian era, was frequently booted off the BBC for being too crude.
The tradition for good old-fashioned crudity goes back further than Miller's time. If we were to travel to the early Pleistocene era and make friends with Homo Erectus (oo er!), he would, I guess, have some trouble understanding the aphorisms of Woody Allen or the surreal experiments of Luis Buñuel. Show him a man slipping on a cowpat though and he would, I guarantee, laugh his sloped forehead off. So would I.
Donald Clarke is a film critic with The Irish Times