Disclaimer: This post is undoubtedly condescending. I apologize for that.
I continue to find myself completely out of touch with pop culture. It’s not something I really feel bad about, but in my own judgmental way, I wonder what is wrong with people. Nowhere does this happen more than with movies.
I recently went to see The Hangover, and while I expected not to love it, I thought it would be good for a couple laughs. After all, the populace in general seems to love it, and it was done by the same director who did Old School, which I found to be quite funny (well, the first and last acts, at least. The second act drags). More importantly, though, is that the critics tended to like it, as it scores a 73 on metacritic.com.
However, watching this movie baffled me. I wasn’t exactly baffled that people found it funny, what I found baffling is why people found it funny. The movie was made up of old jokes from a bunch of other movies of the same genre. If you’ve seen the joke before, especially if you’ve seen it hundreds of times before, how is it still funny? But there are other things that I just don’t understand why people think is funny:
- A man wears a jock strap instead of underwear. Why is that funny?
- A wedding band sings inappropriate things, a joke done in a bunch of other films, but also in Old School! Why is that funny?
- An old man gets a check up. We see his ass. Why is that funny?
- People get hit, kicked, slapped, punched, and tasered over and over again. Nothing more to the “joke” than that. Why is that funny?
- While transporting a drugged tiger, the tiger wakes up behind them and destroys classic car. In Tommy Boy, same thing except it was a supposedly dead dear. It wakes up and destroys a classic car. So they repeated the same joke. Why is that funny?
- Mike Tyson shows up to recover his tiger, and… and… well, there wasn’t any joke there other than Mike Tyson showed up. Why is that funny?
Of course, to some extent, I do understand why people find some of these things funny. Male nudity is apparently this generation’s man-in-a-dress. So whatever the context, people will for whatever reason find it funny. But why? That’s where they lose me.
People also like to watch things that they’re familiar with. So watching a joke play out that they’ve seen before makes it fairly easy for people to comprehend and find amusing. After all, there was an audience for Wild Hogs.
And always, from well before vaudeville, people find it amusing when characters are physically hurt.
Put all these together and you have the explanation for why people find these things funny, and why people love The Hangover. The unfortunate problem is that every one of these explanations begs the question. Why are these things funny?
Cheers,
Charlie
Comrus 