"Attention animators: Please stop creating wondrous alternate universes for the sole purpose of scoring easy jokes off their resemblance to the real world. When you make Shrek 3, for instance, Shrek should not eat at the Unicornia Pizza Kitchen. When a Shark Tale sequel comes up, the finny Will Smith should not shop at the Sturgeon Megastore. That joke just isn't funny anymore. The Flintstones did it first and nearly exhausted it. Recent big-screen cartoons have pretty much finished the trick."

I don't really have anything to add to that, but it was so perfectly on the money that I just had to quote it. I think people take for granted the idea that comedy, more than other art forms (and don't even try to tell me it isn't) has pretty reliable rules of what works and what doesn't and isn't really held to the same ideals of creativity and progress. You can say that some things will always be funny, but I definitely think it's possible to kill a joke or a style of humor with overuse. The element of surprise isn't always integral to whether something is truly funny; sometimes I laugh at a Seinfeld rerun I've seen a dozen times in anticipation of the funny parts. But if you can see the punchlines coming before the setup's even finished then really what's the point?

Labels: comedy, movies

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11, 2005 at 12:50 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.