Lately I've been watching a lot of standup comedy bits on YouTube, and as a result my thoughts drifted to the question of why so few comedians are able to make the jump to film. I'm sure we all know about the Saturday Night Live curse -- where movies starring SNL cast members not named Bill Murray or Dan Ackroyd tend to be awful.
Why is that? And why do so few other standup comedians do well in film?
I have a theory. If you watch a comedian perform, he is emotionally detached. That may seem odd to say about someone like Patton Oswalt telling humiliating stories about himself, or Sam Kinnison literally screaming with rage. But it's true: the comic, in order to succeed, has to be cool and aloof. We have to know that his rage or confession is part of the act. Contrast what happened when Michael Richards (for example) actually lost his temper and insulted some audience members: it killed his career dead.
The comedian is a benevolent dictator, a charismatic leader commanding us to be amused. (It was once said of Bob Hope that he dared his audience not to laugh at his jokes.) Like all tyrants, the comedian can't show any true vulnerability.
And that's why they don't make good movies: the hero of a story -- even a comedy -- has to show real vulnerability, and struggle and fail, and elicit our sympathy. He has to admit that he is flawed, and change himself in order to finally succeed.
That's fine for an actor, but awful for a comedian. We don't laugh at comedians for being vulnerable and flawed, we laugh at them for showing us we're vulnerable and flawed. So a comedian in a comedy either undercuts the very things that earned his reputation, or plays a static character (which means there's no story).
Now, as it happens, there is a secret way for comedians to make funny comedies. The Marx Brothers understood it, and a few others have stumbled across it. The comedian can't be the hero. In Marx Brothers movies, the ostensible hero was some forgettable lunk like Alan Jones or whoever, who probably got a forgettable musical number and ended the movie by winning the heart of the forgettable pretty girl playing the ostensible heroine. The Marx Brothers were supporting characters who just happened to get top billing and most of the screen time.
A supporting character can be static and funny, while the vulnerability and change of the hero gives us an actual story. The Marxes don't have to learn some bogus lesson about responsibility, so they can fade out being just as ridiculous as always.
Boiled down, the lesson is this: the most important character isn't always the hero.
Some comments on this sort of thing are encapsulated here.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/3272-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-On-Stranger-Tides
The movie needs someone to do the heavy lifting of the plot rather than just be wacky.
Posted by: Brian Rogers | 03/27/2013 at 04:06 AM