There is a universality to humor that I think sometimes gets overlooked for the sake of political correctness or because a comedian might be afraid of being offensive. The point of humor is to offend; it is taking pleasure at the expense of someone or something else without exception. Boiling any joke down to its bare form involves one object being humiliated and a person feeling superior for that reason. There is sometimes a fear that a joke will cross a line from being hilarious to simply being cruel. Perhaps such a line does exist--after all, we don't normally laugh at jokes about child soldiers or genocide (people make Jewish jokes, though I never think they are any good)--but I don't normally feel that the lines we draw with our modern humor have any relevance, and their simple state of being takes the joy out of comedy in general, i.e. jokes on race, mental disabilities, etc.
"Death at a Funeral" is gifted in its disregard for the boundaries that society has placed on comedic films, and fortunately does not cross the hilarious-cruelty line. It stays firmly in the former section. Any film whose premise is centered about a funeral home at the burial of a family patriarch must necessarily push the boundaries of what is considered to still be "good form". Not only is this film good form and funny, it's smart funny, and that's difficult to achieve on any level.
In some ways this is a typical dysfunctional family film where the members who were scattered to the winds must suddenly reconvene for a common purpose. It's usually a wedding or a funeral, as it is here, and their different eccentricities cause mayhem before everyone realizes that they love each other, as they do here. In that sense, the movie is fairly formulaic, but that's comedy; a man is walking down the street, he slips on a banana peal, he breaks his ass.
The film is far more clever than a movie like this should be, however, and I don't believe credit is due to anyone but its writer, Dean Craig. The dialogue isn't exceptional and the comedy is not character based, but the situations, the ridiculousness piled on ridiculousness, gets to a point so extreme that it's almost inspiring. From secret, gay, midget lovers, to naked LSD trips, to old person poop on your hands, it certainly pulls out all of the stops while still keeping the plot grounded in reality.
That last point is its true golden quality. Anybody can write a story about a hangover where you wake up with Mike Tyson's tiger in your bathroom, but not everyone can come up with a story where two people can believably be put into the same coffin together, unbeknownst to the members of the family. That is serious comedic talent, and a talent that had me genuinely laughing hard.
Comedy is about shock value as much as it is about anything else. Tyler Perry apparently remade this (and I'm sure he did quite well at the box office), but is it comedy if it's nothing new? If we know what the punchline is it still funny? This shouldn't become a tirade against Perry, but he was the most well paid person in entertainment last year, even though he simply regurgitated something that was only funny at one time. It seems to me that if we love to laugh our money might be better off going to people like this Dean Craig who pushes the boundaries of comedy and succeeds, instead of a man who panders to his very select audience and gets away with bastardizing the art of humor. Something to think about...unless you're watching a "Madea" movie, then you're probably not thinking about anything.
3.5/4
No comments:
Post a Comment