Recently I was watching one of those “50 Best (fill in the blank) of All Time” shows. The topic du jour was comedies.
You know how these shows work: the list is done in countdown format. The announcer recaps the movie, then two or three celebrities (or in this case, people who appeared in one or two movies 20 years ago) go on camera and explain why they think the movie is funny.
But dude? If you have to explain a joke, it didn’t work.
The show never really explained who came up with the list, what qualified a movie as one of the 50 funniest of all time, or how the ranking worked. But seeing how Dumb and Dumber was ranked higher than Young Frankenstein, I kinda suspect it was a group of buddies in their early- to mid-20s who concocted the list after ingesting a fair amount of beer. Or maybe tequila.
I have a theory about comedies. Well, not so much a theory as a description of a particular type of comedy which I only find amusing in small doses. I call it the horse-and-baggie approach.
See, it’s one thing to beat a dead horse. It’s another to beat a dead horse, then cut it into little pieces, then put each piece in a separate baggie and bury each baggie in a separate back yard.
Horse and baggie comedy seems to be based on the fervent belief that if a gag was funny once, it’ll be just as funny if you keep doing it. Repeatedly. In the same frickin’ scene.
I have a somewhat different point of view.
Do the joke, people either get it or don’t, and the scene moves on. Funny gags will wear out, and unfunny gags don’t get any more amusing through repetition. What they get is annoying.
As my dad was fond of saying, “Once is funny. Twice is too much. Third time’s a spanking.”
