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It’s hard to remember now, but movies used to be funny. And not just funny as a means to an end, but funny as an end unto itself. Like, people would pay money to go see something explicitly because it promised to make them laugh, which is wild to imagine now that jokes are basically just something that Hollywood uses to hide the fact that it’s given up on making comedies. What used to be a proud and reliable genre has since been reduced to an omnipresent tone — a tone so evenly distributed between every auditorium in the multiplex that “Lilo & Stitch,” “Thunderbolts*,” “Novocaine,” and “A Minecraft Movie” all feel like they have the exact same amount of humor.
Almost everything is “funny.” Almost nothing is a comedy.
Theatrical comedies are often chalked up as the first casualty of the streaming wars, but the start of their decline can be traced back to the rise of the IP era a few years earlier, when studios realized that laughter was less valuable as a source of fresh revenue than it was as a cheap foil it could wrap around rancid product to disguise the smell of week-old fish. Making “Bridesmaids” good is a lot harder than making “Thor: The Dark World” funny, and the blockbuster-or-bust economics that asserted themselves in the early 2000s helped justify the cost differential between a Kristen Wiig vehicle and a Marvel CGI-fest. We used to have Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds, and Chris Pratt. Now we have Ant-Man, Deadpool, and… well, I can’t actually name any of Chris Pratt’s recent characters, but you get the idea. We used to have Jack Black! Now we have Steve.
Of course, it would be absurd to deny that streaming has also factored into the equation, as the lack of big-screen comedies has been answered by a rich array of boundary-pushing “TV” shows and an endless glut of non-existent Netflix/Hulu/Prime Video movies. The former tend to be more interesting than funny, but that’s only because they privilege the sort of creative risk that the latter exists to avoid. Many streaming comedy shows mint new stars who are still willing to make themselves vulnerable for laughs; most streaming comedy movies protect established stars who’d rather satisfy an algorithm than hazard a chance at disappointing an audience. Why would Jerry Seinfeld confront his own irrelevance by releasing “Unfrosted” in 3,000 empty theaters — all of them quieter than the heist sequence from “Rififi” — when he could measure his success with “viewing hours” that allow him to imagine his Pop-Tart opus brought down every house in America?
That’s a rhetorical question, but it’s also one that cinema’s foundational comic filmmakers would struggle to answer. Take Preston Sturges, for example. He’s dead. Straight up not alive anymore. In fact, he was six feet under five years before the Pop-Tart was even invented. Perhaps even more important, Sturges so fervently believed that humor is one of the purest and most life-affirming things people can share with each other that he made a movie about a shallow Hollywood director who goes on an epic quest in search of profound human truth, only to find it in the peels of laughter that a screening of Walt Disney’s “Playful Pluto” inspires from the prisoners of a labor camp.
Sturges, whose greatest hope for “Sullivan’s Travels” was that a film critic would use it to prop up an internet rant about the state of American comedies in 2025, would surely be aghast at the fact that Hollywood has abandoned its highest calling.
[Editor’s note: A slight spoiler for “Materialists” follows in the next paragraph.]
Sure, he might lose his fucking mind at “Friendship” (something about Tim Robinson’s face makes me feel like he’d be a real source of comfort for someone who’s just time-traveled from the Great Depression), and howl at the narcotized screwball humor of “Materialists” (“Did that 35-year-old spinster really just reject a bionic millionaire!?”). But I think he’d be wounded to discover that both of those films — to one degree or another — were targeted at a self-selecting crowd of cultural elites instead of a mass audience. At the risk of turning this dumb thought experiment into an even dumber game of “what would a white guy born in 1898 think about ‘Girls Trip?,’” I’d also imagine that Sturges might be confused why it took almost eight years to follow that blockbuster success with another R-rated, Black-led female comedy, and that he’d question why a breakout hit like “One of Them Days” only prompted a sequel instead of a full-blown paradigm shift. (Though I suspect he might be able to provide his own answer to that one.)
For all of the (very understandable) handwringing over multiplex ticket prices at a time when kids have been conditioned to think that media should be free to consume for anyone who wants it, movie theaters remain among the cheapest venues for public entertainment, and one of the only places where people might still be able to lap up a shared experience with strangers across the socioeconomic and political spectrums. It would be a cringe-inducing stretch to map the climactic scene of “Sullivan’s Travels” onto the troubles of the 21st century, but when you consider the extent to which Americans have been siloed into completely separate realities, I can’t help but feel like the movies are depriving us of their most basic gift: The chance to sublimate ourselves into a single expression of collective enjoyment. Laughing at a TikTok on the toilet just doesn’t have the same effect on the soul.
Of course, it would be delusional to suggest that a country screaming toward autocracy is just a few good jokes away from singing “Kumbaya.” It’s not like “Barbie” managed to precipitate a new era of mutual understanding, and I’m not trying to say that any movie possibly could. That would be ridiculous. The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Stupid even by the standards of someone who was desperate to file a column in the final hours before a holiday weekend. I mean, it’s not like a reboot of “The Naked Gun” starring Liam Neeson, directed by a member of The Lonely Island, and sold on the power of a scene involving Busta Rhymes and an incredible manslaughter joke is about to be released nationwide or anything.
…OK, that is wild. In that case, I guess I owe it to the fates to entertain the idea. Consider this: The original “The Naked Gun” is one of the three best films ever made (the other two are obviously “The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear” and Raúl Ruiz’s 1983 surrealist fantasy “City of Pirates”), and, as a spoof, it belongs to the purest of comedy subgenres, in that it basically exists for no other purpose than to make people laugh. It’s reasonable to assume the new one operates by a similar principle, which should make it a uniquely valuable test case for the viability of big screen comedies.
In other words, Hollywood wouldn’t be able to qualify its success, nor would it be scared to replicate it — not if it delivers on its potential to appeal to red and blue states in equal measure. A good-natured piece of silliness that constantly makes fun of the police without disrespecting their authority, “The Naked Gun” might be the first movie of the Trump era that appeals to people with ACAB in their Twitter bios just as much as it appeals to people with Blue Lives Matter flags on their bedroom walls — the first movie of the Trump era to bridge the divide between activists and fascists. While I can’t say that I’m overly invested in satisfying anyone who supports disappearing innocent people off the streets, I will admit that I’m curious to see if “The Naked Gun” might solve one of the more pressing mysteries about the MAGA demographic: Do they only watch a comedy like “Gutfeld!” because they’re evil, or are they evil because “Gutfeld!” is the only comedy they watch?
For a movie directed by a Jewish guy from Berkeley, “The Naked Gun” is going to be hard to paint as “woke.” Not only does the franchise have some established cred with the conservative movement (remember when Leslie Nielsen and David Zucker reteamed for “An American Carol”?), but its new installment co-stars Liam Neeson, whose vigilante films have made him something of a MAGA hero, whatever his personal beliefs, and “Baywatch” icon Pamela Anderson, who remains a living symbol of what right-wingers claim to want every time they cry over a studio’s decision to cast an actress of color.
Unlike “Barbie,” “The Naked Gun” won’t be derided as a rallying cry against men. Unlike “Freakier Friday,” “The Naked Gun” won’t largely depend on nostalgia to get people in the door. And unlike the audience for “Happy Gilmore 2,” those people won’t all live in the same house. On the contrary, they will be strangers who’ve gathered together in the dark to go somewhere they’ve never been before. A place where they’re not just entertained, but somehow reborn. A place they come to not just to cry and to care, but also to watch Liam Neeson desperately try and contain his explosive diarrhea while using his gun to commandeer the nearest toilet. After all, if laughter weren’t the most sacred byproduct of going to the movies, then Nicole Kidman wouldn’t have listed it first.
The facts speak for themselves: “The Naked Gun” is the only movie this summer that has the potential to heal America. To stop the bleeding. To bind every soul in this great land together in light and love.
Unless, you know… it’s bad. In which case we’re all fucked.
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