We'll Find A Way To Turn It Off
by ELEANOR MORROW
There is an end of comedy somewhere. This is a place where jokes must stop, and turn around. This may have happened somewhere during the second hour of Beverly Hills Ninja. It happened for the first time in history when Groucho Marx was on the can. It also made thousands weep during what was supposed to be an exciting final season of Friends. They added Paul Rudd, and yet it seemed like they lost so much.
We have much the same thing happening in the sequel to a charming film in its own right, Night at the Museum. The jaunty-nonsensical humor that's currently feeding Michael Cera's many illegimate children has come to a predictable end. I was pretty sure during the second half of David Gordon Green's excruciating Pineapple Express, but now I'm totally sure. Penned by veterans of The State Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, this film is so fun it stops being fun and starts being kinda sad.
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is populated with the careers of these people, all of whom have abandoned comedy for slight notoriety and period dress-up. "Who is Steve Coogan?" a slightly more precocious child than usual will ask one day as she is forced to view this movie in its entirety because her brother has chicken pox.
Battle for the Smithsonian features Bill Hader, Kelly Kapur, Kelly Kapowski, the repulsive Amy Adams, the noxious Ben Stiller, Hank Azaria, Christopher Guest, and hundreds more people who, like Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, should never be permitted to see their wives and children again.
Hollywood can ruin anything. They destroyed The State, they made Harry Potter even more boring and stupid than it actually was, and they made Kristen Stewart stop eating and start complaining. In the beginning of the first Night at the Museum, Ben Stiller's character was a measly janitor and a terrible father. For some reason Ben Stiller's character is now a successful businessman. He suddenly became Hitch. I didn't get it.
Edutainment is probably the future, giving us something that is neither educational or entertaining. Poor Garant and Lennon were probably too focused on the current horrifying season of Reno 911 to wikipedia Amelia Earheart. If this is what now stands in for history, we might as well just forget the past rather than reimagine it as something other than what it was. In the future, things must not only make money, they must also be good for us.
The future is farfetched, there are no more ideas, there are just rehashed versions of old ideas, with more expensive special effects. Before Night at the Museum, I saw the kiddie version of the trailer for Transformers. The preview was full of incomprehensible jokes and Shia LaBeouf screaming, "OPTIMUS!" and "BUMBLEBEE!" at various times. If this is what is going to bring GM back from the brink of bankruptcy, then the millions of auto workers should start looking for janitorial jobs. I hear it's an expanding field.
Our concern now is that this slap-happy, clipped-off joke style of comedy is now coming to harm our children. I fear that young tweens will see The Hangover and think that Zach Galifinakis being afraid of a tiger is a joke. That Ben Stiller getting slapped by a monkey is a joke, that Andy from The Office losing a tooth is a joke, that a fat guy riding a segway is a joke, that Seth Rogen saying 'fuck me' is a joke.
Unfortunately when the man who conceived Best in Show is dressed like a 16th century Russian czar and speaking English to Napoleon, my fears may well be justified.
I don't even believe dead things can come back to life anymore.
Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages on the subject of The United States of Tara.
"Classic" — Sebastian Tellier (mp3)
"Fantino" — Sebastian Tellier (mp3)
"Bye Bye" — Sebastian Tellier (mp3)
