Lets debate about comedies

[Ray Jackson]

Originally Posted by Talleyrand

Absolutely agree.

[Show spoiler]I am always amazed when people find that the silent comedies of Chaplin and Lloyd have aged well and are still accessible, but not the German expressionist classics and the Griffiths epics, for example. And I know that something like It Happened One Night must have truly captured the cultural zeitgeist, as you say, but I find it a tough sit now. Same with a lot of the Preston Sturges stuff (my uncle is really into golden age of Hollywood comedy now and lent me some Sturges DVDs.... I definitely would say his stuff has aged a lot worse than almost anything I've seen from that era; he always lent me the Rene Clair And Then There Were None (which I had never seen until that point for some reason) and it was way better). Even a lot of the 80s classics have not exactly aged like wine, Caddyshack being an exception, that films is great.

But for my money, it would be hard to top the 2009-2011 triple thread of The Hangover*, The Other Guys and Horrible Bosses, although I'm sure in 20 years, as you say, kids will find they have aged horribly.

*If you can watch this and put the sequels out of your mind, it's still very funny.

The funniest individual thing ever, I would say, for the record, would be The Gang Solves The Gas Crisis, an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That one episode is just perfect.


The only comedies I own are Risky Business, The Sting and American Hustle.

Risky Business probably being the only straight comedy of the three.

....but I do own a few on DVD.

I thought Chevy Chase was the greatest movie comedian ever back in the 1980s. National Lampoon's Vacation was the greatest comedy of all time back then.

I watched a few minutes of it the other day on cable and I barely even chuckled.

Same thing with The Naked Gun. I probably never laughed so hard watching a movie in my entire life then the first time I saw that.

...now it just seems juvenile and silly over the top.