Rated R

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Jameson Rich on the death and rebirth of the crude and the lewd: the R-rated tentpole comedy.

When art is a product, its title becomes the brand: to reach a viewer quickest, it must contain the full meaning within. The multiplex greets the casual moviegoer with so much certainty—you need no more context than to hear: Super Mario Bros. Dungeons & Dragons. The Little Mermaid. Barbie. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, etc.—that original movies beg for concision. This has always been one of the R-Rated comedy’s strengths. Sex Tape. Bad Teacher. Horrible Bosses. Dirty Grandpa. A useful heuristic: if the premise can be distilled into two words, it’s a studio comedy. The signifier promises and the signified justly delivers.

When the adult comedy was last in good health, a frat boy was President. Before superhero movies would claim the mantle with their Pollyanna vision of American interventionism, the sex comedy made a sort of libidinal sense as our national form. Movies weren’t yet homework, but a lot of them were about college. Viagra, the subject of so many jokes, had only just come to market in ‘98. But contra the flat, universal tone of Whedonesque Marvel patter, the American sex comedy was—with some notable exceptions, like the Hangover sequels—often too particular to be translatable abroad. Studios saw growth potential not in offshoring production, exactly—something Paramount CEO Robert Bakish invoked on a recent earnings call in ominous reference to the writers’ strike—but offshoring the audience. Why traffic in culturally-specific humor for a couple million locals when you could sell grand myth to the world?

In a 2020 Vulture article headlined, “Will a Comedy Ever Play at a Movie Theater Again?”, Jesse David Fox identified 2013 as “the last big comedy year in American cinema history.” We came, we laughed, it died.

KINGS OF COMEDY

THE SILVER SCREEN

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