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Now let us update the scene to today's audiences: The hero is a lank-haired loser obsessed with losing his virginity before the end of the semester. He disguises himself as a woman to infiltrate his beloved's house, where he meets her family -- dad farts at the dinner table and wanders around after taking Viagra, mom is a horny broad with a penchant for sponge baths, and her fiancée comes on to the hero after his disguise has come off. Oh yeah, and the champagne has been spiked with sperm. Signs of times, and all that. American movie comedy, once one of the richest and most varied reservoirs of Hollywood pleasure -- everything from rowdy slapstick to sophisticated verbal sharpshooting -- has for the most part hardened into two puny categories: pallid romantic marshmallows (anything with Julia Roberts or Jennifer Lopez) and gleeful barf bags (Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie). The latter, the so-called "gross-out comedy" that keeps raking in the bucks with audiences, is a phenomenon that, if examined, can reveal quite a few interesting insights into American culture. And not particularly positive ones -- if audiences guffawing so heartily at the screen knew of them, their laughs might get stuck in their throats. Comedy is probably the hardest genre to study, simply because it is so subjective. What strikes me as funny may not necessarily have the same effect on the patron next seat, and to explain why would be as torturous as it would be useless. Genuine laughter is slippery, a reaction that gurgles from within, defying explanation. From the kindergarten days of cinema, however, one equation was constant: dismantling order = funny. Whether it was the Marx Brothers crashing a posh tea party or John Belushi starting a food fight, there has always been something irresistibly comic in the spectacle of an irrepressible force of nature clashing with stuffed-shirt society -- it seems to appeal to our freest, most anarchic impulses. Anarchic impulses have existed in the arts way before the Keystone Kops first tried on their uniforms, and even bad-manner comedy is no recent break-through: who can forget the beans 'n' coffee wind symphony in Blazing Saddles, or the geysers of blood erupting merrily in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Despite the occasional box-office success (Animal House), gross-out comedies (National Lampoon, the early Saturday Night Live) were mostly aimed away from the mainstream, instead sold to the crowd who saw A Clockwork Orange as a tad vanilla for their tastes. It was not until the Farrelly Brothers epics of the '90s (Dumb & Dumber, Kingpin and, of course, There's Something About Mary) that studios noticed that a mint could be made in the bodily fluid market. And since the only "gross" the Hollywood suits care about is the one pulled in at the box-office, it was only a matter of time before the imitators started docking in. Faster than you can say "Tom Green," things that people normally whisper about to their proctologists became the essential bread-and-butter of comedy. As a result, we were graced with pastry rape (American Pie), coffee laced with shit (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) and catchy hoedowns about incest (South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut) in the course of one year. Following close behind were amputated testicles being eaten (Tomcats), hayseeds buried in steaming mountains of crap (Joe Dirt), and billboard-sized close-ups of a bulldog's nuts (Van Wilder). I distrust generalizations, and indeed I would be lying through my teeth if I said I never laughed at many of these pictures (Happy Gilmore and Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo, neither particularly "clean," are personal favorites). After all, in his study Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy, William Paul defended the spirit of the gross-out as "the voice of festive freedom, uncorrected and unconstrained by the reality principle -- fresh, open, aggressive, seemingly improvised, and always ambivalent." Of course, theoretically anything can be funny. The problem with so many of today's comedies is that they use nastiness not in a good-natured, let's-piss-off-teacher kind of way, but as endurance test for jaded hipsters. Their goal is not to amuse but to shock, to get "yeechs" rather than "yuks" out of the viewer, and each new film needs push further to top the last in the toilet-vomitorium department in order to be considered "cool." The results speak for themselves.
If the gross-out spirit can have such liberating possibilities, one wonders why the movies themselves so often abound in
restricting, negative connotations (destructiveness, fear/hate toward women, sarcasm). In the end, I find very little that's
"fresh" and "open" in Freddy Got Fingered -- it's enough to make anyone look back nostalgically at the lost innocence
of, say, Porky's.
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