There’s been something that has been irking me for a while now. Within the past few days, though, this irritant has swelled within my consciousness. The source of the irritant is rather simple – comedies have shifted towards being dominated by stories of the upper class, an inversion of classic comedy tropes. Recently on Twitter, the great artist Christopher Cooper mentioned how Hollywood films are seemingly dominated by stories of the well-to-do. I mentioned that comedy has been the worst offender, and Cooper succinctly stated how the “Margaret Dumont-type is the funny person and not the butt of the joke.”
Throughout comedy history there are countless instances where a clash of classes leads to hilarity. The aforementioned Dumont being tormented by the Marx Brothers; Charlie Chaplin’s entire body of work seems dedicated to comedy about class structure; Harold Lloyd climbed the building in Safety Last! to raise money to propose his love; in Hoi Polloi, The Three Stooges are taken from the poorhouse to a mansion; Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is about a man sacrificing his principles to advance his career, and on and on. In other words, there are countless jokes that one could mine from people desperate to raise their social status or characters lifted to a higher class that seems almost alien.
This is middle class?
For the most part, today’s comedies have completely turned their back on these situations. The most egregious examples of recent memory are Judd Apatow’s This is 40 and this summer’s dismal Sex Tape. In This is 40, you have an upper class family living in Southern California, the tension within their relationship is rooted in financial problems. However, these aren’t relatable or, frankly, understandable problems. Paul Rudd’s character has sunk a large chunk of change to bankroll a music label focused on putting out music by washed up artists – poor guy! – and Leslie Mann’s character runs a boutique that has been ripped off for $10,000 which she doesn’t notice for months – how relatable! In Sex Tape, Jason Segal’s character not only lives in an expansive 2-bedroom house with his family, but has the resources to purchase 2 new iPads with each successive update, giving the old ones away to the people in his life including the mailman. Later in the film, the couple goes to the headquarters of a porn website in order to purge the website of their titular sex tape. They’re caught and the situation is resolved when they agree to pay the proprietor of the porn site between $15,000 and $25,000 (I can’t remember which). Instead of using this moment to place the characters in a situation of extreme desperation, it’s resolved with a lump sum payment.
But this isn’t an entirely new phenomena. For about the past 40 years, Woody Allen has made countless films that explore the struggles of upper class New Yorkers. Allen’s attempt at a class-based comedy, 2000’s Small Time Crooks, was a bumbling attempt at Marx Brothers-style rags-to-riches story that illustrated just how out of touch Allen is with in terms of the lower classes. Allen, Apatow, and others have seemingly dedicated themselves to make Upper Class Twit of the Year: The Movie with nothing but a reverence for affluent, asking the audience to root for the moronic masters of the universe.
There are still comedies being made with a keen awareness about class struggle. No other modern filmmakers have this understanding like the Coen Brothers. Looking at their filmography, one can see that most of their films deal with class issues, but their ability to mine class for comedy is unparalleled in modern cinema. Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading, The Ladykillers, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? all contain key comedic elements related to class. I believe this awareness is rooted in the Coens’ longstanding love affair with Preston Sturges’ 1941 classic, Sullivan’s Travels. Along with Chaplin’s Modern Times, Sullivan’s Travels is one of the great class-based comedies. John L. Sullivan, a rich director of motion picture comedies, has grown tired of making silly pictures and wants to make a great drama about the nobility of poverty, entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Since he’s never experienced financial hardship himself, Sullivan goes on the road to live in poverty. Through his adventures, Sullivan learns that he can best help the impoverished by making them laugh. It’s a rebuke to the idea of nobility in poverty, understanding it to be an endless struggle.
While not entirely considered comedies, two of the best films from last year – The Wolf of Wall Street and Spring Breakers – found laughs in extreme situations from its class commentary. And not all comedies have to be rooted in a class structure conflict, 22 Jump Street and This is the End are plenty funny while never examining class issues. But then there are the films like Let’s Be Cops which avoids commentary on anything – race, authority, and class – and asks the audience to believe that one of the phony officers has been living for the past two years in L.A. off a $12,000 payday – talk about outlandish fiction. If cinema is a mirror to society, then the issues of income inequality in the New Guilded Age have seeped into comedy in the most nefarious of ways. Like the modern billionaires who cluelessly ask people to toil in low paying jobs for the entirety of their existence, comedy cinema is increasingly unconcerned with the issues of the working classes, let alone the inherent comedy within. As comedies have focused on a higher class of characters, they’ve provided a lower class of laughs. We’re all poorer for that.
