Some people say that laughter is the best medicine. A good joke can bring someone’s day up from
demoralizing to kind of okay. It can
take them from happy to great. It’s one
of the best mood changers. That’s why
people enjoy comedic films. They’re a
break from life. Life can push you down,
but comedies tend to bring you out of that funk, even if only for an hour and a
half of your day.
When it comes to movies, there are a few different places to
go for comedies. Horror comedies are a
pretty big subsection of horror, allowing lighter moments within the blood,
gore, and frightening things. Romantic
comedies bring jokes to relationships, lightening what could feel very
sappy. When it comes to movies where
comedy is the front and foremost thing, there are the raunchy comedies, the
satires, the slapstick humour, the dialogue heavy joke-tellers, the situational
comedies, and the spoofs, among many others.
The most difficult of these to pull off seems to be the
spoof or parody film, though it seems like it should be one of the easier ones
to make. That’s because the quality
depends on how hard the people behind the movie are willing to work to make the
comedy into actual comedy. There are two
schools of parody filmmaking. One is to
take the source material, make a farce of it, and have the jokes naturally flow
from the tropes and movies being parodied.
The other is to fill the source material with as many references to the
source material or other things as can possibly fit into the runtime. Neither are great for originality or
creativity, but one of them is much more potent for entertainment value.
The current phase of parody films began in 1988 when Keenen
Ivory Wayans put out I’m Gonna Git You
Sucka. There were plenty of parodies
before that, thanks to Mel Brooks and the Zuckers, but it’s here that this
narrative really starts. This put Keenen
Ivory Wayans on a path, along with his siblings, that would lead to Don’t Be a Menace in South Central While
Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Shawn
and Marlon Wayans wrote that one. The
trio of siblings would team up with the writers of parody film Spy Hard, Jason Friedman and Aaron
Seltzer, to create the definitive spoof of the turn of the millennium with
2000’s Scary Movie.
Scary Movie
captured a broader audience than the Wayans’ previous parodies had, and grossed
more than either of them or Spy Hard. It was so successful that a sequel was
released the next year. The reason that
this is considered the definitive spoof of the new millennium is that it
managed to influence the movies that came after. David Zucker would take over the Scary Movie franchise at the third movie,
following the departure of the Wayans family.
The Wayans family would go onto more comedies, not all spoofs, but
including Dance Flick. Marlon Wayans, specifically, would go onto
the A Haunted House series and Fifty Shades of Black. Friedberg and Seltzer would do a long line of
parody movies that would never reach the success of Scary Movie.
For the sake of comparing the trope jokes to the referential
jokes, the focus will be on the Marlon Wayans trio of parody films and the
Friedberg and Seltzer films that followed the release of the first two Scary Movie installments. It’s these two paths that help to highlight
the differences and similarities between the two methods. The two paths that can be carved with modern
parody, taken by two different creative teams from Scary Movie.
The weaknesses of parody films are apparent throughout the
filmography of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. When people think of how bad spoof comedy can
be, it’s Friedberg/Seltzer that commonly pop up in conversation. The two guys are notorious for the
referential style of parody that causes more groans than laughs. It all starts in their marketing.
In the years following the release of Scary Movie, Friedberg and Seltzer were all over the place with
their parodies. They followed up Scary Movie with Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, and Vampires
Suck. Many of these movies, notably
Epic Movie and Disaster Movie, were much more about the references to other
properties than they were about actually finding the jokes within the movie
that they were structured as. It got so
bad that the marketing of their movies was always “From two of the six writers
of Scary Movie.” They were referencing themselves to get
people to recognize them. The worst was
yet to come though.
The Starving Games,
which came out in 2013, was the pinnacle of their referential career. It was a parody of The Hunger Games, though parody might be a stretch. There was the shell of a Hunger Games story in there.
The character, named Kantmiss, was in a Hunger Games scenario. Most
of the movie wasn’t about finding the humour in that. It was about referencing as much content as
possible. When Kantmiss fired an arrow,
it went through a balloon being flown by James Franco’s character from Oz: The Great and Powerful. While she was running through the woods, she
bumped into Annoying Orange and the Fruit Ninja. They weren’t jokes. They were non-sequiturs meant to get the
audience to think “Oh, I know what that is.”
This kind of storytelling is why parodies get a bad name.
Since then, the writer/director duo has redeemed themselves
a little bit. They tried something a
little more original in Best Night Ever. Though most people don’t like it, there was
the smallest amount of promise that showed how the pair could make something
decent if they tried. They just don’t
usually try. They stepped up their game
with Superfast!, which played into
the tropes of the Fast and Furious
franchise, poking fun at them instead of shoving references into them. It wasn’t as good as what Marlon Wayans has
been doing, but it was a step in the right direction.
Speaking of Marlon Wayans, this week’s movie is A Haunted House 2. It parodied the horror movies of the time,
just like Scary Movie fourteen years
earlier. This time it was movies like The Conjuring, Sinister, and Annabelle
that were put into the crosshairs. This
was an improvement on A Haunted House,
which had taken on the found footage horror craze. It’s tough to parody found footage because it
becomes more about parodying the style than the stories. A
Haunted House 2 wasn’t about the style, though. It was about the tropes of the movies.
One example of how A
Haunted House 2 does parody properly was when it riffed on the clapping
game from The Conjuring. Malcolm (Marlon Wayans) agreed to play the
clapping game with Wyatt (Steele Stebbins).
Wyatt went to hide, and Malcolm went to find him. The clapping came from the darkness of a
wardrobe. Malcolm went to the wardrobe and
couldn’t find anyone. When he turned
around, hands came out of the clothes.
He attacked the “spirit” who was going after him, which happened to be
his girlfriend, hiding on him. It took
the moment and expanded on it in a comedic way.
It had the character becoming involved in the moment instead of reacting
to it. This action helped to create good
humour.
Marlon Wayans’s movies have gone above and beyond with their
parodying, too. A Haunted House and A Haunted
House 2 were parodies with some dumb humour to them, like most. But it wasn’t simply about a comedic take on
the material. Marlon Wayans made sure it
was a comedic racial take on the material.
It wasn’t about getting laughs out of how people would react in a
paranormal situation. The movies were
about how a black man would react in a paranormal situation. Marlon Wayans heightened his performance in
terms of black stereotypes, allowing his racial background to shine through the
parody. It was another level for the
jokes to rise to, making things that little bit funnier.
The family that helped to kick start the current era of
spoofs is the family that seems to be driving it into the future. The Wayans Brothers hit the big screen world
with I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and
Marlon Wayans is still going strong with A
Haunted House and Fifty Shades of
Black. It’s this racial twist that
seems like it will be pushing parodies forward.
They need to be about something to survive. A filmmaker can’t live on referencing
something else. There needs to be more
to a parody than that. There needs to be
more than the surface layer. Marlon
Wayans knows that and gives a reason to care about what he’s doing.
Friedberg and Seltzer, on the other hand, go the road more
traveled and try to find an audience in surficial references. They don’t go deep with anything they
do. It might allow them to get a broader
audience, but the quality is hurt because of that. Though none of these parodies will be
considered greats, like Airplane! or Young Frankenstein, there is a
difference in quality that can be seen between the work of Marlon Wayans and
the work of Friedberg/Seltzer. It all
has to do with the effort they put in to craft their jokes. The bare minimum leads to lesser quality.
Laughter is the best medicine. That’s how this whole discussion started, and
how it will end. Jokes are a subjective
thing. What one person finds funny might
not be what another person finds funny.
A person who tries to be funny has a better chance of being funny,
though. They have a better chance at
figuring out what makes an audience laugh more.
The audience might not be bigger, but it will be more loyal. The laughs will be stronger. People will have a better time. When someone watches a Marlon Wayans parody
film, they’re more likely to forget their problems and have a good time than a
Friedberg/Seltzer movie. Which medicine
do you think will go down better?
- Date Movie (week 164), Superfast! (week 229), A Haunted House (week 34), and Fifty Shades of Black (week 219) were mentioned in this post.
- Another spoof that was covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies was 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (week 10).
- Michael Tiddes directed A Haunted House 2. He also directed A Haunted House (week 34) and Fifty Shades of Black (week 219).
- Marlon Wayans has made four Sunday “Bad” Movies appearances. He was in Norbit (week 227), A Haunted House (week 34), A Haunted House 2, and Fifty Shades of Black (week 219).
- A Haunted House 2 was Jaime Pressly’s fifth movie for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. She was previously in The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (week 39), Torque (week 43), Cruel World (week 47), and DOA: Dead or Alive (week 191).
- Affion Crockett and Dave Sheridan were both in A Haunted House (week 34), Fifty Shades of Black (week 219), and A Haunted House 2.
- Essence Atkins and Cedric the Entertainer were both featured in the two A Haunted House (week 34) movies.
- Marissa Welsh returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies with A Haunted House 2 after showing up in Jack and Jill (week 101).
- Finally, A Haunted House 2 saw the second appearance of Lawrence Moran, who was in The Swarm (week 253).
- Have you seen A Haunted House 2? What do you think of it? What do you think about spoofs? Let me know in the comments.
- Do you have any movies in mind that you think would fit nicely into the Sunday “Bad” Movies blog? Put your suggestions into my Twitter feed or into the comments. I’m always up for movies I don’t know of.
- Another place to find me is on snapchat (jurassicgriffin). Add me if you want. Or don’t. Not many people do.
- We’re going into another big week. Week 275 is quickly approaching. It’s only seven days away. As such, there’s a special bad movie coming up. It’s one that you might think I should have watched long ago. I saved it, and I’ll be checking it out this week. Not for the first time, mind you. Battlefield Earth will be next week’s movie. Come back for that post. It’s sure to be good. See you then.
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