Parody Has Run Its Course

Twenty five years ago, Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers made one of the funniest movies ever: Airplane! Twenty five years later, two of the three made one of the unfunniest movies ever: Scary Movie 4. How do the guys who essentially perfected the Parody Movie genre make such an unfunny Parody Movie? By forgetting how to write jokes.

Let's go back to Airplane! for a moment. The Zuckers and Abrahams bought the rights to the movie Zero Hour!, and took the screenplay almost intact and filled it full of ridiculous jokes. And we end up with Airplane! And they followed that with Police Squad!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun. (Oddly, they had nothing to do with Airplane 2.) And they were all funny

Then, a funny thing happened: Parody Movies stopped being funny. And I blame Mel Brooks.

Yes, Mel Brooks, who may have invented the Parody Movie, and made two of its funniest entries, Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. In 1987, he made Spaceballs, which, while funny, really didn't bother coming up with original jokes. It just took scenes from other movies, and turned them into funny situations, rather than coming up with funny scenes of its own. This opened the floodgates for all kinds of lazy writing in Parody Movies. And the Parody Movie pretty much died. But people kept making the fucking things. (And speaking of people perpetuating dead trends, there was a kid at the theatre today that had six inches of his boxers showing above his pants. That shit went out, to quote Eminem, "back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark," which was longer ago than most of the people who wear them that way have been alive.)

And now we're back to Scary Movie 4, the third sequel to Scary Movie, which repopularized the Parody Movie, but was just as lazily written as its predecessors. And, as is the case with most sequels, the Scary sequels have gotten less funny the farther they've gotten from the original. You'd think the guys who'd done such great work with the genre before could do something with this movie, but they just fall back on the same old hack-ass shit that the previous movies (including the recent Date Movie) used. Who came up with the rule that if a scene doesn't exist in another movie that you can't make a joke about it? I realize that parodying existing material gives viewers an easy frame of reference, but do we really need jokes about it? Yes, we get it: Brokeback Mountain is about gay cowboys. Yes, Tom Cruise making an ass of himself on Oprah is rife with comic material. But we can come up with jokes about that shit ourselves, or hear the same jokes from any comedian. Do we really need a whole movie about it? No, we don't.

So, if this is the course that the Parody Movie is going to continue on, it's dead. (Actually, it's been dead; it's in a zombie state now.) Maybe if guys like the Zuckers and Abrahams could come up with some original material, I might change my opinion of the genre. If not, they shouldn't even bother. Pack it up and head back to Wisconsin; you're pretty much done.