This stinks! (But you’d think it would have the opposite effect.)
Writes Time’s Lily Rothman:
For better or worse, poop jokes—like so many movie stars of past decades—seem to have lost their box office luster.
See what I mean? You’d think I’d be happy about a trend toward less bodily function humor in movies. But I’m not really.
Rothman continues:
Maybe it means we’re all just a little more sophisticated, even the teenage boys among us. We’re more interested in either the absurdism of Will Ferrell or the jaded cynicism of The Hangover than the naïve, low-brow world of the [Bobby and Peter] Farrelly ouevre. Seth MacFarlane is the most obvious heir to their gross-out throne, but Ted’s grossness is a more grown-up, crude and self-aware; he laughs at sex, for example, like a frat boy bragging rather than a high-schooler bewildered.
She’s talking about why Dumber and Dumber To, the proposed next installment in the Farrelly brothers’ Dumb and Dumber franchise, failed to get a green light from Warner Bros. And while I don’t mind even a little bit that that film hit a wall, I don’t much favor the idea that somehow the unsophisticated, low-brow world it exemplifies is being replaced with the likes of The Hangover movies and Ted.
Are we to really think of those films as being more sophisticated? And somehow, by extension, more appropriate in their “jaded cynicism” and “absurdism”? Is an f-word less of an obscenity because it’s deemed uptown instead of out of town? Are graphic sexual situations easier to approve of when they include sly references to memes and cultural motifs?
Once more, Rothman:
Or maybe it’s not that we got smarter but that, like someone spending enough time in a smelly room that it just stops smelling, we’ve seen so much it’s just not that gross anymore.”
That’s probably more like it.
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