National Post (National Edition)
How Knocked Up changed movie comedy.
TEN YEARS HAVE GONE BY SINCE KNOCKED UP CHANGED MOVIE COMEDY
‘It may be a bit, um, premature to say so,” A.O. Scott wrote 10 years ago this past weekend in The New York Times, “but Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up strikes me as an instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.”
Scott was right, to a point: a decade later Knocked Up remains, if not quite a classic, an unlikely cultural touchstone, a picture of momentous influence against which nearly every new studio comedy may be compared. For better or worse, Knocked Up was instrumental in determining the character of the comedies of its era. And 10 years later Hollywood seems not yet inclined to abandon its model.
What is the model? Scott, as it happens, gleaned its shape in that early rave review: Knocked Up, he observed, “attaches dirty humour to a basically upright premise.” It is “sharp but not mean, sweet but not soft, and for all its rowdy obscenity it rarely feels coarse or crude.” It starts “from a default position of antiromantic cynicism,” but ultimately wends its way “back into romance.” It made the critic “smile and wince,” as well as “laugh and almost cry.”
Most saliently, as Scott notes, “while this movie’s barrage of gynecology-inspired jokes would have driven the prudes at the old Hays Office mad, its story, about a young man trying to do what used to be the very definition of the Right Thing, might equally have brought a smile of approval to the lips of the starchiest oldHollywood censor.”
Indeed. That conspicuous disparity — ribald farce on the one hand, old-fashioned moralism on the other — is the defining feature of the Apatow style, and it’s since become the hallmark of the studio comedy in general. Scott’s descriptions could of course apply as well to any of the films Apatow has written and directed since: Funny People, Trainwreck and Knocked UP’s semi-sequel This is 40 each charts a pat course from cynical to romantic — each begins vulgar but softens into sentimentality; each seems shamelessly outrageous and yet in the end espouses traditional family values.
But could the same not be said of innumerable recent comedies? Scott described Knocked Up as though its virtues were novel. They’re ubiquitous today. Countless films bear the influence of Apatow’s work: Neighbours, Sex Tape, Horrible Bosses, Bridesmaids, We’re the Millers, Identity Thief, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Even Dirty Grandpa had the touch.
Before Apatow, the prevailing studio model was the sort of crude, high-concept sitcom-ish blockbuster popularized by Ben Stiller, and which, for a number of summers in succession, tended to star some combination of Stiller, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughn. These movies — DodgeBall, Old School, Envy, Duplex, Starsky and Hutch, Wedding Crashers, Along Came Polly, Blades of Glory — catered to a college crowd that had aged out of the bawdy teen raunchcomedy of years previous, and, not unlike American Pie and its multitude of imitators, derived their laughs from fancifully scandalous scenarios, gross-out gags, and a great deal of foul-mouthed riffing.
Few of these films were received warmly by critics, and fewer still endure in the popular imagination or are remembered with particular affection. It was a testament only to the dire state of the comedy that they enjoyed any kind of success commercially.
Things changed in 2005, when the arrival of The 40-Year-Old Virgin on the last weekend of August — traditionally regarded as a movie-going wasteland akin to early January — surprised everyone with its endearing and affable charm. But it was really Knocked Up two years later, followed a few months after by the Apatow-produced Superbad, that confirmed the formula’s triumphant effect.
Over the next several years a host of successful Apatow productions, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, Get Him to the Greek, and The Five-Year Engagement, would usher in a period of radical change. Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and Jason Segel would become the comedy stars du jour. Their earnest stoner antics would become the blueprint for hit after hit.
Ben Stiller and his soi-disant Frat-Pack pals were known to improvise punchlines on set. But Apatow, with his writersroom sensibility and company of erstwhile standup comics, took improvisation to another level entirely: his movies often feel as if they’ve been ad-libbed from beginning to end, every bon-mot unrehearsed and every witticism offthe-cuff, which lends the material a rather shambolic quality that ranges in effect from spontaneous to careless. Apatow’s movies are also very, very long: Knocked Up clocks in at 129 minutes, unheardof for a comedy, while This is 40 (133 minutes) and Funny People (146) span the scope of historical epics. It used to be an axiom of Hollywood that a comedy should be no longer than an hour-anda-half. Post-Apatow they’ve been emboldened to go on and on without stopping.
This is one of the more obvious influences Apatow has had on the studio comedy — and one of the more inexcusably negative. More insidiously, Hollywood has adopted the politics that, one presumes, made Knocked Up and its successors so widely palatable. Apatow’s movies look and sound liberal but are at their core conservative: consider the mores they advocate, the principles they favour, the values they embody.
As much as they seem to celebrate a life of freedom and leisure, of bong-rips and good times and suspended adolescence, they are really, in the end, about accepting a very old-fashioned kind of responsibility and learning to see the satisfaction in settling down. (Even Trainwreck’s staunchly anti-monogamy heroine comes to realize that what she wants most of all is a husband and stability.) That may be Knocked UP’s lasting legacy. Goofy and risqué it may be. But it would still bring a smile of approval to the lips of the starchiest old-Hollywood censor.