The Tick returns and joins jesters’ league
Dark and gloomy superheroes have given way to those with humour and a lighter touch
These days, it is not enough for the superhero to save the day — they had better be cracking some decent jokes while doing it.
With the launch (and return) of The Tick in a new series on Amazon Prime Video arriving on Friday, the pendulum has swung from grim and gritty onscreen heroes to superheroes requiring a much lighter touch.
“If you look now at the landscape of superheroes and humour — and I’ve been watching Iron Man really closely and Guardians of the Galaxy — we felt that this was something that we should do,” says Barry Josephson, one of The Tick’s executive producers.
“If you look at the landscape, there are a lot of great dark shows out there and the place that we used to go for comedy is network television, so comedy is something that can grow in cable and streaming as well.”
Like many comic heroes, the Tick is a character that refuses to die. Created by Ben Edlund, he started out in the 1980s comics as a superhero parody: A goofy, bright blue musclebound being with antennae, who has super strength, is nigh-invulnerable and always speaks in bombastic, stereotypically heroic tones. The humour often ventures beyond poking fun at superhero tropes and heads into pure absurdity — the Tick’s bestremembered battle cry is “Spoon!” and his sidekick is a meek accountant named Arthur, who wears a moth suit that lets him fly.
The comic spawned an animated series that lasted three seasons in the 1990s, and then a short-lived liveaction series in 2001 starring Patrick Warburton, likely best known as David Puddy from Seinfeld. Now the clueless protagonist is back again in an excellent new series starring Peter Serafinowicz. Of course, no hero does it on his own and the seeds for this vast superhero comedic conspiracy are evident with several caped crusaders cracking wise.
Spider-Man has long been the poster child for superhero as standup comedian, as he always slung quips as fast as he could shoot webs, and his example is one that looms large over much of superherodom. The recent Spider-Man: Homecoming film successfully rebooted a younger version of that character that also leaned heavily on humour.
Deadpool 2 is currently shooting in Vancouver, and the original film’s success proved that humour mixed with an R rating for adult material could score at the box office. The upcoming Justice League film, which arrives in November, is undergoing reshoots to lighten its tone; fittingly, that is being helmed by Joss Whedon, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator and The Avengers director who has long been able to meld the fantastic and the funny.
In some ways, it’s easy for superhero media to go grim and dark, often as a way to get past the inherent silliness of people putting on outlandish costumes to fight crime, but it can go too far, likely best seen in Suicide Squad and Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which were criticized for many reasons, including their exceedingly grim darkness. On the other hand, going back as far as the original Batman series from the ’60s, TV has often been the place to try comedic takes on superheroes, like the previous Tick series and shows that mix action and humour, such as Misfits of Science in the mid-1980s or the British comedy No Heroics from 2008.
Motion pictures have, however, also taken their shot, with indie fare like Super and Defendor, as well as more big-budget films like Kick-Ass and Mystery Men. There is also unintentional humour, like that found in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, about which only two words need to be said: bat nipples.
Josephson, who has a long list of credits including Men in Black, Bones and Wild Wild West, as well as the first live-action Tick series, has worked on a lot of action comedies and says the key to these series is hitting the right tone, which can be difficult when mixing the outlandish with reality.
For instance, in this incarnation of The Tick, there is occasional swearing, but Arthur (Griffin Newman) is still dealing with a tragedy, and the show deftly handles mental illness. Arthur at one point explains, “My family doesn’t want me to be extraordinary. They want functional.”
“There is a lot of realism in the piece that didn’t really exist before,” Josephson says.
While Marvel has been on an incredible run with its films, its comics rival DC is simply trying to duplicate the success of its most recent release, the universally hailed Wonder Woman film. One of the actors in the Justice League film recently confirmed that the film’s reshoots were caused by a studio directive to lighten its tone. (Lightness need not necessarily mean comedy in every project, but one doubts in this case that they’re adding, say, a musical number.)
“I know that with Ray (Fisher), the young man who plays Victor (Cyborg), there were some adjustments that they made in terms of the tone of that character,” actor Joe Morton, who plays that character’s father, Silas Stone, told IGN. “I think what I heard was that there was a need from the studio to lighten up the film in a way, that the film felt too dark. I don’t know what that meant in terms of how it actually got translated in terms of the reshoots, but that’s what I heard.”
One interesting consequence of the rise of funnier superhero projects is that some in the movie business see less room for pure comedies. An Associated Press article from last month noted many have underperformed at the box office and asked, “Can the big-screen comedy survive the superhero era?”
“They really want these movies to work in China and Russia, and comedies don’t always work like that,” lamented Judd Apatow, producer of Superbad, Knocked Up and The 40Year-Old Virgin. “It does worry me because it feels like the studios aren’t developing as many comedy scripts . . . it feels like times have changed.”
Funny superheroes likely can’t rescue comedy as a genre, but it is clear that, at the moment, the audience likes the odd punchline to go with the punching of bad guys.