Hollywood’s Tyranny of bad taste
As another crass and gratuitously offensive ‘comedy’ hits the big screen, why do we have to pretend they are funny, asks our film critic
THERE is a scene near the beginning of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new comedy film, Grimsby, in which, at a glamorous charity event, a young wheelchair-bound boy suffering Aids is accidentally hit by an assassin’s bullet. As we watch his infected blood fly through the air in slow-motion, some of it finds its way into the mouth of the watching Daniel Radcliffe.
Of course, the Harry Potter star doesn’t really get contaminated with the HIV virus before our eyes, just a lookalike pretending to be him. But it allows Baron Cohen, who co-wrote the screenplay, to deliver what he thinks of as a joke about the bullet doing in seconds what Harry Potter’s evil foe Lord Voldemort failed to achieve in eight films — kill him off.
At a packed premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square on Monday evening, the audience roared its appreciation.
On a more fundamental level, however, the sequence didn’t just enable a slick and, indeed, sick gag. It was also a statement by the 44-year-old comedian that in Grimsby, as in his previous films Borat (2006) and Bruno (2009), no topic is considered unsuitable for comic exploitation.
The clear, deliberately provocative message is that if humour can be found in a disabled child with Aids, then it can be found anywhere.
And sure enough, in his new film, Baron Cohen goes on to look for it in paedophilia, drug addiction and in the spectacle of another child, all of about eight years old, assaulting people with a snooker ball wrapped in a sock.
I cannot lie; there are other scenes in Grimsby at which I laughed as heartily as anyone, including an outrageous episode involving a herd of elephants.
Moreover, although there are some unspeakably vulgar sex scenes, they are at least underpinned by the rather touching devotion Baron Cohen’s slow-witted character, Nobby, has for his wife, played by Rebel Wilson.
And in fairness, the victims of the boy’s snooker-ball attacks are all baddies.
But Aids? Disabled children? The death of Daniel Radcliffe, who might be an overrated actor but seems like a jolly nice chap?
It all reminded me of how increasingly uneasy I have become at the notion that anything, absolutely anything, is now fair game for a comedy writer’s pen.
Even more unsettling is that unspoken strain of intolerance, that ghastly comedy fascism of the liberal classes, which dictates that if you don’t laugh at something you find tasteless, you are a narrow-minded stick-in-the-mud, devoid of a sense of humour.
WHAT nobody seems to have considered is that maybe it’s the comedy writers themselves who have no sense of humour, for their lack of imagination means they have to resort to ever-more distasteful subjects for laughs. Take for example Dirty Grandpa, another recent release — which just happens to have been directed by Baron Cohen’s long-term collaborator Dan Mazer.
The film seeks laughs in the sight of the title character (played by Robert De Niro in the most grotesque misjudgement of his illustrious career) enthusiastically pleasuring himself while watching porn on his TV.
He then travels to Florida with his staid grandson (Zac Efron), and the joke, stretched beyond snapping point, is that the old man is the friskier of the two, and constantly wants to have sex with younger women.
The only decent gag comes about five minutes before the end, when De Niro’s character meets a young woman who is turned on by older men, and makes him say things in bed that will excite her by reflecting his age, such as ‘where are my glasses? and ‘things were better under Eisenhower’.
That made me laugh. But the only reason I was still there to hear it was a professional obligation as a film critic to see the thing to the end.
Of course, randy old men are nothing new in comedy — the Carry On pictures of blessed memory were full of them — but there is a boorishness to Mazer’s film, and others like it, that convinces me movie comedy has, for the most part, regressed.
From the sophistication and inventiveness of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, we have somehow arrived at the one- dimensional crassness of Dirty Grandpa, and the barrage of obscenity and misogyny that was the hit movie of the summer before last, The Inbetweeners 2.
I watched it in a cinema in Hereford, sinking lower in my seat, as dozens of teenage boys, and the odd teenage girl, laughed their heads off at the idea that all women are either easy conquests or appalling harpies.
What is troublingly clear, though, is that we get the big-screen comedies we deserve. If audiences stayed away from ribald films such as The Inbetweeners 2 and Dirty Grandpa, then their like wouldn’t get made.
They get churned out precisely because they make money, and the best of them, such as Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids (2011), make a great deal of money. The latter, a bawdy film about a girls in the run-up to their friend’s wedding, had grossed almost $300m at the last count.
Meanwhile, the riskier, subtler, cleverer comedy scripts — the ones in which nobody has sudden, tumultuous diarrhoea, still less makes repeated references to women’s genitalia — stay locked in a drawer.
When a really smart comedy does get made, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), it glitters like a diamond on a slag-heap. And even that was full of expletives.
Sweet, perfectly wholesome comedies such as the forthcoming Eddie The Eagle (about the hapless British Olympic ski-jumper), which does not rely on swear words for laughs, are rarer still. More and more, I find the finest, most inventive comedy writing in films aimed at children, such as 2014’s Paddington, or last year’s sublime Shaun The Sheep Movie.
In adult comedy, the landscape has changed dramatically even in the last ten years. Baron Cohen’s Borat — starring him as a spoof TV presenter from Kazakhstan — was, for all its gross-out moments, a sharply satirical mock-documentary.
Shockingly, it found much of its humour in anti-Semitism, but we didn’t need to know that Baron Cohen was himself Jewish to realise that the joke was on the antiSemites. Bruno, in which Baron Cohen took centre-stage as a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion designer, similarly exposed the ignorance of homophobes by making us laugh at them.
Grimsby is different. Baron Cohen isn’t making his jokes about Aids and paedophilia in the name of satire but simply because he can. That’s why they are objectionable.
Borat rather brilliantly tapped into serious issues — for example, the insularity of Americans who made fools of themselves earnestly answering spoof interviewer Borat’s idiotic and politically-incorrect questions.
But Grimsby doesn’t really bother with that kind of insight because Baron Cohen knows how undemanding audiences have become.
Comedians have always pushed the boundaries of taste; in a way it’s their job. And film has always given them their biggest canvas.
Mel Brooks broke new ground, not to mention plenty of wind, in 1974’s Blazing Saddles. Twenty years later, the Farrelly brothers, with Dumb And Dumber, took crudeness to another level. But still, those were films with heart, with a kind of sweetness at their core.
When the crudeness gets ramped up but that sweetness evaporates, we are left with the kind of films we are getting now: really dumb and becoming steadily dumber. And there’s nothing much we can do, except vote with our feet and stay at home.