The Return of Visual-Driven Comedy
No double-screen watching allowed
“Almost everything is ‘funny.’ Almost nothing is a comedy.” — David Ehrlich, IndieWire
When you think of your favorite comedy movies, oftentimes what you’re conjuring are ones that lean on verbal humor. It’s the lines you can’t stop quoting to your friends or that withering line read that makes your gut bust in a crowded theater.
But comedy is more than just an appeal to the ears — great humor often comes from entrancing the eyes. It’s trickier and requires more finesse, but a great artist knows how to summon laughter from visuals alone. Be it holding on a facial reaction or setting up an elaborate sight gag, some of the best comedy in cinema never involves the utterance of a single sound. Need I remind you that the first superstar of the medium, Charlie Chaplin, turned movies into a global art form by doing just that.
But these visually-driven comedies have become increasingly few and far between. Studio efforts like The Naked Gun (now in theaters) and indie efforts like Splitsville (opening 8/22) feel as if they’re cutting against the grain. Asking an audience to watch, not merely listen to, a comedy seems borderline radical. “The time has passed when five comedies could open during the summer, and you have a reasonable expectation that at least two or three of them would be hits on some level, if not all of them,” says Fandango director of analytics Shawn Robbins.
This trend has accelerated recently but dates back decades. I’ve got a few theories for how we’ve gotten to this point:
The increased relaxation around censored language since the dissolution of the Hays Code has made the frontier of edginess in pushing the boundaries of the spoken word
The infiltration of improv-trained Gen X comedians like Adam McKay and Judd Apatow shifted the balance of the genre towards line-o-rama, which places the highest value on letting actors riff on the dialogue until the optimal variation is unlocked for the edit
The growing dependency of international revenue for box office profits limited the production of comedies due to built-in assumptions that humor is localized and tough to sell in other global markets
The reliance on superhero movies and intellectual property to entice audiences into theaters, which resulted in many comedian smuggling their humor into comic book properties
The shift of audience preferences to watch comedy on streaming platforms (likely fueled by an early deal for Adam Sandler to produce movies for Netflix), which encourage filmmakers to direct visuals under the assumption that at-home viewers are also scrolling on their phones
The explosion of stand-up comedy in the streaming audio/podcast space
For further reading on these phenomena, I’d also recommend
’ empirical analysis over on …
…as well as Scott Tobias performed a grim autopsy of the feature-length comedic film in the essay “Looking For Comedies in the Streaming World” over on The Reveal.
“Thor: Ragnarok was a bunch of people in a theatre laughing together, right?” The Naked Gun director Akiva Schaffer told GQ. “Every Robert Downey Jr. quip [in a Marvel movie] was a comedy moment. So people have experienced it, but the question is, will they spend money just for that part? I don't know.”
It’s time those of us who care about comedy make it known that we want more than just funny movies. We want COMEDIES, and we want them to look like something more than a roughly assembled collection of jokes shot on a digital camera. (For that, people will just watch a podcast now.) So go see The Naked Gun if you haven’t already done so in theaters. Support Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a big financial gamble for Warner Bros. after his visually enticing Inherent Vice flopped, when it hits theaters in September.
And, if you need further convincing, here are ten spectacularly funny movies to stream at home that all but demand to be treated as an event worth putting your phone down to watch. I’ve rounded up a collection of ten movies that span over a century to showcase just how evergreen the use of the camera is to create comedy.
Safety Last!, 1923, Max and Criterion Channel
If you know any major images from the silent film era, one of them likely includes the sight of Harold Lloyd scaling the wall of a building before grabbing the hands of a clock to prevent himself from falling. That’s from the grand finale of Safety Last!, but it’s certainly not the only reason to watch this collection of adventures following a country boy trying to make it in a big city. Even if Lloyd often takes the bronze medal among great comedians of the silent film era, that position on the winner’s podium is still going to give you a lot to look at and laugh at.
Modern Times, 1936, Max/Criterion Channel/Amazon Prime Video
Recommendations of Modern Times will continue until morale improves … or you all watch it! Beyond being one of the most ingeniously staged comedies ever made, with gags that still make me howl on my umpteenth watch, Chaplin’s use of visual humor has a thematic purpose (as I explain in the newsletter below, based on a final paper in my film history college seminar).
Le Grand Amour, 1969, Criterion Channel
I can already hear some groans at this comparison, but hear me out … French director Pierre Etaix feels like a real forerunner to the Family Guy-esque cutaway humor that now carries such weight in online circles. Le Grand Amour is, on its face, a fairly standard tale of a marriage gone south as a long-married man contemplates infidelity with his younger secretary. But nestled in the middle of the mundanity are flights of visual fancy, like a gag that turns the protagonist’s bed into a car, and literalized metaphors such as marking the marital “split” with a saw. Don’t expect the cinematic equivalent of a laugh track to help point you to when these breaks with reality will occur. You’ve got to keep your eyes peeled to ensure you’re processing when the latest deviation from expected sights will be — and what it means. (This might sound like a lot of work, but I promise it’s incredibly intuitive … not to mention an absolute blast!)
Trafic, 1971, Criterion Channel
I’ve recommended many a Jacques Tati film on the newsletter before, be it PlayTime in the round-up of (basically) silent films or Mon Oncle as a great film to watch while working out. Tati’s final film featuring his famed screen persona of Monsieur Hulot, Trafic, is a bit of a deeper cut in his filmography, so you might want to start with one of the aforementioned titles to see the more beloved classics. But I found this a delightful watch for the way Tati satirizes an automated world optimizing itself to death. There’s a convulsiveness to Hulot’s movement that isn’t present in the previous films, and it’s almost as if he’s internalized the machine logic. Come to think of it, Trafic plays like a frighteningly funny extension of Chaplin’s Modern Times for the post-war era…
Police Story, 1985, Max/Criterion Channel
If Gene Kelly were a fighter, not a flirter, he’d probably look something like Jackie Chan in Police Story. If you only know a slightly older version of the actor from Hong Kong in films like Rush Hour, then you’ve got to see him at his prime in films like Police Story. This very much feels like the blueprint for the modern action comedy, only this time it’s anchored in the fluid movement of Chan’s graceful stuntwork rather than hacked to bits in the editing bay. The film teeters on the edge of being ridiculous but never crosses it as the human body contorts itself humorously to evade injury and death.
The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, 1991, Paramount+
As I mentioned in my review for the latest Naked Gun movie, the best gags in this franchise often linger in the background of a shot — or go entirely uncommented upon. Among the original trilogy of police procedural spoofs, the first two feel like they’ve barely aged thanks to their stacks of ingenious (but easy to miss) gags. 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear is probably the last good one before the studio handed the reins of the series to Peter Segal, and it’s notable for being fairly pointedly political for a film of the early ‘90s. These films hold up because they lampoon a lot of recognizable visual hallmarks rather than specific movies, which then feel like dated time capsules when watched later.
Jackass 3D, 2010, Paramount+
Sure, watching gags designed to wow people in 3D without glasses on renders this a bit more gimmicky than it would play in a theater, as it’s meant to be seen. But, honestly, take any Jackass movie, and you’ll see better-staged comedic bits than most scripted films in the genre. Consider how intricately planned each camera setup has to be to ensure that the stunts will have full coverage and that viewers at home will be able to follow a gag through to its end. Or … don’t, and just experience Jackass 3D as a tribute to the cinema of attractions, a movie of pure spectacle just like the earliest days of movies when people were sensationalized by watching moving film strips through tiny viewholes.
The Climb, 2020, available to rent from various digital platforms
“These slice of life-y, indie comedies are often shot in a particular way, and that often lends itself to organic performance at the moment that can then be edited into the film,” director Michael Angelo Covino told me back in 2020 (further illustrating my point in the preamble). “I think what we set out to do with this one was really [to] try to keep that intact and make it a bit more elaborate and absurdist in moments and let the visuals and the camera partake in the storytelling in a very hands-on way.” Their buddy comedy, The Climb, is an absolute riot that unfolds in patient scenes of a friendship that goes through various ups and downs over the years. It’s paced so much more methodically than the laugh-a-minute comedies being made by the studios, but it somehow never feels slow.
Universal Language, 2024, available to rent from various digital platforms
“By not showing the most dramatic event, what questions does that leave the audience?” Universal Language director Matthew Rankin asked in my interview. “Seeing the person listening rather than the person speaking, does this not raise new questions about how we experience movies and how we encounter a story?” His absurdist deadpan comedy, which filters Iranian cinematic tropes through a distinctly Canadian lens, is deeply thoughtful about where the camera is in relation to its characters. He’s more focused on capturing life, not comedy, and letting his artistry supply the humor in unexpected ways. This offbeat delight dissolves any boundaries you might think exist between artificiality and authenticity in this work of great, graceful imagination.
The Phoenician Scheme, 2025, Peacock
I’ve got many piping hot takes brewing about how we’re all starting to take Wes Anderson for granted, especially now that he remains increasingly relevant as a brand-name director but less and less a theatrical draw. The Phoenician Scheme deserved better than it got earlier this summer, and I say this not only because it allowed me to talk directly with a filmmaker of great personal importance. Working with a new cinematographer in Bruno Delbonnel opens up a fascinating new way of viewing his characters. The Phoenician Scheme breaks from some of Anderson’s recognizable visual language to introduce a different way of thinking about the characters — and the director’s relation to the figures in his dollhouse. (If you want to read more on this, read my review!) It’s not just a “deadpan” humor thing. There’s a deeply intentional point of view that helps bring out the inherent comedy of the situations he devises.
I watched the “screen movie” version of War of the Worlds so you don’t have to.
While I didn’t officially review Freakier Friday, you can read the captions here to get my thoughts on the millennial-pandering legacyquel.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
She really is one of our best.
With NYFF around the corner, I was fascinated to see a week in the life of festival artistic director Dennis Lim in The New York Times (gift article).
I got a real kick out of this investigation by
.
Back this weekend for paid subscribers!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
You’d think visual comedy would be having a resurgence considering the want for films to travel well internationally.