Six Theories About Why Comedy Movies Died

And they have mostly died

A still from the doomed Jerry Lewis holocaust comedy The Day the Clown Cried, which — though legendarily bad — did not kill the genre.

Variety recently published their list of the “Best 100 Comedies of All Time” (the full article is here, and just the list is here). I’m not here to debate the list; I know that these things are highly subjective and just for fun. That being said: Making a list of the 100 best comedies that doesn’t include The Life of Brian might be a greater war crime than anything Pete Hegseth has done.

I don’t want to debate the list, but I want to note the phenomenon that this list captures: It’s yet another piece of evidence showing that comedy movies are nearly extinct. Only two of the movies on the list were from the last ten years, and one of those is Poor Things, which is arguably not a comedy — it depends on how funny you find Victorian freaks having psychosexual relationships with mental toddlers. If you don’t count Poor Things, then the only “top 100” comedy in the last ten years is Everything Everywhere All at Once, and that plus The Grand Budapest Hotel are the only ones in the last 14 years. Here are the movies on the list by year — you can see a sudden drop-off circa 2010:

My method here is the opposite of scientific, but basically everyone who works in comedy has noticed that Hollywood has largely moved on from the genre. Variety’s list merely puts some numbers behind the drop-off. And if that evidence is too scatter-shot for you, there’s other data showing the same phenomenon — here’s a chart that I made for an article a while back:

Source: Movie Insider, which has data going back to 2002. Movie Insider labels movies by genre, so for each year I took the number of comedies and divided that by the total number of movies, and presto: graph achieved.

Comedies are going the way of sandal epics and water ballets. Why? I don’t know, but I think about it a lot. I grew up on late night TV, half-hour sitcoms, and low-budget comedies, which seems like saying that I remember horse-drawn buggies, whale bone corsets, and heroin for sale in the Sears catalogue. Focusing on movies for a minute, here are some non-mutually-exclusive theories about what the hell went wrong: