Monday, August 13, 2018

Whatever happened to Slapstick Comedy?

Ya never see it anymore in the movies save for the redoubtable Johnny Knoxville and his crew (and they are rapidly aging out of their "JackAss" racket sad to say). Even the crazy hilarious Kate McKinnon clearly had recourse to a stunt person for a half-dangerous half funny trapeze fight in "The Spy Who Dumped Me". There are still comical chases and explosions and the like in the movies, but the sort of intensive physical slapstick where the performer clears metes it out and or receives it is becoming a thing of the past. The only other example I can think of, is Jackie Chan, and he has pretty much aged out of the slapstick racket entirely alas and alack... I'll say this, Johnny Knoxville's last movie "Action Pointe" lasted a bare two weeks this summer and proved an unstable mix of fiction and "real time stunt work", but it was also likely an epitaph for the whole "JackAss" phenom. You now cringe with fright when a careworn middle aged Johnny gets himself catapulted thru the side of a barn, like when you see an elderly relation slip & fall in the kitchen. This is sad to me, can anyone out there think of even one performer in Hollywood whose comedy schtick is preeminently physical in nature? Sadly CGI has pulled the fangs of strict slapstick I think...you can literally use computers to create sequences that a Charlie Chaplin would have shot in real time. The modern justification is that CGI saves wear and tear on performers, but it also deals the artist out of the creative process in some ways. If Chaplin denied the sound era as long as he did (up to 1939 or so) then he'd a never ever have tolerated CGI on his sound stage. Bring Back the Clowns I Say....

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