My Favorite Comedy In Recent Memory…
Not Hangover Part II, poised to win the award for Biggest Comedy Debut of All-Time, raking in an expected $138.1 million this weekend. The movie also broke the record for the Biggest Opening Weekend of Any R-rated Film, over five days.
Nope, for me it was Bridesmaids, which comes in fourth, making $16.3 million during its third weekend.
The heroine of a standard rom-com is permitted to be sarcastic and maybe, in the obligatory tipsy scene, a little nutty, but the job of getting people to laugh is generally shunted onto her wacky friend. Male comedy, meanwhile — the just-opened “Hangover Part II” can stand as a convenient example — is all about the wacky friends. Women turn up in these movies as predators, mommies and scolds, but most frequently as idealized romantic partners, who laugh at the guys’ jokes and guarantee their deliverance, sometimes equivocally and at the last minute, from loserdom.
The novelty of “Bridesmaids” is that it merges these two genres, and scrambles the usual division of labor. It may not be a feminist breakthrough in every respect. As Michelle Dean points out in a sharp dissenting piece on the Awl Web site, the movie does not do all that well on the Bechdel test, which counts the number of times two or more women in a given movie have a conversation that is not about a man. The use of matrimony as an organizing principal — the dresses, the parties, the ring — clearly fits the chick-flick template, as does the pity, sometimes mocked, sometimes not, extended toward any woman who doesn’t have a guy.
But at the same time the men in the movie are kind of beside the point. … What “Bridesmaids” may reveal about modern screen comedy is not that women can be funny, but rather that men and women can’t be funny at the same time, or direct their humor at one another. If you think back to the romantic comedies of earlier eras, you see a clash of contending, evenly matched forces, whether embodied by Hudson and Day or Hepburn and Grant. The stuff of comedy was the battle of the sexes, and while it was rarely a fair fight — everyone agreed it was a man’s world — it was often thrilling to watch, because the matrimonial stakes seemed so high. They don’t anymore. The comic predicament is not who you should marry, but how to hold onto your friends.
Guys, go see it. As incentive, some adults only probably NSFW outtakes:
SEE ALSO: A NYTimes Magazine profile of Wiig that appeared with the opening of the film.
5 Responses to “My Favorite Comedy In Recent Memory…”
My wife and I saw this last week and really enjoyed it. Sort of a hybrid movie – many slapstick and gross-out scenes interspersed with more traditional “chick flick” scenes of people talking about feelings, etc. Definitely a thumbs-up.
Super fun flick! Just as a side-point, I totally disagree with the Awl piece, in that Bridesmaids passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. Named women characters talk about all sorts of things — work and kids and money and female friendships and art and tattoos and music and fear of flying and dogs, tons of stuff. The whole point is that so few movies have one single conversation between named female characters that is not about men. Sure, women talk about men in this movie, but they talk about other things too. Just like in real life.
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