Low Comedy

It has come to my attention, as many things do, that there are only two forces left in contemporary low comedy. We should begin our examination with a reminder of what low comedy is. High comedy, by contrary, is an intellectual approach, often tapered with "serious" subject matter. Wes Anderson makes high comedy. The Squid and the Whale was high comedy. We're talking about stuff that isn't that.

Today's movie going audiences have two camps they can turn to for their low comedy. The Frat Pack and Sandler & Co. Both groups are made up primarily of Second City and SNL alumni and both make big money movies.

The Frat pack is led by Will Ferrell. While he has made small investigatory excursions into other fare (Melinda and Melinda...) he is most remembered for his Frat Pack collaborations. With supporting players Ben Stiller, the Wilson brothers, Steve Carrell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner and more, his movies like Anchorman, Zoolander, and the upcoming Tallegada Nights seem to set the tone for our expectations in modern low comedy.

The other camp, Sandler & Co. includes David Spade, Rob Schneider, Jon Lovitz and a few legitimate Hollywood weirdos like Christopher Walken and Steve Buschemi. Films like Happy Gilmour, Billy Madison, and Big Daddy have cemented this camp into another formidable force in low comedy. Their upcoming summer films, Click and Benchwarmers, are sure to make money and fuel many drunken quoting sessions.

A third force used to exist. Jim Carrey, with his mid-90s hits like Ace Ventura, The Mask and Dumb & Dumber set himself as a one-man comedy camp. Unfortunately for Carrey, his legitimate aspirations such as the Truman Show and Man on the Moon took him out of the low comedy spotlight and by the turn of the century, when we thought Jim Carrey, we thought The Majestic. Despite the quality of his legitimate acting in films like Eternal Sunshine, Carrey has lost touch with his low comedy fanbase and has failed to reconnect with the younger crowd, releasing latte-pandering fare like Fun with Dick and Jane.

What interests me the most about the low comedy camps is where and how actors can cross boundries. Craig Kilborn, who was great in a self-deprecating turn in the Frat Pack's Old School, will be seen in Sandler and Co.'s Benchwarmers this summer. Sandler and Co. scooped a big winner with Napoleon Dynamite's comic title actor Jon Header, also to star in Benchwarmers, but it seems that Header's ambitions are too great for one camp alone and he has already been cast alongside Will Ferrell in the as-of-now filming Blades of Glory.

Where will low comedy go from here? While it is unlikely that we'll see a true Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell crossover it seems that comic actors like Carrey may have the right idea, at least in terms of career move. Carrey will co-star alongside Ben Stiller in 2007's low comedy Used Guys, to be directed by Jay Roach who (still following?) worked with Sasha Baron Cohen (making a mainstream turn in Talledega Nights) on Borat. This will allow Carrey the chance to connect himself once again to the low comedy world and hopefully we'll see him soon in a true ensemble Frat Pack film. Sandler & Co. on the other hand have used the strategy of swinging serious actors into their pictures to great success (aside from Walken and Buschemi, we've seen Kathy Bates in The Waterboy and Jack Nicholson in Anger Management). Expect this trend to continue.

Slightly nuanced approaches to the same end product: highly consumable low comedy. Popcorn fare which makes money for studios and keeps their comic actors in our minds. Because you can't sell a low comedy without a recognizable star. And thanks to the efforts made by both camps, their stars should retain recognizability for a bit longer.