Are raunchy comedies a dying genre?

I generally find slapstick to be not funny.

 

As long as women are behaving badly it doesn't bring out the PC police.

 

What types of comedy are deemed universal? It's interesting how what provokes fear provokes a largely similar response from people yet what provokes funny can be wildly dissimilar, even in the same culture - much less outside it.

 

You mean as long as the women who were objectified, and used as sexual props to cater to the male ego are now getting the chance to assert their own control over their images that they might use it to poke fun at themselves by engaging in behavior that was once acceptable from men as normal, even coming-of-age? This doesn't bring out the so-called PC police? For shame. Right?

 

I think if anything, they've diversified and they continue to experiment how far they can push the envelope, so I don't think they'll die off anytime soon.

I think the worst example of this is a raunchy-teen movie style version of Dukes of Hazzard set as a prequel. It was a horribly misguided idea.

 

I do hope Shock Comedies are on the way out. By that I mean the genre of comedy where it is about pushing you so past your limits with the immediacy of a joke that you laugh. The ultimate example being "Brothers Grimsby". It's a bad sign of a burned out, "always on, always distracted" multimedia age, where we are far too desensitized by what we overload ourselves with.

 

I started feeling desensitized after the South Park movie. By now nothing's sacred and hence nothing's truly shocking. The idea of anything being shocking is sort of a quaint nostalgia.

 

Well, Firefly is basically a western in space, at least in most episodes.

Westerns are still pretty popular in fanfic, though. There's a ton of really excellent Bonanza fanfic on several sites. I used to watch the show in its original run when I was a kid, but got back into it a couple of years ago.

One of the benefits of fanfic is that finally, after all these decades, the Cartwright brothers (and sometimes Ben as well) actually manage to get married and have kids, without something dire happening to the wife.

And some of Adam's exploits in these stories might well be considered a bit raunchy...

Same here. I've seen some of the episodes easily a dozen times and still find it funny. Granted, there's a lot of the jokes that are definitely not PC nowadays, and there are a couple of lines that are definitely racist... those are uncomfortable to watch nowadays.

I used to watch that with my dad. There were a couple of times when it crossed the line and I had to explain to my dad why it was unacceptable.

One of the strangest memories I have concerning the Benny Hill Show was finding a Benny Hill-themed birthday card in a religious book store. The message inside wasn't raunchy (although only someone who watched the show would have gotten the joke), and I've concluded that whoever put the card out probably had no idea that the photo on the front was Benny Hill (the rich Texas oilman character he played when the show was spoofing Dallas).

 

I don't think raunchy in itself is a bad thing, but the combination of raunchy, dumb, and that thing where it's "Trying to be offensive but for the sake of making the audience feel cool for not being offended by it" they do now is just really repulsive.

Shows and movies like that are just exploitative mocking nihilism.

 

Me too. And as I said before, said people can stick to past safe eras of comedy where their tender sensibilities won't be offended by raunchy humor (the ironic thing about said past eras [the '30's, '40's, '50's and '60's]? Those eras had raunchy humor, too, but it was all underground and on records, and was like this.)

 

You should watch the show "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" because it's partially about this kind of thing. I mean it's about women's role in society back then as well but the setting does sort of take place in the underground comedy settings of the 60's. It's a brilliant show.

As for me I sort of see raunchiness being accepted as being something that will come and go and eventually everything that goes away always comes back only slightly different. RIght now it's hard to do it because everyone is on edge because of the political climate. Seems like everyone hates or distrusts everyone else so anything that seems to be edgy is seen as a personal attack. I suspect that once Trump is gone things will sort of calm down. Plus I think we are going to see more progressive strides in equal representation but when people realize that the world will still end up sucking like it always tends to do then people are going to start looking at other things for why it always tends to suck.

Jason