Comedians' Little Secret

By RICHARD CORLISS

A tale of two movies. On the first weekend in June, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End led the North American box office with $44 million. In second place was the no-star comedy Knocked Up, at $30 million. Which number made Hollywood happier? The second, because the budget of the Judd Apatow comedy was also in the $30 million range, about a tenth that of Pirates. And as word of mouth goosed Knocked Up's weekday grosses past Pirates, the film also certified its leading man, Seth Rogen, as a new comedy star. First law of movie economics: an action epic costs buckets to make; a comedy, peanuts.

A tale of two other movies. Apatow's 2005 comedy The 40 Year Old Virgin made a star of Steve Carell, who was then signed to be the lead in Evan Almighty. It's a sequel to the Jim Carrey hit Bruce Almighty, in which an ordinary guy is given supernatural powers by God himself. This time, Congress-man Evan (Carell) is told to build an ark in preparation for a coming flood. A premise for surefire laughs, unless you happen to live in New Orleans. But God didn't foot the bill for the movie's cost overruns; Universal did. The final price tag was something like $175 million, the highest ever for a comedy, and that doesn't include the $40 million or so for marketing the picture. If Evan Almighty, which opens on June 22, triumphs at the box office, it will prove the second law of movie economics: that a comedy star can carry a big picture.

Rogen and Carell are two examples of underknown talents with ordinary looks who were given lead roles in movies and instantly proved their pull as comedy stars; they could make the audience fall in laugh with them. Just now, they are two of a dozen or so movie comics who are giving the genre a clout it hasn't seen for decades--maybe since the great silent era of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Vince Vaughn and their jolly colleagues aren't of Chaplin's artistic stature, but they are something the industry loves (moneymakers) and the public needs (pleasure givers). Fronting hit after hit, comedy stars have taken the place of those Hollywood stalwarts, the action stars.

This was to be the summer of threequels, with franchises like Pirates, Spider-Man 3 and Shrek the Third stoking the audience's addiction to familiar stories writ large. But those films came out in May. Then what? "The summer began under a cloud of tentpoles," says Marc Shmuger, chairman of Universal Pictures, which has bet heavily on comedies, including Knocked Up and Evan Almighty. "We felt there would be demand for an entertaining alternative. And the success of Knocked Up shows how large the thirst for a great, funny movie really is. I think by September we will be saying it was the summer of comedy."

The summer, the year and maybe the decade--comedy has become the most reliable source of Hollywood profits. Moguls love to hit the home run of a Pirates or a Lord of the Rings, but they live on the bloop doubles of Talladega Nights and Meet the Fockers. A top comedy star may earn the same as an action star, $20 million to $25 million a picture, but that could be nearly half of a comedy film's budget; everything else (script and director, supporting cast, production cost) is cut-rate. "You can make three comedies for every action movie," says an industry power broker. "It's such an easy 'yes' for a studio exec." For one such pooh-bah, Matt Tolmach, co-president of production at Sony Pictures, the guidelines are simple: "It is critical that you not overthink comedies," he says. "Did this script make me laugh out loud sitting alone on my couch? If it did, I should consider it. If it didn't, I shouldn't. What's funny is funny. Funny is worth taking seriously."

And, for a wide swath of the public, worth buying a $10 ticket for. Action movies, and horror movies too, typically attract the young male demographic. Comedies, when they work, appeal to all ages. Knocked Up, a stoner comedy with lots of phallocentric raunch, might have seemed limited to dateless packs of guys; yet its first-week audience charted 57% female and 56% over the age of 30. "One thing marketers have told us," says Tolmach, "is that there's a lack of a generation gap between older teens and their parents in terms of their comic sensibilities."

Comedy is not something either generation is getting much of on prime-time TV. Sitcoms have lost their 50-year grip on the upper reaches of the Nielsen ratings, falling victim to the cheaper, more popular talent contests and reality shows. Movies have stepped into that gap. There's a connection with TV, of course: nearly all of today's movie-comedy stars (Carell, Stiller, Ferrell) started on the small screen. The biggest hits also depend on two of the oldest, most productive Hollywood combustions: first between script and star, then between star and audience.

Among actors of the past 30 years, star meant action star. Action movies, however expensive they may be, still often make more money abroad than at home. But longtime studs like Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris will all be 60 or older this year; they've either cut way down on movie work or found other employment. And few youngsters have risen to take their place. Instead of tapping the icons, producers of action epics often recruit dramatic actors (Johnny Depp for Pirates, Tobey Maguire for Spider-Man, Matt Damon for the Bourne franchise) and build the big stunt scenes around them.

The list of actors who can really sell an action film is short indeed: Will Smith and Tom Cruise. But Smith wants to graze freely among genres and rarely makes action pictures. Cruise has made more than a dozen films that grossed at least $100 million in North America, and usually much more worldwide, but his high price tag and off-putting offscreen antics led Paramount, his home studio, to sever relations last year. In addition to the dearth of action stars, there's the zeitgeist to contend with: in internationally edgy times, intimate comedy gives an audience more comfort than blow-up-the-world melodrama. So it's out with the musclemen, in with the funnymen.

Even further back, in Hollywood's golden age, stars--including comedy stars--radiated glamour. Cary Grant could whinny, do a pratfall and wear a dress, but he was still one of the handsomest, most seductive men on the planet. Comedy audiences today are not looking for gorgeous people with cute problems; anyway, they're not finding them (with the exception of that pearly, Grant-like anachronism, George Clooney). The movement has been from class to mass and, in some cases, to jackass.

The personas of most of today's funny guys could be said to flow from Steve Martin. As a stand-up comic in the '70s, he played the idiot with an utterly unwarranted belief in his coolness, while in his first hit movie, The Jerk, he played ... a jerk. The first type has bloomed in the strutting film personalities of Ferrell, Vaughn, Jack Black, Owen Wilson and many others; the second in Sandler, who teams this summer with another lout, TV's Kevin James, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Lower on this fast-food chain are Rob Schneider and Larry the Cable Guy.

Rogen might seem a spawn of Woody Allen, but he's closer to Cheech and/or Chong with a bar mitzvah. He hasn't the Woody whine and inferiority complex. Like the Martin stage persona, the characters these guys play don't have self-esteem problems; indeed, that is their problem. The only star who simmers with comic angst is Stiller. He's the put-upon loser, a jocular Job, in films like There's Something About Mary and Night at the Museum, when he's not taking roles as the pompous, uptight bad guy (in, say, Dodgeball) or the preening oaf, as in the well-nigh-immortal Zoolander. The moneymen love Stiller too, because he's the rare comic star with international box-office clout.

The new stars have to be distinguished from the previous generation: the hyperactive chameleon-comedians Robin Williams, Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy. Ferrell doesn't dazzle by slipping into a zillion roles (as he did on Saturday Night Live). He found a persona the audience likes--the lanky, ungainly goof who thinks he's a supreme jock--and he mostly sticks with it. He knows the mass audience wants its stars only in their familiar mode. When they try going upmarket--Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction, Sandler in Spanglish--the fan base deserts them.

Like major league teams with their farm system, comedies offer a chance for young talent to move up. Vaughn provided comedy relief for nearly a decade before his breakthrough with Wilson in Wedding Crashers. Rogen was one of Carell's buddies in The 40 Year Old Virgin; in Knocked Up, he had his own posse, and one of that group, Jonah Hill, will star this fall in the Rogen-written Superbad with Michael Cera, who's the male lead in the just wrapped Juno. John C. Reilly, Ferrell's foil in Talladega Nights and the forthcoming Step Brothers, gets his shot at stardom in the Apatow-produced Walk Hard.

So times are great if you're a comedian--and if you're a man. The lack of women leads in comedies is astounding and appalling. Are women somehow not funny, or do audiences not want to see them at the center of a comedy? Next year, Universal will try Baby Mama, with Tina Fey as a career woman who hires Amy Poehler to carry her child. Our blessings upon it. But until some comic actress has a big fat hit, Hollywood will keep thinking of comedy as Guytown--one more genre, like action movies, where women need not apply.

With reporting by Reported by Rebecca Winters Keegan / Los Angeles