If I find out that you are younger than me, I will call you a youngin, even if that age gap is only a couple of weeks. Some of you might be thinking that the gap isn’t that large, and the term youngin isn’t warranted.
And to those people I say simply, these youngins haven’t watched the greatest movies of all time and so they are youngins in my opinion. The two movies that I often cite when I make this claim are “Superbad” and “Shaun of The Dead,” some of the funniest and most critically acclaimed comedies of all time.
These two movies are such landmarks of comedy that it always baffles me whenever I meet somebody that hasn’t seen them. This might be my old-headedness talking but they don’t make comedies the way that they used to anymore.
Comedies used to be all over the place in terms of what they talked about and how they satirized particular subjects. For instance, the movie “Benchwarmers” is about a bunch of men in their 30’s playing little league baseball, and it is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen, up there with “Grown Ups” in my opinion. Another example would be “Shaun of The Dead,” a movie about a bunch of zombie apocalypse survivors making their way to the bar before they get eaten alive by zombies.
Comedies in this vein aren’t in style anymore in Hollywood, and it makes me a little sad. These are the movies that define whole generations of movie-goers, and they aren’t being made anymore. The only ones that I have heard anything good about in recent times have been “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
It is my opinion that comedies have lost their zany or awkward edge that made them so great in the first place. “Superbad” is one of the most awkwardly funny movies of all time, because it is a comedy that plays up all of the zany and weird things that stereotypical nerds did back in high school. Same with “Benchwarmers.”
