Making a good comedy movie is not easy, especially if the MCU is your competition with big budget. From 2008’s Iron Man going forward, generous goofballs like Hulk and Thor have struggled with Doctor Strange’s ways and Tony Stark’s snark to create hilarious screen tension that gives fans more than just CGI action and hero-world heroes.
In short, the MCU is good for being funny – and that, says funny guy Seth Rogen, just makes the tasks of other comic filmmakers harder.
Talk to Total Film to promote its new time-traveling, fish-out-of-the-water comedy An American Pickle, Rogen pointed to a well-known but often ignored MCU fact: Most of her biggest stars and stories earn enormous laughs, even when faced with high stakes, world-threatening threats from the farthest realm.
“[S]something that me and [producing partner] Evan [Goldberg] talking about a lot is how Marvel movies are comedies, “Rogen said.Thor: Ragnarok is a comedy. Ant-Man is a comedy at its core … There are $ 200 million comedies out there, and that’s something, as a comic filmmaker, to be aware of. That is the benchmark that people expect! If you’ve been making a big huge comedy, just know that your competition is like Marvel’s. ”
If that feels like criticism that the biggest fake fish have a way of screaming the little boys out for laughs, then that is not it. Rogen sounds like an enormous admirer of the MCU’s ability to find comedy gold by casting natural hilarious A-list stars for roles that swing them between epic action and glorious welcome moments of pure bliss, like Thor in the lea of Surtur. ‘They are legitimately funny [movies] and stars of comedies, ”said Rogen.
What can an aspiring film comedian do in the face of Marvel’s infinity of funny fireworks? Let the big budget movies worry about mixing humor with its special effects and great universal ideas, and instead just focus on the things that money can not buy – such as engaging characters and a story that can put them in humor in smaller moments.
Or, in other words, find a way to be just as funny as Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster Thor: Ragnarok, as Ryan Reynold’s milk market in Deadpool – but only on a smaller scale.
“Audiences still love comedy, and they want it – Deadpool – but the scale of it is enormous,” he said. ‘So if you are not offering them that range, you need to think,’ What am I offering them? ‘… What we offer is pure comedy and emotion and relativity and nostalgia. That’s the trade-off. You will not see the God of thunder hilarious, but you will see something that might represent your real life, and that is very gratifying in another way. ‘
Plus, when it comes to crazy costumes, time travel, and the preservation of the entire universe in general, Rogen already has a lot of experience placing his own comic touch on science fiction. He and Goldberg performed Hulu’s Future Man (with Rogen himself playing an idiotic media executive of the future), and An American Pickle finds that his immigrant character is awakened from a 100-year baptism in one funny mistake after another in present-day America.
Produced by Rogen, Goldberg, and The boys with EP James Weaver, An American Pickle now streaming on HBO Max.
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