How The Family Comedy Can Get Its Groove Back

In terms of mainstream cinema, we are living in a time of insensate storytelling. On one end of the spectrum is try-hard R-rated humour and monotonous action. On the other, infantilising drags. Concerningly, this has calcified into the accepted standard and in the process displaced an essentially colourful genre: the comprehensive family comedy. The few current studio offerings are tepid at best, insulting at worst. IF, directed by John Krasinski and starring Ryan Reynolds… Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile… Harold and The Purple Crayon starring the Shazam man… What are we doing, people?

The family comedy was once a thriving genre that was broadly sentimental, but crucially underpinned by sharp wit and a healthy dose of sarcasm that met the minds of the different generations watching it. I’m talking 90s and early 2000s goldies: Uncle Buck, Richie Rich, The Nutty Professor, The Parent Trap, Father of the Bride, School of Rock, Cat in The Hat, Home Alone, Shrek and Elf. In 2024, it lacks any edge.

A lack of star power is a part of the problem. Former supremes in the family comedy pantheon like Steve Martin, John Candy, Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers tower over the modern, self-insisting Ryan Reynolds model. Russiagate wasn’t the only foreign collusion that altered the social fabric of America in 2016. Notably, the introduction of Deadpool into Hollywood did commensurate damage to people’s perceptions of democratic mores: it elevated the Canadian Reynolds to a fraudulent status of comedic import. Garrulous but saying nothing, Ryan Reynolds’ charisma is about as dynamic as a chain restaurant, as boastful as a 4x4 car. To me, his prominence in the industry is akin to asbestos insulation. He simply can’t be our guy.

The Nutty Professor. Image: Paramount Pictures.

But primarily the malfunction can be located in the sanitised, boring scripts – and we must reckon with such vapidity. The old greats did not have prestige, cult or arthouse credentials, but their intelligence was self-evident due to the tight writing; legible but not condescending; neither merciless nor bad-faith, but not opposed to a caustic turn either (think of Ferris Bueller’s fluid and holistic inbuilt irreverence, for example). There were well-tempered physical comedy sequences that were self-aware when they were derivative. They weren’t saccharine to the point of grating, straining for relevance by overstating down-with-the-kids parlance, or stuffed with modern references that instantly date the film. Between the babying chronicles of Marvel and the current roster of Disney live-action remakes that darken the colour grading but never the actual events of the story, the valence of innocence is limiting. This so-sweet-it’s-stunting state of filmmaking should of course frustrate us adults, but we should also be concerned on behalf of kids too. 

When you dumb down any element, it leaves everyone in a state of arrested development. Audiences should not be patronised and children especially, I believe, are suffering from these lacklustre narratives. Kids don’t need to be spoken down to; they can handle smarter writing that has Stygian and dissident flourishes. It’s productive to integrate pockets of slightly more mature humour, jokes that children may not fully understand yet but will plant a seed in their heads, root them in the real world, and give silly but useful introductions to life’s complicated realities (as well as the generative net benefit of just exposing them to intelligent commentary – the language of The Simpsons is a great, enduring resource for this).

Father of the Bride. Image: Touchstone Pictures.

Attesting philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous caution “the limits of my language means the limits of my world”, I gained so much from the world-building of these family movies as a kid, from historical touchstones in Hairspray with quips about J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance to Richie Rich mocking the pageantry of the 1% (see the parents cooing esoteric financial jargon as alternative ABCs over their baby’s cradle: “Can you say blue chip? Can you say convertible debenture?”), as well as playful innuendo in The Cat in the Hat in which a garden rake is addressed as a “dirty hoe”.

In the best of this genre, they would sneak in slice-of-life honesty and absurdities; they would have gently inflammatory moments and humanise complicated but redeemable grown-ups whose vices just might’ve outweighed their virtues. Another fond feature was the inexplicable, goofy choices: take Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood Men: in Tights styling Maid Marian’s iron chastity belt with 'EVERLAST' engraving or the beaming Martin Short breaking the mould for the quirky side character in Father of the Bride, as the inimitable Franck delivering cinema’s most mystifying accent.

The School of Rock. Image: Paramount Pictures.

In terms of animation, the Despicable Me films are straight-down-the-middle fine, but so cutie-pie to the point of inconsequence (I even charge the universally charming Paddington with being a little too adorable as well). The genre needs to get on Shrek’s gag level again, parodying the OJ Simpson Bronco chase with a mediaeval horse and carriage. Movies can still reach an unequivocal optimistic ending with some cynicism or taunting sprinkled along the way, but they are currently frozen in a puritanical and anti-intellectual state. Garfield, originally a sleazy wee bugger, is whitewashed in its 2020s treatment à la the va va voom purification of the Green M&M, and the trojan horse pedagogy like that of the anti-consumerism agenda in Over the Hedge or Chicken Run’s allegory for the Holocaust is notably scarce, with Zootopia's anti-cop messaging being a rare exception from the last decade.

We must dispense with the insipid influence. Give me eccentric fever dreams with a communist throughline or an anthropomorphised creature that jests double entendres about drugs. Give me a wacky peripheral aunt that only serves to offer non sequitur flashes of her storied past or thinly-veiled criticisms of her useless husband. Give me a sobering nihilistic comment from a ten-year-old here, an AM hip flask swig from a company boss there. Pour raw anxieties and off-the-wall dreams onto the page. Put the marrow of life back into the story.

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The Nutty Professor is streaming on Prime Video
Father of the Bride and Home Alone are streaming on Disney+
The School of Rock is streaming on Paramount+