PODCASTS: Should comedies be taken seriously? Sarah Jessica Parker and Ben Stiller join the debate...

As we approach the 81st Academy Awards, it's startling to look back and realize how few comedies have been among the films that Hollywood has chosen to celebrate with Oscars. With the film industry in the midst of what many regard as a new golden age of screen comedy — certainly financially speaking, if not artistically, as well — now seemed as good a time as any to explore the origins and evolution of this trend, seek out the thoughts of some of our most revered comedic actors about it (give a listen to my podcast chats with Sarah Jessica Parker and with Ben Stiller), and take a look at some of the films that hope to snap it in 2008.

Comedies 'don't get no respect'

For as long as movies have been made, the majority of moviegoers have demonstrated with their wallets that they go to the movies not for provocation or remonstration, but for escapism, pure and simple. The good people in Hollywood, for their part, have always been more than happy to accommodate them. Why wouldn't they? Since the era of the great silent-era comedians, movie comedies have almost always required the smallest budgets and attracted the largest audiences, often earning remarkably high returns. This makes it all the more remarkable that, in a town where nothing speaks louder than money, movie comedies have a hard time commanding respect from critics and awards groups.

In ancient Greece, where acting blossomed into an art form, the genres of comedy and tragedy — represented by laughing and crying stage masks that have since come to symbolize the theater — were regarded as equally important and respectable. But today? Academy members, according to my Envelope colleague Tom O'Neil, "shrug off comedies as, literally, a joke."

From where does this bias come? At the first Oscars ceremony in 1927, academy members seemed to be heading in a different direction. That year, they selected two winners in the best director category, one for best dramatic direction and one for best comedy direction. But the next year, and forever after, there was just one best director, just as there was only one winner in all of the others categories, and voters were asked to judge comedies against dramas.

Their verdict has been consistently unkind. For 80 years, only a handful of comedies have ever been nominated for best picture, and of them only 11— using an extremely loose definition of comedy — have won: "It Happened One Night" (1934), "You Can't Take It With You" (1938), "Going My Way" (1944), "The Apartment" (1960), "Tom Jones" (1963), "The Sting" (1973), "Annie Hall" (1977), "Terms of Endearment" (1983), "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989), "Shakespeare in Love" (1998) and "American Beauty" (1999). Most of the aforementioned are actually genre hybrids with comedic elements, not pure laugh-out-loud comedies. (Comedic performances have done only slightly better in the acting categories. Comedies usually have to settle for recognition in the original screenplay category, if anywhere.)

'Funny? Funny how? Like a clown?'

What do people who earn their living by making movie comedies make of all this? We spoke with two of Hollywood's most popular and acclaimed comedic actors funny to find out.

"Maybe it's just the dichotomy of laughs versus seriousness," says Ben Stiller, 43, the son of veteran comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, whose R-rated summer comedy "Tropic Thunder" earned critical praise and is edging toward $200 million in worldwide ticket sales. "People, you know, just assume that since it's not serious, you don't take it seriously."

But just because comedic actors appear to be having fun on screen doesn't mean comedic work isn't challenging, insists Sarah Jessica Parker, 43, who won four of the eight Golden Globes for which she was nominated during her tenure on the hit TV show "Sex and the City," and who could well win a fifth for her performance in this year's movie version.

"It might look like it comes easily, but there's enormous choreography to it, there's endless rehearsing of timing, thinking about your environment, props," she laughs, trailing off. "There's just a lot that goes into it. And it's hard — it's wonderfully hard."

Both actors believe it's hard for anyone who is not a comedic actor to fully appreciate just how challenging comedic acting is — just as hard as, and perhaps even harder than, dramatic acting.

"Making a comedy, I think, can be even tougher, on the level that when you see a drama it's open to interpretation," Stiller says. "People say, 'Oh, I thought that was good,' 'I didn't buy it,' 'It really moved me,' 'It didn't move me.' But with comedy, it's similar to a horror movie, in that if the audience is screaming, it's scared and you know it — you actually hear the response. And, in a comedy, it's the same thing — you know, you get into that first screening and people are either laughing or they're not. No matter how much you want to justify it or try to equivocate, you can't argue with the fact that people are not laughing, that something is not going the way it needs to go for the movie."

Parker cites the absence of an audience as another major challenge for those who work on movie comedies. "Unlike in theater, where you have a response and you can kind of get a meter, film is very much a vacuum — you are working in silence, you know, you're not hearing responses. Comedy requires participation from the audience in a different way than straight material does, so when you're filming you really have to think about timing and the other person's role in it in a different way." She adds: "It's also complicated to have pathos in comedy without being insipid, saccharine, trickily manipulative.... Never mind the whole physical part of comedy, which is also very much a part of the storytelling."

If you can't cry, you laugh...

So should the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences follow the lead of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., which distributes the Golden Globes, and institute separate categories for dramas and musicals or comedies?

"I don't know if the solution is a new category or not," Stiller says. "It is worth looking at." He pauses and adds, "It just seems like there is no recognition for people who, over the years — and this is for years and years, you know — have been doing such great work."

Stiller doesn't name names, but one can safely assume that some of the following comedic actors — none of whom ever won an Oscar, and many of whom were never even nominated — crossed his mind: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, William Powell, Myrna Loy, W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, Peter Sellers, Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy. (Parker singles out Lily Tomlin as a screen comedian she feels deserves some recognition.)

Could things change, in terms of awards? Could popular screen comedies one day be nominated alongside screen dramas for best picture? And could screen comedians one day find a regular role at the Oscars other than as presenters? There's reason for hope. In just the last few years, the academy has thrown out several other historical biases by presenting its best picture Oscar to a festival flick ("Crash"), a gangster movie ("The Departed") and a horror film ("No Country for Old Men").

Still, Stiller emphasizes, "I don't think comedic people really take themselves seriously, and I think you have to have that attitude if you do comedy — yes, we love to get critical praise and awards and all that stuff, but at the end of the day when you're making a comedy, people in the theater are either laughing or they're not laughing, and that's the gauge that you have to go by." When it comes to comedies, he says, "The audience is really who you're making it for."

The last laugh...

Like them or not, comedies serve an invaluable role in our society, which writer-director Preston Sturges — one of the best comedic talents to ever work in Hollywood — probably articulated best in his 1941 dramedy "Sullivan's Travels."

In the film, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a young movie director who has made his name directing shallow but profitable comedies, pleads with his studio chief to let him make a weighty, social-conscience, Oscar-type movie about the human condition titled "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Granted this opportunity, Sullivan goes out on the road dressed as a hobo so that he can get to "know trouble" firsthand.

His plan, however, takes an unexpected turn when a series of misunderstandings lead to him being thrown into a chain gang with no way of revealing his true identity. There, he and his fellow prisoners lead a miserable existence, until one day they are given a brief respite, ushered into a makeshift movie theater and shown a Disney cartoon. Slowly, the men, with shackles on their bodies and nothing but troubles on their mind, are swept away by the zany antics before their eyes, and reluctant chuckles soon give way to all-out laughter. Sullivan looks around and realizes that if comedies can help people to escape from even this bleak a predicament, they must be pretty important, after all.

Not long after, Sullivan's mess is sorted out and he makes his way back to Hollywood. There, he tells his studio chief, "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan."

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An earlier, shorter version of this article appeared in a recent print edition of The Envelope.

Photos: "Baby Mama" (Universal), "Burn After Reading" (Focus Features), "Happy-Go-Lucky" (Miramax), "Sex and the City" (Warner Brothers/New Line), "Tropic Thunder" (of DreamWorks), "Superbad" (Columbia).

Comments

[It would help...]

Well, it would help if critics got behind great comedy pieces around Oscar season.

In 2003, Johnny Depp scored a nom for his portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow. That was acting at its finest, and the character (as Billy Crystal said, "a slightly gay pirate") will live forever in pop culture. Bill Murray also showed wide range in Lost In Translation, which had brilliant comedic elements.

Both were comedic performances deserving of award recognition, which could have been backed strongly by critics. Of course, these were all critically acclaimed performances at the times of the reviews, but, when the award season came, everybody jumped in the drama bandwagon.

In this particular case, it was Sean Penn's performance in Mystic River, which eventually won the Oscar, even though you can probably think of 100 other roles/performances just like that. Actually, Penn himself did pretty much the same thing that very same year in 21 Grams.

Looking back, Depp had won the SAG Award, which means he had strong support among one the largest branch of the Academy, the actors! Still, he lost. What a shame.

Btw, Tom O'Neill constantly complains about the same topic, but every now and then throws a hissy fit that Judy Holliday's performance in Born Yesterday won an Oscar over BOTH Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond and Bette Davis' Margo Channing. I reckon the word OUTRAGEOUS is commonly thrown in to provide, alas, drama and fireworks!

[Shaun]

"For 80 years, only a handful of comedies have ever been nominated for best picture, and of them only 11— using an extremely loose definition of comedy — have won"

Don't forget the big winner of 1994 - Forrest Gump was definitely a comedy. Sure, it too was a hybrid, but you could definitively label it as a comedy.