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Comedy: How deep will the R-rated renaissance run?

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There have been very few surprise hits in this year of modest box office and relentless sequels. Topping the short list is ‘Bridesmaids,’ which has stormed its way to nearly $160 million in domestic receipts. While not nearly the same sort of phenomenon, ‘Bad Teacher’ has been a sleeper in its own right, garnering $79 million to date. And this weekend, ‘Horrible Bosses’ got off to a solid start, taking in a higher-than-expected $28 million to beat out Kevin James’ ‘Zookeeper’ as the weekend’s biggest new release.

What these three films have in common is not only that they’re comedies but that they also are, of course, bawdy and R-rated. If ‘Bosses’ is able to hits the $75-million mark, it will make 2011 the first year ever that at least four R-rated comedies have topped that number (joining ‘The Hangover: Part 2’).

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All three of 2011’s racy originals, it should be said, were jump-started and greenlighted after ‘The Hangover’ became the most successful R-rated comedy of all time in 2009, and all three are, in a sense, the first fruits of the post-’Hangover’ boom.

My colleague Ben Fritz wrote recently about the changing economics for Hollywood comedies. Studios are less willing to greenlight comedies at bigger budgets, he wrote -- a function, in part, of the growing power of the international box office, where American comedies typically don’t play as well. But this globalization may paradoxically be helping R-rated comedies. Movies in this genre are often made for a price and seen as a more niche play so don’t need the same kind of worldwide receipts; it’s the bigger budget, all-ages comedies that are taking a beating.

There’s also an argument to be made that R-rated comedies are where much of the filmmaking talent has now gravitated. From a quality standpoint, ‘Bridesmaids,’ ‘Bad Teacher’ and ‘Bosses’ more than hold their own against the high-profile PG-13 comedies of 2011, ‘Just Go With It’ and ‘Arthur’ (although the R-rated comedy camp will have to live with ‘Hall Pass’ and ‘Your Highness’).

But if this trio of summer originals is born of the ‘The Hangover,’ what will these movies in turn generate in the next few years? Success tends to attract a crowd, which sometimes means pale knockoffs. ‘I think the quality will go down for a little while, because studios will be jumping all over these things, and that may just mean going as dirty as possible without actually making it original or comedic,’ ‘Horrible Bosses’ co-writer Jonathan Goldstein told 24 Frames.

When you look at the history of the genre, he may have a point. The modern R-rated comedy was essentially born in 1978 with National Lampoon’s ‘Animal House.’ John Landis’ frat-house film became the second highest-grossing movie of that year and yielded a fertile period. In the four years that followed, we got a slew of R-rated classics: ‘Porky’s,’ ‘Caddyshack,’ ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High.’

But the period proved to be short-lived. Hollywood did turn out ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ in 1984, but the R-rated comedy soon got bogged down in sequels and poor imitations like ‘Spring Break.’ The category then went into a lull before being reborn with ‘American Pie’ more than a decade later (and then nearly disappeared again before the Apatow boom of the latter 2000s).

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This all may seem like the normal cycle of the movie business, but R-rated comedies tend to move in periods of sharper boom and bust: filmmakers figure out how to break a taboo, then that gets tired, so they need to wait a few years for new taboos, and new ways to break them.

This year has seen new elements, such as the workplace and women, tossed into the mix, and it’s given the R-rated comedy a certain freshness. We may yet see a few more movies cleverly riffing off these ideas. (Even before the release, there had already been some discussions of a ‘Horrible Bosses’ sequel, Goldstein said.) And then, like any dirty prank, we may find that it just gets a little old.

RELATED:

Box office: Newcomers Horrible Bosses and Zookeeper hold their own

Studio comedies are a tough sell in Hollywood

Horrible Bosses: The Freaks and Geeks connection

— Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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