His sister is the hero.
Recent-ish good comedies: Booksmart and Barb and Star
3 Likes
I’ll give them a look, I like Kristen Wiig 
4 Likes
He’s fine. Josie Lawrence is brilliant
5 Likes
Totally!
2 Likes
As previously mentioned, I am a cis-het white male raised in an evangelical midwestern household. All of the crazy shit the regressives are accidentally saying out loud now I grew up hearing daily. Yet, somehow my god-addled pea brain knew that these movies were awful. I wasn’t anything like woke and it’s taken me decades to unpack exactly why I thought they were awful, but I never enjoyed them. And that list is like >5% of the awful films the 80s produced.
4 Likes
Sure. Not a single person is going to Chappell’s stand up shows anymore… And not like Ricky Gervais just got a fucking special on netflix. 
don’t gaslight me, please.
5 Likes
Or possibly, are deliberately loss-making for tax-avoidance purposes.
(Plus there’s probably supplemental reasons like “we have this person on a contract for one more film, so let just put them in this film then we’ve fulfilled the contract”)
2 Likes
Yeah, most of his flicks don’t work for me, but i think he did Planes, Trains, etc with Martin and Candy. I watched that again with some fam recently, thought it held up pretty well. Alcohol helped.
5 Likes
Same here, really. It’s not that Hughes is terrible or that the actors are bad. They just don’t “click” with me.
Nearly all of them have characters selling out their individuality for yuppie ideals, too. Bit weird but it was the 80s.
4 Likes
Was Breakfast Club intended as a comedy? It’s been literally decades since I’ve seen it (and I’m not willing to go watch it again) and I honestly don’t remember how it was framed. I’m not doubting scenes were intended to be humorous but just wondering if the film itself was overall meant to be a comedy.
Then again I’ll freely admit so many movies that are supposed to be comedies just leave me flat. 
8 Likes
I was surprised by that classification, too. I went to look it up. It’s considered a “dramatic comedy.”
I liked the flick okay, back when, but I don’t remember laughing at all. 
7 Likes
Well huh, ok, then. One more example of where I find genres definitions mostly less than useful, I guess! (It’s even worse for me with music.)
I had to look it up: it came out in 1985, so I was pretty much solidly in the target audience at the time, although I don’t think I saw it until around 1989 or so. (Still very much target audience, I guess.) I know I enjoyed it at the time, but I agree that I don’t remember really laughing at it.
4 Likes
Yeah, it’s more of a drama with comedic elements. I guess I conflated it here because it has so many of the same awful 80s tropes as a lot of others mentioned. But mainly because I hate it and thought it was awful that one of the main points seems to be that makeup trumps mental health and being pretty/popular is a desirable outcome in and of itself. I’ll admit it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.
5 Likes
Not to turn this into the Hughes thread, but to this:
I did like how the movie exposed that life (being pretty/popular) as it’s own form of prison for teens. Not being able to befriend who they want, as one example.
It was totally like that at my first school, not that I was one of the popular kids.
Then I moved and it wasn’t like that in the new place, and it changed my life.
7 Likes
This! So much this! Target audience for it or not, that pissed me off even way back then. I recall it seemed at odds with the overall theme of “we’re going to define ourselves instead of who we’re told we are” … but I guess that gets overridden when it comes to being conventionally attractive.
6 Likes
Even Whose Line used a lot of editing- the live taping was well over an hour, and they’d cut the live show down in order to just use the best material.
1 Like
Speaking of the drama part of it, since we’re already off-topic - while I was looking it up I saw that, allegedly, the scene where the kids each describe what got them detention wasn’t scripted at all. Hughes just told them to ad lib it.
Gives me a whole new appreciation for Anthony Michael Hall.
5 Likes
You want to know how comedy died. Read some of these comments. Nobody has a sense of humor anymore. I understand not everyone is going to like everything, but man just reading a few of these comments makes me wonder what exactly these people think is funny. I mean seriously people does everything offend you
8 Likes
