Word: comical
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...limited to dateless packs of guys; yet its first-week audience charted 57% female and 56% over the age of 30. "One thing marketers have told us," says Tolmach, "is that there's a lack of a generation gap between older teens and their parents in terms of their comic sensibilities...
...personas of most of today's funny guys could be said to flow from Steve Martin. As a stand-up comic in the '70s, he played the idiot with an utterly unwarranted belief in his coolness, while in his first hit movie, The Jerk, he played ... a jerk. The first type has bloomed in the strutting film personalities of Ferrell, Vaughn, Jack Black, Owen Wilson and many others; the second in Sandler, who teams this summer with another lout, TV's Kevin James, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Lower on this fast-food chain are Rob Schneider...
...Allen, but he's closer to Cheech and/or Chong with a bar mitzvah. He hasn't the Woody whine and inferiority complex. Like the Martin stage persona, the characters these guys play don't have self-esteem problems; indeed, that is their problem. The only star who simmers with comic angst is Stiller. He's the put-upon loser, a jocular Job, in films like There's Something About Mary and Night at the Museum, when he's not taking roles as the pompous, uptight bad guy (in, say, Dodgeball) or the preening oaf, as in the well-nigh-immortal...
...Knocked Up, the camaraderie is mainly comic. Guys topping guys - men amusing themselves and one another by competing in a kind of verbal bowling tournament - is as old as the Friars Club, as familiar as The Man Show (actually a favorite of mine, in its early Comedy Central years), as intense and obscene as The Aristocrats. It's also the ribald companionship of the sitcom writing room, a basically male preserve where the scribes often engage in sexually explicit jokes about the show's cast, as an assistant copies it all down. (In 1999 one such assistant, Amaani Lyle...
...extensive notes on this trend) but a more honest parable. Instead, in the middle of their stoned bliss, the guys decide to go back home: Pete to his loveless marriage, Ben to the foxy lady who somehow wants him to be the father of their child. Comic birth scene and declarations of love ensue...