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Comedy died with George Carlin. My optimism has been struggling with this since July, but there's no denying it anymore. Stephen Colbert, Louis Black, Jeff Dunham, and a few others have been fighting their hardest to stop it, but pop culture has finally killed comedy. And the final nail in the coffin was the onslaught of "romantic comedies."
A romantic comedy, for the fortunately uninformed, is essentially a romantic snore-fest with a few jokes thrown in just to keep people awake. The jokes serve as a torture enhancer. Just as you're about to doze off from boredom or pass out from drowning in bullshit, the director throws in a semi-funny one-liner, or perhaps a scrap of irony, just to keep you trapped in reality so you have to experience every painful moment of the shitty formulaic movie plot.
It's a strictly-adhered convention that every romantic comedy follows this algorithm:
- Protagonist (I'm going to assume male, but nothing changes if you switch the roles) does something new.
- The first 10 minutes of the movie serves to get the humor out of the way, save for a joke now and then to make unimpressionable people miserable, to make room for the cookie-cutter romantic storyline.
- Protagonist meets the object of his affection (referred to from here on as Whore), but she soon departs.
- Protagonist has several awkward run-ins with Whore.
- Protagonist begins to date Whore.
- After the gratuitous dating montage, Whore begins to "fall in love" with Protagonist.
- Suddenly, a story complication that anyone with an IQ above 40 could see coming since the first 10 minutes of the movie! Whore runs away from Protagonist, or is separated by circumstance in some way.
- Protagonist, now entirely pussy-whipped, makes a mad dash (usually to an airport) to rekindle the love between him and Whore.
- Protagonist and Whore meet eye-to-eye, argue, make up, and kiss in all of 15 seconds.
- The movie closes on a lighthearted note with either a wedding or an activity relevant to the main characters' one-dimensional personalities. Everyone goes "Aww," and I start cleaving them with a battleaxe.
As if these doppelganger movies weren't enough of a cancer to all things funny, they've begun to brand these catastrofilms as "comedies" rather than "romantic comedies," which begs the question: Where the hell are all the tragic comedies? Where are the movies where everything goes to shit in a tragically hilarious manner and things don't end with a happily ever after?
If I'm going to pay money to see a damn comedy, I expect a fucking comedy, not some run-of-the-mill fairy tale that appeals to the denomination of women who need to be institutionalized because their societal delusions are impenetrable by logic and reason.
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