There is Such a Thing As Taking Oneself Too Seriously

Another awards season looms - or should that be glooms? It does look like being another 'serious' one, what with the US election, and Iraq still rumbling on and, oh yeah, the world economy falling apart. Expect Hollywood to get all preachy, with big stars doing big acting (seen Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revolutionary Road trailer?) and big issues.

Now I like a weighty isshoo movie as much as the next man, even if that next man is George Clooney. But, like George, I also enjoy a laugh - and it doesn't look like I'm going to get it at the multiplex any time soon. Whatever happened to funny at the pictures?

To trot out the old statistic: the last comedy to win an Oscar for best picture was Annie Hall in 1978. Maybe the Academy doesn't deem laughter an appropriate response to the serious business of Oscar night. Which is, of course, quite laughable in itself.

But you would have thought that, following the flops of all those deadly serious Iraq movies, Hollywood would have noticed audiences are seeking a new artistic response to the current state of the universe - and a comic one seems to me only the only natural one. But, to revisit a lovely old phrase, maybe uttered by a vaudevillian on his deathbed when asked if it was tough taking a final bow: 'Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.'

Maybe proper comedy is just too hard for Hollywood attention spans. The kings now are Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow, who churn out comedies like a production line, their turnover rate honed on Saturday Night Live. So we're watching sketchy characters become tiresome after five minutes.

Ferrell et al have certainly had commercial successes, and a few reasonably funny movies - Elf, Anchorman, Knocked Up - but with easy laughs and glib writing. And they know it: the recent Pineapple Express, from the Apatow stable, ended in a violent shootout - when the laughs run dry, blow some shit up.

Ben Stiller did it, too, in the dismayingly awful Tropic Thunder, whose 'jokes' featured Robert Downey Jnr blacking up.

There are some sophisticated comic writers today - Wes Anderson, for example, and the Coen Brothers, but their recent works have failed on the actual laughs. Films such as Little Miss Sunshine and Juno brightened up recent Oscar races and suggest that the comic muse hasn't deserted Hollywood, but comic auteurs are no longer encouraged by studios: where is the new Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, George Cukor, Mike Nichols, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen (in the early, funny films of course)?

There is only really one such talent at work today, one who can sustain his tone through polished scripts that create gently absurd universes, where irony is blended with empathy for rounded characters. He is Alexander Payne, director of Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004). Not for him a conveyor belt of childish gags, rather a long process of writing and crafting. His next film, I understand, will be Fork in the Road, but not until 2010. Let's hope that by then we're all laughing our way back to the movies.