In Brief: When Did Pop Culture Stop Being Fun?
From Bel-Air to Frasier, we’re losing our sense of humor in favor of “social consciousness.”
The cultural zeitgeist of recent years has driven us away from the fun and frivolity that entertainment once brought. Gone are the days of campy super hero movies and light-hearted fantasy. They’ve been replaced with the dark origin stories of heroes and even villains. Much of this is great entertainment, and it’s certainly not inherently wrong, but writer Alexander Larman says there’s still reason to be a bit bothered.
In 2019, the aspiring filmmaker Morgan Cooper had a clever idea. He took the cheery early Nineties Will Smith comedy The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and reimagined it as a gritty social realist drama, even making a low-budget trailer for his idea. It went viral, and the streaming service Peacock turned it into a series, now titled Bel-Air.
The protagonist (still named Will Smith) is again removed to his aunt and uncle’s care after getting involved in gang tensions in West Philadelphia, but the show is largely devoid of jokes. Instead, it tries to offer a serious look at the young African-American experience in the contemporary United States, complete with Instagram influencers as supporting characters. It is not much fun.
“Television dramas reinvented as comedies are nothing new,” Larman says, pointing to other examples. But it’s becoming a trend because many in Hollywood “are reluctant to take a risk on potentially divisive humor.” Serious is less offensive.
Sometimes, this verges on the absurd. I have no idea why the new Pixar film Lightyear exists at all, given that few children would have watched a Toy Story film and hankered for an origin story for the Buzz Lightyear character. I am even more surprised that the marketing material suggests that Lightyear is a would-be heroic adventure, rather than the wry comedy that viewers might expect.
Likewise, I am excited to see Matt Reeves’ new Batman film, but the publicity suggests a three-hour (three-hour!) picture of glum and sepulchral darkness, both literally and metaphorically. Lamentable though the Joel Schumacher films were, at least they came closer to the bright Pop Art sensibility of the Sixties television series than the endless gloom of the Christopher Nolan, Zach Snyder and now Reeves iterations.
Larman notes that “it has been decreed that audiences want ‘dark’ and ‘serious’ over ‘fun’ and ‘frivolous.’”
Perhaps it is a reflection of our society. Humor’s potential to offend people has never been so great, and livelihoods and careers can be destroyed in an instant. While few care about the multimillionaire comedian or film star whose unguarded actions lead to their downfall, there is something deeply depressing about the thought that once-acceptable shows and films could now be verboten.
