In the 70s-80s, the spoof genre worked so well because everyone in the spoof is part of the gag. At the end of Blazing Saddles, Dom Deluise’s anger during the “French Mistake” rehearsal works so well because everyone is absolutely deadpan. It’s like a Church service, everyone bowing to the sacredness of the medium to convince the audience that what they’re watching is absolutely normal, when in fact it’s totally absurd. That’s the power of the spoof: the audience partakes in an otherwise totally normal ritual, except humans alone know the absurdity of it all, and as a viewer you’re rewarded heavily for seeing through the veil. If AI or an alien or a chimp were to watch Blazing Saddles and Stage Coach, they wouldn’t see much of a difference. In fact, you could subtly score Blazing Saddles, but change nothing else, and make it into a convincing thriller.
The spoof genre absolutely worked, as seen in Police Squad, a TV series which perfected the format. If someone watching Police Squad actually thought it was a serious cop drama, that only made it funnier. The joke was on them. That was its power.
Then something happened in the 90s. Maybe it was TV in the kids’ rooms, or the internet, or global distribution, the home video market… But spoofs started making a really awkward and horrible transition to becoming self-aware. You can see this awkwardness in Robin Hood Men in Tights. I know I’ll get heat from this since this film is beloved, but the jokes are caught in a weird liminal space; the gags are good, like when Robin asks the crowd to “lend their ears” and they start throwing them. But there are additional reactions like Robin saying, “That is disgusting.” Yes, we know that. When Brooks sells circumcisions using a guillotine, it’s a great gag, but the crowd reacts all too out-of-bounds; they say it’ll hurt, express discomfort. Yes, we know that. And that’s where this awkward growth seems to be happening: the spoof actors, and the entire show, is trying to “help” the audience see the absurdity of it all, when the audience needed no such help in the 70s and 80s.
A major turning point was Scream in 1996. Scream is the opposite of a spoof. It’s a refusal to partake in the sacrament of the genre, a genre-breaker or anti-spoof. In a way it’s the cinematic expression of pure ritual skepticism, the kid who sees the priest pouring cheap wine into the flask and calling it “transubstantiation”. The actors are catching on to the genre’s limitations and start to think creatively outside the box they’re in. That’s hilarious, but that isn’t a spoof. The two are fundamentally different religious exercises. The spoof is unadulterated ritual that is made ridiculous so that only the audience can see through the veil, but Scream is a complete break where the production itself escapes the ritual, and the audience is just along for the ride.
The genre-breaker is still ritual, though, and failing to see this will cause total pain and humiliation to the production. She Hulk couldn’t accept itself as ritual, and the final moments when the actress disses on the writers (an actual diss) was a failed attempt to make light of their failure to accept the fact that She Hulk is as ritualistic an experience as any other show.
I don’t believe spoofs are dead; people are still as religious as they’ve always been. People still laugh at Naked Gun. The nostalgia over Men In Tights is evidence that even awkward spoofing is better than no spoofing. But the studio production models are averse to spoofs; they are too “inside” and they fear the audience won’t “get it”. The studios are engaged in helicopter parenting with the audience.
I was once frustrated that my oldest son wasn’t “getting” my jokes, but when he turned 8 he started getting them all, then started making his own jokes, and sometimes they would slay. I treat my sons like I’d want to be treated, trusting that they’ll get the joke. Otherwise I would treat them like idiots, which is what modern marketing execs and producers tend to do. Maybe they do this because they themselves are idiots and didn’t get Police Squad. When we laugh at Leslie Nielson, we laugh at these idiots. They might intuit this; perhaps their bad comedies is their revenge on us, for laughing at their participation in the ridiculous ritual of genre.
I think that might be why we can’t have spoofs anymore, at least not on the studio level. Which sucks.