the humor in the Marvel movies makes me want to shoot myself directly in the face

"It is I, the Quipster!"

OH FUCK MY SIDES

(I acknowledge upfront that this is not an original complaint.)

I am not an out-and-out hater of Marvel movies but I don’t much like them; mostly I’m kind of indifferent to the movies themselves, while I worry about their impact on which movies get funded¹. (This is in contrast with Star Wars, where I am deeply and passionately invested in the ludicrous story particulars of a ridiculous universe that has produced maybe 4 hours of legitimately good movie across 11 films.) Like everybody else I think Black Panther is the best one, but it’s also emblematic of the problems with the franchise. The first two thirds are a fantastic movie; the last third is an D+ movie that isn’t bad enough to erase all the good that came before. (It’s an intimate family drama that suddenly becomes armies of CGI characters playing grabass while Bilbo Baggins flies an invisible jet.) The film takes its turn for the worse because Marvel’s cookie cutter approach to movies dictated that they had to have a pointless and emotionless computer-generated mosh pit.

But, look, I don’t hate these movies, some are more fun than others, and now that they’re on Disney+ I’ll sometimes put them on as I drift off to sleep. But I find it’s getting harder and harder to do that. What’s making the movies close to unwatchable for me, these days, is the humor.

You’ve seen the movies, so you know the score. In the Marvel Universe, characters communicate primarily through one-liners. Situation happens->character reacts-> other character responds with a quip. These jokes are almost all the same: deadpan, knowing, condescending, self-impressed. They all demonstrate that the person telling the one-liner is effortlessly cool and totally unconcerned with the situation before them. They are not really jokes, most of the time, but dry references to some aspect of the story that doesn’t really depend on setup and payoff but rather assumes that a superhero talking like a member of a college improv troupe is inherently humorous. And it’s all the same. Yes, there are jokes only Tony Stark could tell and jokes only Captain America could tell. But in a majority of cases the character telling the joke could be switched to someone else in the scene with no issue, as the jokes aren’t actually indicators of personality at all.

As time goes on it gets to me more and more and now feels like someone has stuck the claw of a hammer into my nostrils and is giving it a quick tug every joke.

The biggest thing is that I just don’t find any of these jokes funny. The “aren’t I clever? Aren’t I cute?” school of wordplay is not something I have a lot of tolerance for in general these days. My immediate response to most Marvel quips is “yes, we’re all very impressed, thank you.” With everyone dropping clever lines on social media, the explosion of podcasts that amount to people hanging around and making fun of each other², and the general sense that comedy has been democratized - while comedic talent certainly hasn’t been - I’m just worn out by the constant feeling of being in a basement watching a movie while a bunch of 13 year olds try to do the MST3K routine for the first time. Does everyone have to be the funny one, now? Does everyone feel the need to fill every silence with a vaguely joke-like utterance? It’s tiring.

There are some more layers to this. The first is the rigid regularity of the jokes in these movies. You can watch a Marvel movie, take out a stopwatch, and time out how long passes between each joke. I think you’ll be amazed at how consistently they come, even in the grand finales of many of these movies. The creators of these movies seem to be terrified that if there isn’t a mandatory quip break every 12-16 minutes the audience will forget they’re having fun. The problem is that different movies have different plots and in some points in some films it’ll be awkward and inappropriate to put a joke beat in according to a schedule - and that’s what we get, all too often, a humor beat that’s awkward and inappropriate. Comedy has to organically fit a plot moment. “Obligatory humor” just doesn’t make much sense.

(Interestingly, the Marvel movie that best navigated this is Thor Ragnarok, which as everybody pointed out at the time is not a superhero movie with jokes but a comedy with superheroes. They solved the “too much forced humor” problem by making a straight-up comedy, which allowed them to avoid the predictable rhythms and stale action-joke-action patterns that have infected the franchise.)

The second issue is that everyone tells these jokes! Everyone. In 25 or whatever movies there’s like 5 major characters that never quip. Characters are not only from different countries and backgrounds and ideologies but different species and yet everyone drops the same kind of one liners. Aunt May is dropping her best zingers in these movies. Aunt May. The straight man was such a commonplace in comedy for so long because it works. You have to have square characters to bounce the humor off of. Now everybody is the wacky jester. In real life everyone is not a insult comic. Everybody is not firing off snappy material all the time. It makes the characters in super hero movies, already swollen and unsympathetic, seem even more cartoonish and hard to connect with.

But it all makes sense if you understand that these are assembly line movies made by a creative team that is risk-averse above and beyond anything else. You make every character tell quips even when it makes no sense because you’ve made every character in the previous movies tell quips and they all made a billion dollars. And that’s the real issue behind all of this: homogeneity. I know I’m not breaking new ground here but the MCU movies are built by a machine that feels compelled to sand away the idiosyncrasies and quirks that make movies actually interesting out of a fear that difference will hurt the box office. You can’t have a Marvel movie without the relentless jokes for the same reason we didn’t see Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man or Patty Jenkins’ Thor: because they would be different, and different is a risk.

That’s why your favorite movies don’t end up on critic best-of lists, Marvel fans. Because really good movies can only be made with the freedom to fail. I know that sounds like a slam but it isn’t really. Not only is this clearly a calculated decision by Disney, I suspect it’s what most comic book movie fans would choose themselves. They’d likely rather have a franchise full of solid Bs than a few As and a lot of Ds. And that’s a legitimate choice as a consumer of movies. Me, I find it very depressing. We’ll never see a great Marvel movie because we’ll never see one that tries something entirely new. Kevin Feige will never allow it.

Hawkeye: THAT WAS A CLOSE SHAVE! (laugh track)

1. You ever see The Rock? Of course you have, it’s a great movie. The Rock could not get made today. Point blank, no question, period. That classic action film doesn’t get made in 2021 because 1) there’s no franchise potential and 2) it’s not appropriate for children. The category of big-budget movies for adults that are not parts of franchises almost doesn’t exist anymore. And this is something that’s constantly lost when, say, there’s another Martin Scorsese-comic book movie dustup. It’s not just about the quality of the movies that do get made. It’s about the movies that don’t get made because studios just want to make “four quadrant” garbage. Go to a movie executive and say “here’s this incredible script called The Rock, it’s action-packed and smart and funny, sure to be an action classic, by the way it will never start a franchise and children can’t see it in the theater, I need $150 million.” Go try that. See how far you get.

2. I’m not saying that this style can’t be funny (speaking as a guy who is not funny and barely listens to podcasts). Podcasts like How Did This Get Made? and Cum Town pull it off, but that’s because they’re really good at it, and I suspect it’s much harder than it looks.