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Comment by matthewh806 | Hacker News Reader

Why would you choose Borat as the kind of comedy which "isn't allowed to be made today" when you know you're going to have to contrive a reason for the existence of a sequel which was near enough made today in a footnote...?

Most of the points express a disappointment with mainstream Hollywood movies, which if you don't broaden your horizons is eventually going to lead to disappointment for any cinephile.

"The sitcom-and-laugh-track era appears to be over, thank heavens" I would agree about the laugh-track era being over - but thats hardly a new development. I've been watching the Larry Sanders show from the early 90s which was a landmark show without a laughter track. But to say the era of the sitcom is over is nonsense? There are so many great recent ones.

The one thing I agree with is that scrolling through Amazon Prime / Netflix is a draining & dissatisfying experience

Otherwise, I don't know... I've been watching movies at varying frequencies for decades and I certainly don't feel I've come close to even really tapping the surface, don't feel like I can guess immediately where the director will take me & don't feel really constrained by Vonnegut's theory about there only being six types of story.

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> The one thing I agree with is that scrolling through Amazon Prime / Netflix is a draining & dissatisfying experience

But not (only) because they lack a good catalog. It's mainly because they don't (want you to) have the tools to find content you'd truly like. They're focused on promoting new and trending content. The proper approach is to have a list outside content providers and not use providers as discovery tools. (Edited a typo.)

You need an external list anyway just to keep track of where things moved around to across subscription services. I wouldn't mind the current segmented streaming market as much if the people that are selling their media rights around provider to provider would do any effort to guide your eyeballs to their work, but they don't seem to be incentivized to do that and would rather direct you to a buy/rent situation instead which makes the whole streaming subscription piece redundant. Right now nobody's running the job as the promoter where they do an end to end hype train, it feels like everyone's just leaning on passive advertising and waiting to sell media rights to the next group. With the direct to consumer digital media purchase option only becoming more prevalent it seems like the subscription movies are going to be in purgatory for a very long time.

This is why I believe it should be a legal requirement for digital storefronts to have an API that allows 3rd parties to create custom UI for them. I understand that they want to have marketing control over their content, but as a result we're creating an objectively worse experience for customers with no way for competition to step in a solve it.

>The proper approach is to have a list outside content providers and use not use providers as discovery tools.

As an aside, justwatch.com (and their mobile app) do a good job of filling this role. They have the same "promote the stuff that's already trending" problem, but will recommend things across services or that aren't available for streaming but you might want to track down anyway. (No affiliation beyond being a happy user)

When Amazon Prime video first came out, the catalog was extremely poor - I suspect they cheaply licensed a large library of old, obscure releases in order to have something to launch. But they also had simple, effective algorithms for content discovery as opposed to the herding algorithms of today. I seem to recall they even had a "random" categorization which seemed to be truly randomized and which was wonderfully hit or miss.

Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today"

The line "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" would be a scandal today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfgO90yGusI

The best example of the "wouldn't be allowed to be made today" is Tropic Thunder.

Yawn, everyone always uses this film as a "prime" example. I don't even think it's true. This film (like Borat) was clearly satirical and the real targets of the jokes quite obvious...

I think a better example of movies which "wouldn't be allowed today" is probably something like the Hangover, which just mines outdated stereotypes & slurs for laughs. Just a sign of society moving on really (as much as Todd Phillips likes to cry about it, I feel his inability to adapt to the comedy landscape is really just a failure of the imagination). I thought the 21 / 22 Jump Street movie addressed this issue quite well it seems the shift took place sometime between the two releases

I'm pretty skeptical of the "couldn't be made today" tropes. Some types of films have gone out of style. And there probably are cultural/ethnic stereotypes that would have been mostly considered funny by many audiences that would be more broadly seen as just offensive today.

But I'm not sure how many things are really outright taboo. For example, I've also heard people say that Heathers couldn't be made today--can't be threatening to blow up a school--but it was actually staged as an off-Broadway musical not all that long ago.

The 22 Jump Street movie kiss/fight scene could never be done today, nor could the other kissing scenes, but the kiss/fight scene was a pivotal part of the movie.

Borat is racist, it's not 'satirical' and that's ok, the world's complicated. It's also ok to hide behind 'satirical' as everyone does, except when you get picky on movies you personally don't think are 'satirical'

Hollywood's inability to deal with kissing is academically interesting. Currently combining sarcasm with the 'correct' actions they are told to follow. It's a dangerous path towards the religious moralism we left behind in the 60's, but perhaps I fear change.

The idea nothing is happening is incorrect.

I mean, a main character is in blackface for the entire film. I'm fairly skeptical that will ever happen again.

I feel like RDJ would've been cancelled into oblivion if it came out in 2021 and he weren't the posterboy for the entire comic book movie genre.

I mean, this already happened. Ted Danson was semi-cancelled in the early 90s for wearing blackface to a Friar's Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg.

Blackface being problematic isn't something we just figured out in the last 12 years, and people trying to do something funny with it anyway isn't new either.

I don't disagree with the fact that blackface is an old phenomenon, I think RDJ's prodigal-son-returns factor and headlining a tentpole summer blockbuster helped brace the impact a bit.

I don't think Tropic Thunder "would be allowed to be made" when it was made.

I still don't quite get how they managed to get a movie centered around a character in black face made, even though it was obviously a parody.

Maybe they would need to cut that specific line but apart from that? As far as I recall, everything else should be fine.

Maybe also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c1F0PpbHdg

lol they subtitled the black people speaking English

Shock horror, society has moved on in the 40 years since Airplane was made...

How do you even know it wouldn't be allowed? People love to spout this kind of stuff, but... have you even tried?

Edit: A very nice example I've come across is Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was (same with Borat). Masterfully done and I believe (from what I've seen in terms of comedy recently) that kind of stuff would still fly at the BBC. There's even a documentary from a couple of decades back about the success of the office and a BBC producer admits even back then they had to reign in a few of the areas Gervais wanted to go in terms of race & disability (it was also mentioned that he is quite obsessed with these topics), so its all bullshit that people like him are shouting about "THESE DAYS...!".

In fact maybe he's right and the Office couldn't be made today. But that's primarily because Gervais isn't funny these days

> Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was

But that’s exactly why it could not be made today. Today, you can’t say anything which can be taken out of context. Quote mining has become a national pastime.

So, how do you explain Ricky Gervais' ongoing presence in TV, standup & social media where he routinely says objectively worse stuff than ever appeared in the Office with no real damage done to his career?

His recent standup work has far more objectionable content in it than the Office ever did

I would guess that a TV series must be approved by more people than an individual’s standup routine.

A standup is the producer/director/writer/actor for the program. An sitcom/romcom has multiple producers/directors/writers/actors involved, so there is a much broader level of editorial. The producers deciding what directors/writers to hire is in and of itself editorial control. The writers agreeing what jokes to use is editorial control. Even the actors will get their say while on set with lines like "i just don't feel this is what my character would say", then you get rewrites onset.

TL;DR: of course a standup's routine is much less scrutanized than any other type of content by the nature of it.

That's interesting; he also said:

> Please stop saying "You can't joke about anything anymore". You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system.

https://twitter.com/rickygervais/status/1172874651019763712

He's such an idiot

https://screenrant.com/original-office-show-ricky-gervais-ca...

> "Now [The Office] would suffer because people would take things literally...This was a show about everything — it was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now, in case they say the wrong thing and they are cancelled...I think if this was put out now, some people have lost their sense of irony and context."

> “…They’re even more scared now because people don’t take an explanation for an answer, they just say, ‘Well, I don’t want to see it, so let’s ban it.’”

Obviously the Office isn't in the limelight anywhere near as much as it used to be, but I never hear people having a problem with its tone or style of comedy. A few other sitcoms have had scenes removed from streaming platforms / boxsets (Peep Show, Fawlty Towers etc). But the Office I've never really seen mentioned in a similar way. In fact it's still pretty much beloved by everyone and regularly polls amongst the best British sitcoms of all time.

I didn't downvote you, but the office was very much censored and there were articles about it[1]. The same article discusses Community having one of its best episodes ever yanked over black face that was explicitly explained in the episode. People have lost their collective minds.

[1] https://tvline.com/2020/06/26/the-office-community-blackface...

That article references the American Office. The above comment references the British Office.

People have lost their individual minds. The collective mind prevails.

People have lost their minds, because they don't want to see blackface, even in an ironic context? I wish you wouldn't say those things, because I feel the same way, I really don't want to see it, and I don't find it funny or worth seeing in any context. Please don't assume that everyone likes the same jokes that you do.

Yeah, as another comment mentioned I was specifically referring to the UK Office. I've seen the first couple of seasons of the US Office and so not enough to really comment on this particular scene being removed.

However, they are vastly different shows tonally and so I imagine a scene featuring black face would be handled very differently by the US version

Whats the matter, is Ricky Gervais too challenging for you?

(ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adh0KGmgmQw)

have you ever seen an episode of it's always sunny in philadelphia? the show is regularly far more offensive than any line in airplane, and nobody cares.

Its also tv's longest running sitcom.

Really? I would have guessed Seinfeld or something in that vein.

I think it's actually pretty debatable, depending on what you count "longest running" to mean. Curb Your Enthusiasm has been on since 2000 but has taken years-long breaks. Is that longest running?

FWIW It's Always Sunny is, I believe, considered the longest running live action sitcom. Longest running sitcom overall is The Simpsons.

Simpsons is not considered a sitcom, but it is the longest running show, period.

Sitcom: a television series that involves a continuing cast of characters in a succession of comedic circumstances [Merriam-Webster].

The Simpsons is most definitely a sitcom, just one that happens to be animated.

I can't see a critic taking that dictionary definition very seriously. If you had looked at Wikipedia instead, you'd see no animated show is discussed in the article on sitcom, suggesting animated shows are considered a separate genre.

If you opened a textbook on mass media, it might have a definition of sitcom that is more culturally relevant.

From The Simpson Wikipedia page: "The Simpsons is an American adult animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company." The sentence links to the "Animated sitcom" page, which states, "An animated sitcom is a subgenre of the sitcom that is animated instead of live action that is geared toward adult audiences in most cases. South Park and The Simpsons are two of the longest running animated sitcoms."

A square is also a rectangle.

> but it is the longest running show, period.

I guess soap operas don't count?

Longest running prime time show?

> Longest running prime time show?

I'm not sure it's our job to keep adding qualifiers to the OP's bold statement that "Simpsons is not considered a sitcom, but it is the longest running show, period." until it's finally accurate.

In any case... PBS' Nova is 47 years old. Frontline is 37. I believe those are aired in prime time. And they are "not considered a sitcom" either.

Not the longest running show... soap operas, and possibly some news programs, hold that title. For example, the soap 'Days of Our Lives' has been running since 1965.

Yup.

I think the problem is that a lot of the humor in Airplane has aged like sour milk - it's not a comedy made to stand the test of time. Consider "Blazing Saddles", which does not suffer from this problem nearly as much and is 6 years older. I could see it getting made today just fine with a few tweaks.

Airplane will always be hilarious, fight me.

And Blazing Saddles is the poster child for "could not get made today" arguments.

> And Blazing Saddles is the poster child for "could not get made today" arguments.

Blazing Saddles was the poster child for that when many of the movies that argument is now made about were made, too.

Because its the kind of movie that could never be made, except that it was. And if there was a Mel Brooks-in-his-prime now, the modern equivalent (which, presumably, Blazing Samurai this year will not be) could get made today.

Going from a cowpoke to a bushido setting? How very Westworld.

> Going from a cowpoke to a bushido setting?

That's not the biggest change:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazing_Samurai

Including blackface, which other threads are suggesting is just totally impossible to pull off. The reality is it's perfectly fine to do anything offensive so long as the the joke isn't just reinforcing those beliefs.

Not any different than the very common older, white racist character in sitcoms today. They're funny! Not because racism is funny, but because the unacceptability of their racism is funny.

those episodes aren't on any streaming service nowadays though

I think you’re confusing “would not be allowed to be made today” with “would face a ~48 hour Twitter outrage cycle then the world would move on”.

I feel like we're stuck in this absurd cycle where the outrage to the outrage becomes a force multiplier. A small number of very vocal people on the left express outrage about X. Not a view shared by the vast majority of the population, left and right included. Right wing media picks up on said outrage and makes vast, sweeping statements about what it means about "the left" and "America today". The whole thing snowballs, some folks on the left end up defending people they don't agree with just because of the outrage on the right... blah blah blah it all eventually dies down until we do the same dance a couple of months later.

It's all an absurd waste of everyone's time, except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures and a huge pay day from it.

I mostly agree, and you're spot on about the outrage cycle. Well put.

However, I don't think the outrage cycle is really contained within Twitter, or within social media in general. It also spills over to traditional media, at least to some extent. Since it gets a lot of attention, including sometimes from influential people, it can actually affect the kinds of content that people dare make, especially if financial risks are involved.

What you're "allowed" to do is a bit of an imprecise expression unless you go right down to law, but it would be a little disingenuous to pretend that social pressure doesn't affect what people expect others to find permissible. Getting outrage thrown at you can certainly make people feel something is socially forbidden. (That of course serves a pro-social role as well. But I don't think we're used to the idea that it's normal to have outrage or other strong emotional condemnation towards something we do from random people we don't know unless we've done something totally unacceptable. We're wired to think of social acceptance as important and outrage as something that requires our attention. The way social media works throws us off because of that. But I digress.)

I also think that as more high profile people leave Twitter, the extremes of canceling are going to die down. It's pretty well accepted in the leftist communities that canceling has become more than a bit too impulsive and reductionist (this latter factor, I would suggest, due in part to Twitter's tiny character limits), and I think at this point everyone wants to leave Twitter and be done with it, but it's a technical issue now. Twitter is addicting, and honestly so is the adrenaline rush from knowing some rich guy's day/week was ruined. imo, it's easier to just not think about Twitter when people you know/admire aren't on there, and if you're not thinking, you're not tweeting, and if you're not tweeting, you're not recklessly canceling.

Something should replace it, though. Transparent accountability is good, and I think we'll really need to figure this one out before a tech monolopy takes advantage of it again.

> except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures

True, but don't pretend that folks like Samantha Bee or Joy Reid aren't exactly the same thing for the other side.

I'd maybe agree that they occupy similar spaces in their respective media landscapes, though Bee being a comedian already makes her a different proposition. But either way I wouldn't say they are the exact same thing. An example: recently Tucker Carlson recently took time in an episode to detail an entirely unfounded conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind the January 6th Capitol attacks. It was completely and utterly false, and easily proven as such. But he has not (to date) admitted that.

If there are examples of this level of disinformation coming from Samantha Bee and/or Joy Reid I'd be interested to see them.

> Bee being a comedian already makes her a different proposition

That's a bit of a cop-out in some ways, especially depending on how it's meant.

If it's meant to indicate that Samantha Bee uses humor, that's fine. But by the same token, Rush Limbaugh used humor. Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder use humor. None of those people do a show with their primary intention being to get a laugh, though. They do a show with their primary intention being to express a point of view, and if they can use humor to do that, all the better.

If it's meant to indicate that we shouldn't take Samantha Bee too seriously, don't worry; I don't. I also don't take Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson too seriously, either.

But usually, it's meant to deflect criticism. Jon Stewart did the same thing. He would make serious criticisms of commentators (including a much younger Tucker Carlson) as if he was trying to be taken seriously, but as soon as anyone criticized him he would immediately fall back to, "I'm a comedian!"

To his credit though, John Oliver (who was on the Daily Show along with Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert back in the day) doesn't seem to hide behind the "I'm a comedian" shield anymore.

Joy Reid regularly does the same. [0][1][2]

[0] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/24/joy_reid_...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/joy-reid-fact-check-tapper-1546432

[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/27/17286392/j...

Samantha Bee is not a talking head being laundered by news outlets into something like reporting.

Who is pretending they can't tell the difference?

Your conclusion misses the fact that those outraged people move the needle.

Studio Execs are very sensitive to outrage. It's part of the calculus.

Often, the outrage is perpetuated within the industry as well.

That said - Airplane would get made - they'd just adjust the jokes accordingly.

When they made Airplane, there were a lot of gags they didn't use because they just were 'too much' - or not funny.

So adjusting the content a bit is always something going on.

That said, the 'fear bar' is much, much lower for certain formats.

My canary for that is Tina Fey. And Judd Apatow. These are staunchly progressive people, but with serious comedy chops. They have been making some passive aggressive public statements lately with respect to this stuff, you can hear what they think on podcasts.

What we need is for Mel Brooks is to come back and save us. He's too old, but if he backed a Ben Stiller remake of 'Blazing Saddles' - I think it would be the funniest thing of the century.

I agree about the description of the outrage cycle, but I think what you're leaving out is people frequently get fired/ostracized for these things. That really does have a cooling effect.

Who got fired for making a movie?

Oh how I wish it was contained to Twitter.

He wouldn't be allowed to visit the cockpit either, which is an enduring joy from my childhood.

> Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today"

Yes, the kind of comedy it has is very tied to the immediate social context for commercial viability, both as to the what it is lampooning (late-70s disaster films) and how.

The broader template of Airplane! (broad take-it-to-11 parody of recently popular film patterns) because it was itself the pattern for its own flood of films in the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, Superhero Movie, and several sequels to Scary Movie).

The, "Could not be made today," line of thinking is overblown. I predicted around 2015 that a movie in the style of "Falling Down" could never be made with a black lead. Less than 2 years later, Get Out was released. And as far as scandal-worthiness goes, I think if Sorry To Bother You got past the salacity filter, we're doing pretty good.

Personally I like (mainland) Chinese movies and TV. It boggles my mind that I had to get a bootleg copy of the 2010 Three Kingdoms TV series.

> don't feel really constrained by Vonnegut's theory about there only being six types of story

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I am not aware of any such theory by Vonnegut.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27748327

Yeah, you're right - I hadn't seen the shapes of stories video in quite a while, i was just taking the authors comment about it.

I think if you watch that Vonnegut video and come away with the conclusion that there are only "x" ways to tell the story then you've missed the point entirely, agreed with your post basically.

There is infinite space to explore within those 'story shapes' (like how we still get fresh + unique takes on the Heroes Journey for example) that it doesn't really matter

Yeah, Tropic Thunder, is a much better example of a recent movie that could never be made just a few later because somebody might be offended.

agreed. shortage of comedies like Hangover and Borat is to me progress on a societal level.

It's not hard to notice that the two Borat movies are very different in style

Who is ridiculed in the subsequent moviefilm? Orange man, anti-abortion activists, libertarians, holocaust deniers - they are all safe to laught at. Just compare with who was the laughing stock at the original one - feminists, blacks, gays, jews. That wouldn't fly today

So the acceptable targets have just changed. I don't think the complaint was that you can't make fun of jews (or whoever) specifically but about whether comedies of that general type are being made.

Sacha Baron Cohen has changed targets 6+ times in his carrer so there's nothing new there.

> Just compare with who was the laughing stock at the original one - feminists, blacks, gays, jews.

If you think the first Borat movie was laughing at any of those groups then you have seriously misunderstood the movie.

It's been shown time and time again that a lot of cult movies are popular less for their satirical bent and more for the shock value and edgy premises in which the satire plays out.

That's why there are innumerable comments of the "They wouldn't be allowed to make this today" variety. Shock first, nuance second (if at all).

No, I understand that the movie was about common americans as the name suggests. But now, even using these groups as props for jokes will get you bombarded with thousands of angry tweets starting with the word "Normalizing"

The two Borat movies were completely different. The first movie made fun of everyone, the second movie made fun of the political right.

to be fair a lot of the “making fun” was self-inflicted

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