The Jokeless Comedy

We all know how I feel about Will Ferrell. But what really kills me is that when left to his own devices, he's not funny. Watch him on a talk show. He's not funny. But he gets huge laughs thanks to a kind of "system" he's perfected: he'll say something kinda dum-dum benign, like "I have a truck" and then give out that completely blank i-have-no-corneas stare. Meanwhile the audience is sitting there and starts thinking "well, it's WF, it must be hysterical" and starts losing their shit. The more he just sits there staring like a fucking dope, the more apeshit everyone goes.  I think in watching Ferrell talk, people subconsciously start coming up with their own jokes in their heads, thinking oh, that's what HE'S thinking. He's in effect making the audience do his work for him. Fucking genius. Maybe one day women will figure this act out, and when their man is horny and looking for some the woman can just walk into the bedroom and deliver the Ferrell Blank Stare until the dude says "you know what you're right, let me take care of this" and whacks off, allowing her to get back to her Redbook.  - XMASTIME

As I've said before, Ferrell + Apatow = the Death of Comedy, and today in the New York Times THIS GUY says the same thing, starting with The Hangover II.

Is “The Hangover Part II” a comedy? Yes, definitely, but only of a recent strain: the now-dominant form of cinematic humor we’ll call the jokeless comedy... This mutant subgenre is the offspring of two genetically compatible fathers: Todd Phillips, director of both “Hangover” films, as well as “Old School”; and Judd Apatow, director of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up” and the producer/midwife to a litter of similar-looking movies with mix’n’match titles. (“Forgetting the Greek”? “Get Him to Sarah Marshall”? “Drillbit Taylor Express”?) Together, like Lenin and Trotsky, Phillips and Apatow have engineered a comedic-cinematic putsch. “Old School,” in 2003, was the April Theses for this uprising, and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” in 2005, was its October Revolution...What these auteurs truly have in common, though, is that they have systematically boiled away many of the pleasures previously associated with comedy — first among these, jokes themselves — and replaced them with a different kind of lure: the appeal of spending two hours hanging out with a loose and jocular gang of goofy bros.

Looking back on it, he durability of this genre is stunning;  but then, who would guess that tv would still be dominated by reality shows?