We live in an increasingly lonely world, siloed in our personal algorithms, scrolling our screens and reacting with outrage, disgust or some wicked combination of the two. It’s an ugly time. But more than anything: It’s a serious time.
I mean that literally: We are so serious. And while we are serious, we are alone. We rarely gather to laugh together. What a shame. Because there is nothing quite so bonding — so heartening, so joyous, so life-affirming — as being with a bunch of people you don’t know and laughing your head off.
One of the few bummers of reading Matt Singer’s new book “Funny Business,” set for release Oct. 6, is realizing how much of that collective experience has been lost. The book is a deeply pleasant recounting of the “frat pack” (Will Ferrell/Vince Vaughn/Seth Rogen) comedy boom of the mid-aughts, and Singer walks us through the emergence of the scene. How it may have launched because Ben Stiller and Judd Apatow met in line for an Elvis Costello show. How Ferrell and Adam McKay might be their generation’s Abbott and Costello. How Kristen Wiig crashed the bro-comedy canon with “Bridesmaids,” one of the highest-grossing comedies of the era. And he does it all with verve and warm affection for the period while still noting how male and White it was.
But as the book goes on, you start to realize, hey, they don’t make original movie comedies like this at all anymore.
And they don’t. Movies such as “Anchorman,” “Wedding Crashers” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” were smashes, but big-screen comedies for adults (even young, immature adults) have essentially vanished. Of 2025’s 50 top-grossing movies domestically, exactly one (arguably two) could be classified as an adult comedy, and that was the reboot of “The Naked Gun” (which finished 39th and made less money, adjusted for inflation, than any of the original Naked Gun movies). The only comedies in the top 50 the year before were sequels (“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire”) or remakes (“Mean Girls”). Original comedies are pretty much no longer getting made.
Singer argues that this is in large part because of how people now consume comedy. “A lot of the people who are covered in my book grew up loving movie comedies and wanting to make their own ‘Caddyshack’ and ‘Animal House,’ … and so that’s what they did,” Singer said in a recent interview. “Some people I spoke to were like, ‘The people who are funny now are not watching those kinds of movies now.’ They’re watching TV shows, they’re watching TikTok. They’re watching people online, and that’s what they see, and then that’s what they’re going to want to emulate.” Which is to say: They are laughing alone.
Watching the original “Naked Gun” in a movie theater made me feel like I was sharing an endless series of belly laughs with a room full of people who had suddenly become my best friends. But now the only way I get to share that experience is with the “share” button. It is very much not the same thing.
Tellingly, most of those comedy stars of 20 years ago are no longer bothering with movie theaters. Ferrell’s (sadly unfunny) new show “The Hawk” is streaming on Netflix; Vaughn’s (much funnier) action-comedy “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice”; and Wiig’s (even funnier) comedy “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” both went straight to streaming. Steve Carell hasn’t made a big-screen adult comedy in more than a decade, but he’s also all over your devices. They’ve given up the ghost.
Singer’s book, then, serves as a fitting, and compulsively readable, epitaph for not just the mid-aughts comedy era but screen comedies in general: The book has a hard time being optimistic about the future of the genre. Box office, in general, has been up this year, and it has been up for original films rather than just comic-book legacy franchises. But where it’s most up — horror movies — is telling. It’s a dark, serious time, but the irony is that horror is also where you can find the next generation of comedy talent.
Because the best place to laugh now is in horror movies, from “Obsession” (written and directed by Curry Barker, who has run a YouTube sketch-comedy channel for years) to “Get Out” and “Nope” (made by Jordan Peele, a comedy legend from “Key and Peele”) to “Weapons” and “Resident Evil” (two terrific horror films that are also hilarious, helmed by Zach Cregger, formerly of the sketch troupe “The Whitest Kids U’ Know”). The comedians have learned that the way to make it on the big screen is to sneak their comedy into a different genre entirely.
Which does have value: One of the great joys of seeing the outstanding “Resident Evil” was laughing along with a packed house. But that this is only happening in horror movies and kids’ films feels like defeat — a concession to our loneliness, our algorithms and our inability to find ways to laugh together. Surely we haven’t lost this entirely. And don’t call me Shirley.
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