I did. That's why I mentioned mode in my response.
Just wondered, as from parts of your response it almost seemed as if you hadn't (my bad).
I definitely agree when you say comedy is hard; I've always said that movies are subjective, and comedy is the most most subjective genre of all. Even when you take away cultural specific nature of what is "funny", it's still incredibly difficult to create something that will make large numbers of people laugh. For instance, my father cannot stand Airplane. He doesn't find it funny at all. In fact, he finds it more annoying than anything. However, I think it's a piece of comedy genius, a true classic.
I think the biggest problems for comedy movies are the fact that there are so many great shows on tv, plus there are so many different kinds of humour that appeal to a broad audience. In some ways, it's very similar to the horror genre. The goal of a comedy is to make people laugh, the goal of a horror movie is to make people scared. But there are just so many ways achieve that goal.
Horror movies has recently gone through a bit of a renaissance. We are now getting well made and well written atmospheric, tense and psychological horror movies that rely on tension in the scene rather than jump scares, blood and gore. Similar to horror movies, comedies do not need massive budgets or even lots of well known actors to appear in them to be good. If you look at a lot of the recent releases from Blumhouse Pictures, I think they've all had budgets under $50 million dollars but go on to make 5 or 6 times that at the box office, turning over a tidy little profit for the studio. The movies are interesting, engaging, creative and tense. Maybe more independent studios should adopt a similar model in their approach to comedies.
Some of the best comedies of all time have a very simple premise, so maybe studios are over-thinking the process? Hopefully, the comedy genre will experience a similar renaissance to the horror genre and we get a surge of well written, intelligent and funny movies being released.
Difficult to say. I think sometimes comedy as a mode can be overdone. For example I appreciate that the Marvel movies aren't dour, desaturated and depressing affairs but at the same time I'm not sure what making Thor fat really gives to a story like Endgame. At their very best Marvel movies sometimes remind me a little of the OT Star Wars where humor was present and it could relieve the tension without taking you out of the adventure and drama of it. Kind of goes the other way to. If I'm watching a comedy I don't really want horror movie levels of gore going on.
Marvel in particular use a technique called Bathos. I talked about this in my IT: Chapter 2 review. For those unaware what bathos is, it is a technique where a moment of massive tension or drama is lessened/undercut by a moment of humour. The MCU uses it a lot, some would say too much.