We sat and started watching the movie “Meet the Parents” last night - and after about an hour of it I switched the television off. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I didn’t find any of it funny. I just felt more and more sorry for the guy played by Ben Stiller, and more and more antagonistic towards every other character in the damn film.
There have been a few films like it (that I’ve bothered starting to watch) over the last few years - things like Rat Race, Scooby Doo, and so on - I’ve either had some kind of sense of humour lobotomy, or those films were just not funny.
Ben Stiller was okay in Starsky and Hutch, but nothing else recently has even approached funny. Bits and pieces of Armageddon were funny (perhaps unintentionally).
Maybe it’s just American humour that I don’t get any more? Funny to me is movies like Four Weddings, Notting Hill, and series like “The Office”.
I guess I’ve grown out of slapstick humour somehow. How does that happen?