Tag Archives: anti-comedy

Friendship (2025) Movie Review

It has become increasingly common since the COVID-19 pandemic for stories, think pieces, podcast episodes, TikTok clips, studies, surveys, and all manner of media detritus to be made on the current state of adult friendship and an apparent “loneliness epidemic.” Why are people feeling so lonely, more so now than ever before?

Despite how it’s been characterized, this “epidemic” is not a novel phenomenon unique to one generation or isolated to a “post-pandemic” moment in time. It’s a decades old trend in declining social connection, according to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Still, the discourse surrounding this supposed epidemic comes with the usual nervy energy of Internet-brained discussion: if this is a crisis, then it must have a solution, and its causes must be easily condensed into digestible bullet points.

This reduction of the complexities of human relationships into basic cause-effect bullet points (we are more lonely…because technology!) is a useful entry point into Continue reading Friendship (2025) Movie Review

Adult Swim, Anti-Comedy, and Cringe Humor: What’s the Appeal?

Note: This in an in-depth article on Anti-Comedy and Adult Swim programming. If I mention a given show, short film, or feature film, there is a strong chance that I will be giving spoilers for that video, so be cautious. Also, this is a multi-page article; the links to subsequent pages sometimes get lost at the bottom of the page.

 

Anti-Humor. Anti-Comedy. Meta-Humor. Non-Comedy. Whatever hyphenate you want to use to describe the brand of comedy that is purposefully not funny or otherwise lacking in traditional comic structure.

Anti-Comedy, as I will refer to it throughout the rest of this article, is a highly divisive form of comedy (my fascination with the divisive is well founded). Some dismiss it as destructive to quality comedy or simply lazy. Others can’t digest it as something humorous or necessary.

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Late-night television programming block Adult Swim, launched in 2001 as a complement to Cartoon Network’s children’s programming, has harnessed these alternative forms of comedy to seeming success. With shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!The Eric Andre Show, and the short film series of Infomercials, Adult Swim has Continue reading Adult Swim, Anti-Comedy, and Cringe Humor: What’s the Appeal?

The Comedy (2012) Movie Review

Rick Alverson’s The Comedy is not a comedy. It is an anti-comedy. A satire of a self-destructive generation gazing on their own broken world. The film opens on a group of people, mostly slightly overweight men, drinking and dancing, spitting beer and stripping nude. This is a commonplace setting for this group of “friends.”

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The film stars Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric fame. Comedy partner Eric Wareheim co-stars, and their presence in the film in one instance is Continue reading The Comedy (2012) Movie Review