‘Moon Knight’ director explains the importance of the show’s comedy

Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige has been talking a big game about how “brutal” Moon Knight is, but anyone craving a Frank Miller-esque gritty adventure is likely to be disappointed when it premieres next week. We Got This Covered has seen the first four episodes, and without spoiling anything, the show is broadly comedic.

We attended this week’s Moon Knight press conference, where the cast and crew discussed how important the comedic aspects were. Oscar Isaac said that his starting point was “What if Peter Sellers was in a Marvel project?”, before going on on to reveal that he’d based the character of Steven Knight on An Idiot Abroad‘s Karl Pilkington.

Now, director Justin Benson has given his take, saying that humor is key to the character.

“I think in everything we do, our cheat to finding the humanity in characters is have them crack a joke in a stressful situation. And so Moon Knight obviously in decades of storytelling has been somewhat defined by that, at least in some of our favorite runs, like the Lemire & Smallwood run. That one feels like it’s like, oh yeah, one page of something brutal; literally half a page later, there’s a punchline, there’s a joke.”

That fits in neatly with the MCU house style, where the heroes are always ready to puncture any tension with a wry one-liner. But Moon Knight doesn’t have quite the same knowing sense of humor that other MCU projects display, as Isaac explained when he went into the show’s approach to laughs.

“I think Marvel in particular have done such an amazing job at combining action and comedy in such a great way.  And I thought with Steven, there was a chance to do a different type of comedy than we’ve seen of somebody that doesn’t know they’re funny, doesn’t know they’re being funny.”

All of which adds up to making Moon Knight one of the funniest projects Marvel Studios have ever released, with a specifically British streak of comedy running through it, that’s vaguely reminiscent of the original version of The Office.

You’ll soon get to decide for yourself whether the jokes land or not. Moon Knight‘s first episode premieres on Disney Plus on March 30, and will run for six weeks.