Home Featured Content

6 Unlikely Or Perhaps Mismatched Comedy Duos

The comedic “double act” is a concept that has been around for at least a century, first gaining popularity in the vaudeville halls at the turn of the last century, and continuing to be implemented through the comedy generations right up to the present. It’s a ploy often used on the presumption that two opposing forces, when forced to collide, can in the best cases result in explosive, uproarious comedy. We’ve seen the likes of comedy duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Brooks and Reiner, and Wilder and Pryor team up to produce memorable acts and classic movies. The gimmick has spilled over the borders of pure comedy to inform a genre specific to the medium of film in the years since—that of the buddy cop genre.

1) 21 Jump Street

Recommended Videos

Anyone who has seen This Is The End knows that Channing Tatum has developed something of a rapport with the rising group of comedians responsible for giving us movies like Superbad and Pineapple Express. But at first, it was unclear whether he would have any chemistry with the established comic talent of Jonah Hill. The result was a pleasant surprise: the two ended up being as much fun to watch on the movie screen as they were in their press appearances leading up to the film’s release. The fact that Hill seems to get along extremely well with his co-stars in virtually every movie, from Tatum to Brad Pitt after Moneyball, makes his douchey persona in This Is The End even better.

I guess my main issue with 21 Jump Street, as enjoyable and funny as it was, was that it took this team of opposites and fell into essentially the same notes as any other duo consisting of a nerd and a jock. They made a bit of a half measure toward subverting these tropes, showing that today’s generation almost looks on the nerd more favorably, but in the end, the movie’s attitude remains that this is a weird, perhaps even regrettable or at least unnatural cultural phase, and the jock will always end up banging the teacher.

It’s cause for at least a little bit of ambivalence about Tatum’s comedic ability; it’d be nice to see him find an angle to work against his type of the hunky brute (dancing well doesn’t quite cut it), so that he can be as parodical as Hill and Rogen and Franco and the rest.

Exit mobile version