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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.

6) Get Smart

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When you combine, say, Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon in Taxi, or Queen Latifah and Eugene Levy in Bringing Down the House, or let’s just go ahead and say Queen Latifah and any geeky white dude, expectations are already low enough that it’s hard to be disappointed when such a comedy combo crashes and burns. But I have to say, seeing Steve Carell team up with anybody is promising. We’ve seen him recently have tremendous success working with Tina Fey in Date Night and even Jim Carrey and Steve Buscemi in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (Carell and Buscemi’s partnering was actually downright, well, magical). But it turns out not even Steve Carell’s light can shine when it’s absorbed by the comedic black hole that is Anne Hathaway.

And I still like Anne Hathaway, but in the same way an actor like Steve Carell will say they got into comedy because every time they tried to do serious drama they got laughs, an actor like Anne Hathaway just always feels awkward doing comedy. Or at least she has so far. It’s still possible that she could nail something in the future, or perhaps complement another performer to a satisfactory degree.

I didn’t think I’d find Sandra Bullock very funny in The Heat, but whether it was the surprising writing, beautifully-timed direction and editing, or the sheer force of comedy emanating from Melissa McCarthy’s performance, she does a fine job. What’s especially subversive and exciting about female-driven comedies like The Heat is that the pairings tend to defy expectations and conventions, with the character we’d typically see being essentially made fun of, like Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street, being the joker rather than the jokee.

McCarthy does this in Bridesmaids as well, turning out to be the most stable character in the entire movie. If female comedy duos can consistently produce the type of humor that doesn’t rely on the audience associating with the “cool” character the way male buddy comedies often do, it has enormous potential to rise to the top tier of genre comedy. It almost already has.

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