The Funny Thing About Funny People

I was not entirely surprised to learn, after its opening weekend, that Funny People had failed to have the draw that Judd Apatow's earlier efforts had boasted. I thought, perhaps, that the long run-time would have something to do with that, as well as all the hold over summer nonsense films that continue to rake in cash against all reason (i.e. G-Force, Ice Age 3, Harry Potter, etc.) I also recognized that the tone was significantly more somber in Funny People than in Knocked Up or The 40 Year Old Virgin...yet I didn't initially think that this was an issue.

Therefore it came to me as quite a shock when many of my friends began to get around to seeing the film and expressing their utter disdain for it. On more than one occasion I was confronted by a friend who absolutely detested the film. Why was this such as shock? Chiefly because Funny People is one of the most full-on moralistic parables in recent memory. For people (like my friends) who more-or-less uphold traditional moral values in relation to marriage and family, Funny People should have come as a welcome to surprise. It certainly did for myself.

In an even odder twist, an op-ed in the Times picked up on this thread and developed some very astute conclusions about the conservatism of Apatow's films and how Funny People demonstrates where moralism starts to cost people, and how Americans apparently (if judging by the box office as well as my friend's reactions) just don't care for that sort of confrontation.

The entire, fantastic article can be read HERE, but two quotes that really stood out to me are as follows:
"No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as “Knocked Up,” Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.

"But “Funny People” is a Judd Apatow movie — endless penis jokes and all. It’s just a more grown-up one, in which doing the right thing comes harder, and bad choices aren’t easily unwound. The way it’s been received suggests that his fan base isn’t ready to hear this kind of story yet. But it’s also reminder that Americans of all ages tend to like their social conservatism much more in theory than in practice."

What then, I wonder, did my supposedly morally conservative (read Christian) friends find so unappealing about the film? Was the issue, as the Times writer postulates, that they only want to be handed the "sexy", easier to digest values of life, love, and marital bliss? Could it be that when the rubber meets the road (to borrow the colloquialism) too many "social conservatives" are ready to frown and abandon ship?