NeverarGreat said:
One of the defining aspects of Star Wars is its apparent timelessness, both in its mythological themes and in its setting. It is designed to remove itself from the contemporary in order to access the universal in everyone, and this is probably why the humor is such a big point of contention for these new movies.
The first part is a given. I think what’s in question is the second part. Is the humor in the ST especially contemporary?
Comedy as a genre is notoriously difficult to sell to a wide audience because many jokes rely on the absurdity of specific things taken from contemporary culture. Poe’s jokey bit at the beginning of TLJ relies on an entire subgroup of crank call jokes, and while the joke isn’t new, it isn’t exactly ancient enough to disappear into this aforementioned universal experience. I think this is why the original trilogy rarely makes jokes, opting instead for more generalized situational humor and physical (often droid) comedy.
TL;DR Star Wars should be generally funny, but not not specifically jokey.
Bear with me here guys. I know it’s something about myself that I can tend to be contrarian, but I think there’s interesting things to be gained from a devil’s advocate perspective.
So that said, my question is does the humor of the scene rely solely on it being a contemporary cultural reference? Obviously it’s invoking crank calls, but is that really the joke? Isn’t there humor to the scene beyond that? Doesn’t the scene serve a narrative purpose beyond being a cultural reference? Poe is stalling Hux to charge up and help the Resistance escape, and the way he’s chosen to do that is by fucking with him, which I think is funny whether you’re aware of the concept of “prank calls” or not. So I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be considered situational humor.
This reminds me of a contentious joke from TFA, Han’s line about the trash compactor. People were/are mad because it’s a “meta” reference to a previous movie. But that kinda baffles me. Han was there in that trash compactor. That’s part of his life, he knows what kind of experience it’s like to be thrown in one. Why wouldn’t he suggest it? It’s an in character joke, something he would find funny too (as opposed to say Finn finding the ball Luke trained with, which Finn would not know the significance of so the moment only holds meaning from an outside audience winking perspective, or something like Obi-wan saying “you’re going to be the death of me” in AOTC).
I’m honestly curious about the response to the scene and I think it’s worth interrogating. Is it problematic because it’s too contemporary? Or is that one reason that people have latched on to for a scene that doesn’t work for them for potentially a variety of reasons? To that end, I have a question - those who don’t like the scene, did it make you laugh at all?
Honestly for me it makes me laugh, which I don’t think is nothing, even though I wouldn’t call it a perfect scene. If it doesn’t make you laugh I think that’s worth something too.