However: and I kinda began to allude to this before, but I think my issue with this situation isn’t so much that the joke is about vaginal flatulence, but more that they made a gross-out joke at all (fart, queef, poop, dick, ballsack, washing slime out of “every crack”, whatever), and that the decided it was strong enough to put it prominently in a trailer (which sets a tone for the film).
Immature and especially gross-out “humor” has never been my thing (I can’t remember an instance where I’ve found myself enjoying a fart joke) and I always feel like it lowers a film to a certain level of immaturity and unfunniness.
Fair enough. Gross out humor is usually pretty base and unfunny, though I personally like to think that it’s not necessarily true that those jokes can never work. It’s all about context, construction, and delivery. 95% of fart jokes are horribly unfunny but there is that 5% that can make them work in an unexpected way. If it’s actually funny, I’m not going to keep myself from laughing because of the mere fact that it’s a fart joke.
Of course, that isn’t to say that the gross out humor in the new Ghostbusters is funny. Out of the very few gross out jokes in the film that I can think of off the top of my head, I didn’t laugh at any. But this is a film with a lot of jokes so usually they’d move right on to a different joke that I did laugh at so I didn’t really care.
In the case of the queef joke, I didn’t laugh. But, as I mentioned earlier, there was a purpose. I don’t know why they’d want to figure this joke prominently in a trailer as it is does not match the tone of the film. It does, however, as I said, set the tone for McKinnon’s character. So even if it’s not all that funny it still serves a purpose. It’s a small thing, but still.