"Everybody says how hard comedy is, but, when it comes time to honor things, whether it's on a weekly critical basis or whether it's award time, at that time of the year, comedy is the poor, dumb child of dramatic work"
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Reitman’s line isn’t really about comedy’s difficulty; it’s about comedy’s status anxiety. He’s taking a familiar compliment - “comedy is hard” - and flipping it into an indictment: praise becomes a polite way to keep comedy in the kids’ table while drama gets the inheritance. The sting is in his phrasing. “Poor, dumb child” isn’t just insult, it’s a portrait of how institutions treat laughter as lesser intelligence, a cute talent that can’t possibly carry “serious” meaning. It’s deliberately ugly language, because the bias he’s calling out is ugly and persistent.
The context matters: Reitman comes out of a Hollywood ecosystem that runs on gatekeeping. Weekly criticism tends to reward visible suffering, capital-A Acting, and narratives that announce their importance. Awards culture doubles down, turning “prestige” into an aesthetic (muted colors, trauma arcs, solemn biopics) and treating comedy as disposable entertainment - something you watch, enjoy, and forget, rather than something that should define a career. Reitman’s grievance is also economic: comedy often has to succeed broadly to be valued at all, while drama can be “important” even when fewer people show up.
Subtext: comedy’s power is precisely what makes it threatening to cultural arbiters. It smuggles critique in through pleasure, punctures authority without giving it the dignity of a fight, and exposes how much of “seriousness” is just a costume the industry likes to reward.
The context matters: Reitman comes out of a Hollywood ecosystem that runs on gatekeeping. Weekly criticism tends to reward visible suffering, capital-A Acting, and narratives that announce their importance. Awards culture doubles down, turning “prestige” into an aesthetic (muted colors, trauma arcs, solemn biopics) and treating comedy as disposable entertainment - something you watch, enjoy, and forget, rather than something that should define a career. Reitman’s grievance is also economic: comedy often has to succeed broadly to be valued at all, while drama can be “important” even when fewer people show up.
Subtext: comedy’s power is precisely what makes it threatening to cultural arbiters. It smuggles critique in through pleasure, punctures authority without giving it the dignity of a fight, and exposes how much of “seriousness” is just a costume the industry likes to reward.
Quote Details
| Topic | Funny |
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