Daily Inspiration Quote by Bobby Farrelly

Comedy is the genre critics love to treat like a guilty pleasure: fun when it works, disposable when it doesn’t. Bobby Farrelly’s gripe lands because it’s less a plea for praise than a diagnosis of the way cultural gatekeeping works. Comedy, in the review economy, is often graded on an invisible curve where drama gets “importance” points and jokes have to justify their existence beyond laughter. If a film makes you cry, it’s art; if it makes you spit out your drink, it’s “just” entertainment.

Farrelly’s first move is structural: he frames the problem as systemic (“comedies in general”), not personal, deflecting the easy read that he’s bitter about any single pan. That’s savvy coming from a director whose biggest hits were broad, bodily, and proudly vulgar - exactly the kind of work that tends to trigger critical discomfort dressed up as standards. His subtext is blunt: reviewers apply the wrong rubric. They want moral uplift, thematic gravitas, or tasteful restraint - values comedy routinely violates on purpose.

The second sentence is the sharper barb. “Taken seriously” is the tell; he’s not asking critics to laugh harder, he’s asking them to admit comedy is craft, not fluff. Then he twists the knife: even when comedies do get canonized, the anointed titles might not be the funniest, just the ones that flatter critical identity - the “smart” comedies that signal discernment. It’s an argument about taste as power: what gets called “good” often aligns less with audience pleasure than with what critics feel comfortable endorsing.