Commentary: Revisiting ‘Scary Movie’ Puts Two Types Of Comedy On Display

Comedy is interesting as it can approach material in a multitude of ways. The two big categories are timeless jokes and pop culture jokes, which are often rooted in the era in which the joke is written. Timeless jokes are usually presented from start to finish. They are typically presented as isolated gags that can be understood without any prior knowledge. In contrast, pop culture references require a certain familiarity with current events to discern the humor. Twenty-five years after its release, looking back at Scary Movie is a great way to see examples of the two in action.

Starring Anna Farris and Marlon Wayans, the film is essentially a spoof of 1990s slasher movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, but it also references films like The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, and The Usual Suspects. Although irrelevant, the plot follows a killer in a small town terrorizing a group of teens who accidentally killed a man with their car a year earlier.

The movie abandons story completely, focusing solely on jokes and gags over coherent and logical storytelling. This allows the film to do things that don’t make any sense all for the sake of generating laughter. Some of the jokes are timeless. They feature an electric fence around a girl’s underwear and a woman who talks too much in a movie theater getting killed by other theaters attendees. However, the film also utilizes a lot of ’90s pop culture, as well. The opening sequence features Carmen Electra as the killer’s first victim. She makes a joke about her relationship with the musician Prince that, without context, would go completely over the head of anyone who didn’t know who she was or her connection to the rock star. Revisiting the film today allows the viewer to see a notable difference between these two types of comedy.

Scary Movie now streaming on Paramount+.