I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.
Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.
The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but it’s all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”
people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say “quips” when they mean “bathos”
another problem with quips that’s a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the author’s voice, NOT the characters’.
steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.
the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.
steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?
the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.
humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you can’t get that from a blandly uniform pulp.
I have never heard anyone summarize Westley’s character so perfectly in a single line
