Not that I announced it or anything, but I set myself a challenge to make 2026 the year of Comedy Unloveds. It’s a genre I don’t lavish quite enough attention on. As I get into my video on this month’s Unloved, the sublimely ridiculous and ridiculously sublime “Never Change!,” you’ll see why.
You can throw on a movie like “Blazing Saddles” or “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and admire everything about it except the humor. The compositions, the great approximation of the language of genre, the performances, the costumes, the production design, their comments on the place of myth in popular culture and in the make-up of modern morality… etc.
But what sells them to most people is that you just laugh yourself stupid while they’re on. Those two films are peculiar in the annals of comedy: basically everybody will tell you they’re funny. Not to say they aren’t; they are, they obviously are, but maybe not always for the same reason.
A lot of people will tell you the funniest part of the Black Knight scene in “Holy Grail” is the line “Just a flesh wound.” Allow me, the joyless critic, to say that’s the least funny part of the scene. The funny part is when Cleese’s Black Knight runs at Graham Chapman’s King Arthur and his arms are limply chopped off in a spray of blood. The mix of high energy and low reward. That’s comedy. To me.
See it again in Will Forte’s big scene in “Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie,” where this man and his chintzy shop are suddenly the center of the universe. “You listen to me! I’m Alan fucking Bishopman, and I’ve run EZ Swords for 15 years. And you want me to CHANGE! FUCK YOU!” Forte’s character barely makes a dent in the film, though he makes an important phone call that sets the third act in motion: he’s suddenly the biggest adversary the heroes have ever faced. And he’s a guy running a sword shop in a deserted mall in 2012.
All this to say that I’ve been studying Marty Schousboe’s “Never Change!” and it has just about every kind of joke structure imaginable, all of them to my liking. Me. The joyless critic. It swings a hundred times, hoping it’ll connect at least once. To me, it worked 90% of the time.
I mean, just look at the opening. The first sound we hear is a TV playing a commercial. “Pizza Hut. We’ve cleared out all the dead bodies and our crust is sometimes literally stuffed with shit.” That’s the first ten seconds. Then we see two movers on the front lawn of a sad-looking two-story house, throwing every belonging into the back of their truck and surely breaking everything in it.
For the joke to land, two things can be true: it doesn’t matter what’s in the boxes, or it does. The film asks which one you think is funniest because the scene works either way, but the camera dollies past this to Jo Firestone, looking out the window, wistfully. The movie is already both itself and a parody of itself. That’s the first minute.
Thank god that the critic’s job, charitably, isn’t just explaining why funny stuff is funny, but god knows a movie like this tempts me. I could just go on listing jokes and explaining why I laughed but… well… just watch. I wavered a little in my mission to make a year of comedy Unloved, and spoiler alert: my December Unloved is NOT a comedy. But it was nice to look for human grace notes and big laughs when I’m sometimes looking for the kind of vision that seems to burn through time.
I have a friend I sometimes show homework movies to, and she’d tell you it’s much less risky to suggest “Heaven’s Gate” than to suggest “Never Change!” After all, a landscape is self-evidently beautiful, a myth self-evidently in need of deconstruction. But comedy? That’s subjective.
What happens if you don’t laugh in that first minute and 100 remain? Comedy is hard. But I’d stake anything that you’ll laugh at least once while watching this movie.
