Comedians' Little Secret

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The personas of most of today's funny guys could be said to flow from Steve Martin. As a stand-up comic in the '70s, he played the idiot with an utterly unwarranted belief in his coolness, while in his first hit movie, The Jerk, he played ... a jerk. The first type has bloomed in the strutting film personalities of Ferrell, Vaughn, Jack Black, Owen Wilson and many others; the second in Sandler, who teams this summer with another lout, TV's Kevin James, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Lower on this fast-food chain are Rob Schneider and Larry the Cable Guy.

Rogen might seem a spawn of Woody Allen, but he's closer to Cheech and/or Chong with a bar mitzvah. He hasn't the Woody whine and inferiority complex. Like the Martin stage persona, the characters these guys play don't have self-esteem problems; indeed, that is their problem. The only star who simmers with comic angst is Stiller. He's the put-upon loser, a jocular Job, in films like There's Something About Mary and Night at the Museum, when he's not taking roles as the pompous, uptight bad guy (in, say, Dodgeball) or the preening oaf, as in the well-nigh-immortal Zoolander. The moneymen love Stiller too, because he's the rare comic star with international box-office clout.

The new stars have to be distinguished from the previous generation: the hyperactive chameleon-comedians Robin Williams, Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy. Ferrell doesn't dazzle by slipping into a zillion roles (as he did on Saturday Night Live). He found a persona the audience likes--the lanky, ungainly goof who thinks he's a supreme jock--and he mostly sticks with it. He knows the mass audience wants its stars only in their familiar mode. When they try going upmarket--Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction, Sandler in Spanglish--the fan base deserts them.

Like major league teams with their farm system, comedies offer a chance for young talent to move up. Vaughn provided comedy relief for nearly a decade before his breakthrough with Wilson in Wedding Crashers. Rogen was one of Carell's buddies in The 40 Year Old Virgin; in Knocked Up, he had his own posse, and one of that group, Jonah Hill, will star this fall in the Rogen-written Superbad with Michael Cera, who's the male lead in the just wrapped Juno. John C. Reilly, Ferrell's foil in Talladega Nights and the forthcoming Step Brothers, gets his shot at stardom in the Apatow-produced Walk Hard.

So times are great if you're a comedian--and if you're a man. The lack of women leads in comedies is astounding and appalling. Are women somehow not funny, or do audiences not want to see them at the center of a comedy? Next year, Universal will try Baby Mama, with Tina Fey as a career woman who hires Amy Poehler to carry her child. Our blessings upon it. But until some comic actress has a big fat hit, Hollywood will keep thinking of comedy as Guytown--one more genre, like action movies, where women need not apply.