One thing I notice about modern comedy films, is that they star the same collections of people, and many of these groups have the same directors and/or writers. Some of these collaborators have more success than others, but in general, it seems like there are not many funny movies any more. Now this is not a new thing. The older casts of Saturday Night Live made a lot of great movies together, and comedy teams go as far back as I can remember in film. But maybe now they have taken the advantages of familiarity and complementary styles and just used it to get lazy or sloppy. Rather than using familiarity & teamwork as a boost to reach as high as they can, it seems like they might be using it as a crutch to put in less effort. And with the overlap of these various loose collaboration groups, it's like they're all in it together, and going through the same motions, instead of challenging each other.

"Sausage Party" is a parody cartoon, that aspires to two different things. At the first it succeeds pretty well, being a send-up of contemporary animated features, with anthropomorphic animals and everyday objects, like cars or toys (or as my mother and sister were just watching, a movie about how much rats and French people are alike), except it's adult with raunchy conversation and innuendo that escalates into explicit sex acts by the end of the movie, and that all works pretty good if that's your thing. And that would have been fine if that's where they stopped. But they had to keep going for an additional parody idea and try religion as well, which is where the premise kind of falls apart. You can do an atheistic take on religion based on the lack of objective proof, the need for facts and evidence, and the tautological discouragement of pursuing any of those things. Or a way to tell a religion story would be to have God as the villain, who then exploits your soul in the afterlife or something. But you can't do both at once, because then they conflict with each other. Especially when you are trying to do humor. There needs to be a factual basis for a joke, or a frame of common reference. If you are going to make a joke about a group, for example, you should base it around commonly understood characteristics of that group. Thus, you rest an Irish joke on alcohol consumption. It doesn't make sense to make an Irish joke where the punchline has to do with political organization, which is a notable Irish trait, but is not immediately familiar so as to allow easy comprehension of the punchline; or to rest your joke on the athleticism of Irish people, which might be more true than the drinking, but is also about 100 years out of date, and, again, not a reference in the common frame. Nor can you make a joke about Irish propensity for diamond mining, or pickpocketing or other traits that no one factually or fictitiously attributes to the Irish. The one exception to the latter, is among a small group who might recall an experience whereby the members of that group would have humorous associations with the unusual juxtaposition of concepts...but in that case, it is not the wisest choice of material for mass distribution.

Anyway, "Sausage Party" has fun with the idea that food "lives" in a supermarket, and the food-people eagerly await their opportunity to be chosen by the shoppers and taken off to a better place, not knowing that they are going to be mutilated, dismembered, burned alive and eaten. The horrified reactions of the food upon learning their fates and witnessing the deaths of their companions, along with a scene suggesting a food spill in the supermarket is something akin to a disaster or major accident, with the cracked or split containers doing duty for broken or bleeding bodies. In service of the movie's second layer of parody, the food-people use religious language and imagery to discuss their anticipation of their choosing and reward, and view with pity and horror food that gets thrown out due to expiration dates or exposure outside of the package (on some food, the package is part of the entity, such as jars and bottles of condiments or liquids, and in others, the packaged food items themselves are individuals, but it still works), and at one point, characters discuss it in terms akin to religious sexual abstinence.

But that's where it doesn't work. Two characters actually argue about going along with "the gods" (shoppers) and whether or not it is worth being "chosen" in the exact same terms as a typical pop culture debate between a skeptic and a believer on the values of faith versus needing proof. That argument doesn't fit the circumstances of the movie, however, because there are real consequences and experiences. Waiting until marriage to have sex because otherwise an invisible man in the sky might arbitrarily deny you eternal paradise IS a notion about which you can have the faith vs. evidence discussion. But a discussion between two characters who have SEEN the gods in question, has nothing to do with faith or skepticism. There are good reasons for staying in the package, because you KNOW you will be discarded if discovered out of it, we see it happen to other characters. This is not like the real world examples of religion, whereby people forgo concrete pleasures for a dubious promise of hypothetical rewards or equally suspect threats of punishment, it is, by what is shown in the film, behavior that has real, known consequences. You can scoff at someone for putting off sex based on unprovable hopes or fears of heaven or hell, but not because she's worried about pregnancy, or disease, or horror villains who have been observed detecting and killing sexually active people (Have you seen "It Follows"? You should).

The "religion" of the food-people is later revealed to be made up by the American Indian analogue, who describes scenes of horror and terror as the food feared being purchased and consumed, but that makes no sense in the religion debate. If they wanted to show an intermediate party making up the religion story to pacify the masses, that would be one thing, but there is no underlying reality to the idea that Indians invented religion as some obscure revenge on the white people, unless maybe Bill Hader really wanted to do his Indian voice, but he's too invested in the PC mentality to get away with it in most circumstances. You could do the religion angle if the food voluntarily was embracing martyrdom, or something like that. As it is shown, however, the circumstances of the food-people don't really fit the religious narrative, and might actually be better done if the extra level of parody was spoofing 70s dystopian sci-fi movies, like Soylent Green or Logan's Run. And yes, they had their religious digs, but not enough to take over the movie to such an extent that you can't help but notice the flaws.

And that brings me around to my original question. Are maybe all of these creators and writers too comfortable working together, that they are coming up with stuff in kind of an echo chamber? I mentioned one exception to stereotype jokes that don't follow actual stereotypes, alluding to an in-joke. Maybe a few people met an Irish child molester or something and thus to them, and only to them, making child molester references in a brogue, or saying "hide the kids" when a Lucky Charms commercial comes on the screen, makes sense and is even hilarious, because they are drawing on the camaraderie and shared experience to augment the humor and their enjoyment of the joke. When all these comic people are so used to working together, maybe they have gotten into a sort of self-reinforcing rut, where they don't recognize the difference between standing common understandings that form the basis of broadly appealing jokes and private references or humor that only works for them. The religious humor is not quite an in-joke, but seems something more like dog whistle, in that using the terminology in such a way indicates a fashionable topic, and that people who are cool should demonstrate as much by laughing with the rest of the clique. If you are not particularly invested in their point of view, you have to look at the joke askance.

It's not actually making anyone think or challenging their ideas, so much as sneering at them, and expecting everyone to cheer because you're the one with the microphone. Maybe that's fun if you want to go with the flow, like in a live performance, but I don't see the humor in it.