Despicable Me 4 and Hundreds Of Beavers provoke an interesting question – is slapstick comedy seeing a resurgence?
In the trailer for Illumination’s Despicable Me 4, in cinemas today, a Minion gets stuck in a vending machine. This is funny, because it allows his fellow Minions to hit him on the bottom. His bottom is funny because it is large, round, and attached to two disproportionately small legs. Hitting it is funny because it makes a satisfying wobble, and the worst-case scenario for poor Stuart involves him shouting incoherently in a silly voice.
At the other end of the budgetary spectrum, Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds Of Beavers – the $150,000 black-and-white silent comedy which enjoyed a limited UK cinema release earlier this week – employs the slapstick staple of person-carrying-log-donks-companion-on-head-with-log. The person, in this scenario, is a six-foot beaver.
The decades-long comedy drought on the big screen has not been kind to slapstick. The few comedy flicks which have broken through have tended towards gross-out (Superbad, Bridesmaids), situational (Game Night, Booksmart) or genre mash-ups (Deadpool, Palm Springs, Hit Man). In none of them do two delivery workers attempt to carry a piano down a flight of stairs.
In the last couple of years, however, the comedy tide does seem to be turning. Barbie takes plenty of cues from the classic comedies of Hollywood’s golden era, and both it and Emma Seligman’s Bottoms make great use of heightened, deceptively violent fight scenes for comic effect. The aforementioned Hundreds Of Beavers is probably the most critically-acclaimed comedy in recent history, and shows all the signs of growing into a cult indie classic.
Children’s animation, too, is emerging as a haven for the slapstick arts. The Minions are perhaps the purest example of physical comedy available to a modern audience – their rubber-boned antics make them fine inheritors of a tradition which can see them blown up, battered and blasted into space without so much as a scratch. Their commitment to practical silliness hasn’t always made them a hit with critics – but a $4.6 billion box office shows they continue to strike gold with young audiences. Sometimes, all a kid wants is to see a cute thing hit with a mallet.
But Gru and friends are far from the only animated fliers of the physical comedy flag. Illumination’s own Migration from earlier this year, while largely consisting of witty duck quips and references to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, boasted a villain in the form of a near-silent chef-dressed psychopath. The best sequences of The Garfield Movie saw our feline hero catapulted between trees like a physics-defying hot potato. Even The Super Mario Bros Movie had a pleasing physicality to it (I shall pass no judgement on whether any of it was funny).
These films, too, follow a period in animation dominated more by jokes than practical silliness. Pixar arguably laid the foundations for what makes a 3D animated family hit early in the century, and comic styles have hewn close to their mould since then. After a string of perceived missteps, however, the animated kids movie has largely reverted back to a simpler, Tom & Jerry-esque form.
Read more: Shrek 5 confirmed for release in July 2026
Of course, Despicable Me 4 arrives on the coattails of Pixar’s Inside Out 2, and while the two films have plenty in common (sequels to wildly successful previous entries, anthropomorphic, non-human characters), their styles of comedy could hardly be more different. Where Inside Out 2 puns (“sar-chasm”, “stream of consciousness”, “brain storm”), Despicable Me 4 injects Gru with badger tranquiliser. There’s some crossover, of course, in the forms of emotional newcomer Embarrassment and the way a Minion says “banana.” But the success of both suggests there’s room for more than one style of comedy at the box office. After a period where it seemed neither was particularly viable, that’s an encouraging thought.
Hundreds Of Beavers is screening in select cinemas now, and Despicable Me 4 is showing across the UK.
