This Paul Rudd & Amy Poehler Rom-Com Was the Last Great Movie Parody

The Big Picture

• Full-on parody feature films are rare, but
  They Came Together
  brilliantly spoofs romantic comedy tropes.
• The movie takes familiar rom-com moments and heightens them to absurdity with clever jokes.
• The key to a good parody is understanding and loving the original genre, as seen in
  They Came Together.

Whatever happened to parody movies? While parody is alive and well with internet sketches like Honest Trailers and Pitch Meetings, it’s rare that we still see full-on parody feature films. Filmmakers have been making light of specific films as far back as Buster Keaton’s first film Three Ages (a spoof of D.W. Griffith’sIntolerance) and continued on through genre send-ups like Mel Brooks‘ Blazing Saddles, to mocking specific movies like the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker film Airplane!, which made light of the Airport films of the 1970s. Even after Brooks and ZAZ moved away from parodies, there was the trend of Scary Movie movies and their spin-offs, and, in 2007, one of the finest genre parodies was released; Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story would go on to be a cult favorite. Sadly, a new film in the vein of these classics does not seem to be on the horizon, thankfully audiences were treated to one last great spoof with 2014’s They Came Together.

Nearly ten years ago, Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler reunited with Wet Hot American Summer director David Wain to star in a hilarious, absurd comedy that perfectly captures the tropes of the typical romantic comedy. They Came Together features Rudd as the corporate stooge who can’t commit to pursuing his actual dreams, while Poehler is a quirky klutz happily running her small business but unlucky in love. One night, the two are invited to the same Halloween party to meet and instantly hit it off until Rudd’s corporate job threatens to put Poehler’s candy shop out of business. As might be expected, this throws a wrench into their romance and separates them until they can find fulfillment in themselves and realize they’re meant to be together. Along the way, there are montages of the two falling in love (set to an original Norah Jones song), an ex one of them just can’t get over, and of course, a marriage that one needs to interrupt, so the main couple can be together. If They Came Together sounds like a hundred other typical romantic comedies, that’s only because in some way it is, but it is anything but standard.

‘They Came Together’ Is Truly Absurd in the Best Way

Something that distinguishes the parody film from many comedy movies is how absurd a parody can get. While broad comedies like Tommy Boy or Dumb and Dumber can have moments that go off the rails, there still needs to be some foundation of reality. Parody, on the other hand, relies on an audience coming in with an understanding that the film they are watching is as aware of other movies and media as they themselves are, which means parody can go a little broader. Parody heightens the expectations going into a movie by taking the familiar and making it something much sillier and broader.

They Came Together practices this throughout, taking moments seen in every romantic comedy, calling attention to them, and heightening them to absurdity. When Rudd and Poehler meet for the second time after a disastrous first meeting and realize they have something more in common than they thought, they nearly hook up that moment in public, and what specific thing do they bond over that means they’re meant to be? Fiction books. No genre beyond that, not historical romances or science fiction, not even a specific author like Stephen King. Just fiction. It takes a moment that is needed for any couple to get together and makes it infinitely sillier. But it’s not just the absurdity of that moment, it’s that familiarity.

‘They Came Together’ Knows the Genre Well Enough to Flip It Brilliantly

They Came Together has hysterical jokes throughout, but it takes more than that to make a good parody. In a template practically laid out by Mel Brooks, the key to parody is understanding and loving the original.Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein work so well and hold up to this day, not just because they are funny, but because they capture the looks and feelings of Westerns and Frankenstein movies so precisely. Wain, and co-writer Michael Showalter, are not using They Came Together to angrily deride the genre; in fact, they love rom-coms. When speaking to Vulture upon the film’s release, Wain said, “For both of us, it’s our favorite genre. We’ve spent so much time over the last few years watching and talking about our favorite rom-coms, and there are a few — Crossing Delancey would come to mind — that not everybody cites that we love. And just like with anything that you love, we also see all the clichés that we can make fun of as well, so it’s been this long-brewing idea to make our version of a romantic comedy that’s kind of off-the-wall and absurd.”

There is a fine line with these types of movies because if they become too unrecognizable the audience loses their grasp of it. Fortunately, Wain, Rudd, and Poehler keep it just grounded enough. All have experience making movies similar or close to straightforward romantic comedies, allowing them to capture the format and rhythm of a romantic comedy while subverting it throughout.

It’s riding the line between capturing the genre perfectly and knowing where to make fun of it that makes They Came Together a great parody. As silly and absurd as it gets, it clearly had a lot of dedication when it came to developing the idea as a whole. Wain and Showalter were careful students of what makes rom-coms work and what the appeal is (Showalter had previously made a less broad, more deconstructive rom-com, The Baxter.) They found clever ways to break down the tropes and clichés that so many have come to expect from the straightforward versions of these movies and push them to the point of absurdity. They Came Together doesn’t mock people that like rom-coms, but instead says, “these movies can be pretty silly, so let’s make it even sillier just to have more fun with it.”

What Happened to Parody?

The recent release The Blackening has an element of parody ingrained in the premise, but the spoof elements were used more as a jumping-off point than a parody of horror and horror conventions on the whole. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story did parody recent music biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody and Walk the Line, but leaned too far into the absurdity of it all (despite real parts of Yankovic’s life being incorporated) and was less about making fun of music biopics, and more about playing with the idea of “what if one of these movies was about Weird Al?” For as fun as Weird is, it’s not commenting on the genre as much as Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story manages to do.

This is all likely the result of the movie-centric sketch comedy that quickly make the rounds on the internet. Why spend years making an entire movie commenting on a genre and its conventions, when How It Should Have Ended releases regularly scheduled videos commenting on movies that came out a few weeks prior? It can be hard to compete when so many outlets are making the kinds of jokes a parody would in a much quicker turnaround. Thankfully, Wain and company were able to create a hilarious movie, that is endlessly quotable, brilliantly absurd, and in addition to Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd, features a stacked cast of characters, but one character just as important as the two of them: New York City.

They Came Together is available to stream on Peacock in the U.S.

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