WENLEI MA: Why on-screen comedy like Naked Gun is what the masses need right now

OK, maybe laughter is not the best medicine. It’s probably not better than, say, penicillin, beta blockers or insulin, but it’s still pretty great.

Having a good old belly laugh sesh isn’t just a fun time. It has psychological and physiological benefits ranging from stress relief, enhanced oxygen intake, firing up endorphins, an improved immune system and even pain relief.

Who can argue with that? It also requires so much less effort than 10 sets of whatever it is people do sets of at the gym.

Things are piling up at the moment and our mental loads are at capacity.

Every day is another news article about runaway property prices and unscrupulous real estate agents (related: do you also rage at the daily letter box drops from that parasitic industry smugly boasting about widening the wealth gap, yeah, me too, and I’m lucky enough to be a homeowner).

Kids are starving, populists are gaining, authoritarians have no shame let alone empathy, billionaires are billionaire-ing, and, oh yeah, the planet is still dying. On top of that, the couch I ordered and waited 18 weeks for couldn’t be properly angled (Pivot! Pivot! Pivvvvvvot!) through the loungeroom door.

It’s … a lot.

So, there I was on Sunday night, about three hours into six episodes of screeners for Alien: Earth and despite the fact the show is actually very good, I wasn’t necessarily feeling it.

It was scary and engaging, and smart and thoughtful in how it dealt with metaphysical questions around what it means to be human, but all I wanted to do was watch someone take pratfalls for two hours.

Comedy is a balm, a salve, chicken soup for the soul. It distracts us and it heals us. It’s why I watch and rewatch episodes of 30 Rock right before bed, it resets me. When everything starts to feel overwhelming, comedy is what pulls us out of a funk.

There have been many incredible TV shows this year that is in conversation with the world around us, and reflects storytelling’s role in helping everything make sense when we can’t articulate it ourselves.

Star Wars political thriller Andor had jawdropping insights into how fascists manipulate the ruled by exploiting fear for power and control. It was a political thesis packaged as an action thriller with gunfights and emotional beats.

Adolescence was a look behind the veil of toxic masculinity and its clutches on the social and emotional development of boys, told through one community’s experience of violence. Medical drama The Pitt culminated in its characters dealing with a mass shooting event.

These are three of the strongest series so far this year and those were powerful hours of storytelling. They were also, to different degrees, interested in optimism, of humans’ capacity to keep fighting against wrongs or to find the redemption in moments of great darkness.

It’s enough to make you weep in sadness and hope. But it was also kind of depressing.

Seth MacFarlane, the writer behind Family Guy and Ted, was on a podcast recently when he bemoaned the current trend of “negative” storytelling.

“Some of the blame lies right here in this town. The dishes that we are serving up are so dystopian and so pessimistic,” he said on Where Everybody Knows Your Name. “Yeah, there’s a lot to be pessimistic about, but it’s so one-sided. There’s nothing we’re doing that’s providing anyone an image of hope.

“They’re certainly giving us a lot of cautionary tales, but where are the blueprints that they once gave us for how to do things correctly?

“It can’t all be just, ‘Here’s what going to happen to you if you f... up. You do need, ‘Here’s what you can achieve if you change your ways and do things right’.”

Sure, MacFarlane is a comedy guy, so he has an interest in elevating his genre as well as The Naked Gun sequel on which he is a producer, and it is more nuanced than everything is only dark right now. Like the aforementioned shows, the best kind of dystopian storytelling has light embedded within the shade.

But he’s also not wrong. We need to laugh. Not just a chuckle or a tee-hee, but a full-throated, roll-in-the-aisles, wee-your-pants-a-little guffaw.

Andor, The Pitt and Adolescence may be three of the best shows of 2025 but the two I enjoyed watching the most were The Studio and the second season of Platonic.

In addition to both starring Seth Rogen, they were properly funny with high joke density, physical comedy and barbed witticisms.

Rogen fell over so many times in The Studio, it was verging on vertigo. How many things can one man trip over? And yet, every time, a full belly laugh. It doesn’t have to have the fluency of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati to be hilarious, it just has to have a story or character reason for it.

In the case of Rogen’s Matt Remick, a fictional Hollywood studio boss, it’s the physical manifestation of his internal conflict between art and commerce, of loving movies so much but needing them to make money.

He can’t reconcile those two sometimes opposing forces so it comes out in these goofy pratfalls.

The Studio and Platonic have the effect of completely grabbing your attention (put down that phone, don’t second screen!) and pulling you into their worlds.

That’s not to say that they have no value beyond wordplay or farce. The Studio explored the economics and artistic aspirations of an industry that touches almost everyone while Platonic was a look at middle-age and friendship.

Some of my favourite comedies – especially the always rewatchable ones – are broad and silly and also have something to say.

Bridesmaids is another emotional story about how friendships evolve through adulthood, but it also has a screaming diarrhea scene. If you can’t relate, you’re lying to yourself. Spy is about a woman who’s been underestimated, and she also tips over on her scooter.

Game Night is about a couple trying to be on the same page about having kids, and then there’s Rachel McAdams using a Stanley knife to dig out a bullet from Jason Bateman’s arm, and the moment they realise the shot was a through-and-through.

Plus, every little thing that Jesse Plemons said and did in that movie, such as questioning the profit margins of a three-for-one deal on bags of corn chips. He was right, they were fibbing. Seriously, Game Night is so good.

Superbad crassed it up with penis drawings and dirty dancing with a girl on her period, but it was also a poignant story about the fear of growing apart as you’re growing up. Blockers blended parental anxiety with outrageous behaviour as three folks try to stop their teen daughters from having sex.

Michael Palin very, very, very slowly running Kevin Kline over in a steamroller in A Fish Called Wanda will never not be wonderfully ridiculous. That cocaine binge in Joyride is too much in the best way.

The Naked Gun sequel is about to hit cinemas in Australia (previews this weekend, wide release on August 21) and it is so deliciously dumb and eminently uproarious. In a room full of people all laughing together, it is pure joy.

Locally, Fisk is more droll than LOL but there is no line of dialogue Aaron Chen can’t make funny, and it captures the beauty of the banality in suburban Australia, while Deadloch perfected the absurdity of a small town’s murder streak. The true crime obsession needs to stop.

Ask yourself this. Do you really want to sit through yet another sombre series about a woman who was gruesomely murdered just so a taciturn and repressed male detective can come along and expose the underbelly of some idyllic community?

Or do you want to see Steve Carell scream his tits off getting his chest waxed?

I know what I’m watching tonight.