The return of rude: Hollywood brings back the raunchy comedy

Joy Ride, in theaters this Friday, is not for the modest. The R-rated road trip movie, from the director Adele Lim (Crazy Rich Asians), follows four friends, played by Ashley Park, Sabrina Wu, Sherry Cola and the Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu (from Everything Everywhere All at Once), on a weeklong romp through China that is deliriously deranged and unapologetically lascivious. There’s a moving plot about searching for one’s identity after a life in white America and a pointed subversion of the trope of meek Asian women. But Joy Ride is primarily crass and vigorous, viscerally horny comedy, pulling from such R-rated touchstones as The Hangover, Bridesmaids and Girls Trip – binge drinking and vomit, copious references to several orifices, cartoonish clouds of cocaine, a raucous sex montage that made me giggle with a sound I have not heard from myself in a long time.

Related: Joy Ride review – slickly likable Asian-American comedy dwells on family and identity

In other words, not something often seen on the big screen these days, as Hollywood studios, weathering the bite of streaming services and the pandemic, pivot even further into franchise fare and mined IP. Given the endless sinkhole of options from one’s couch, theatrical releases tend to bet on the appeal of a communal movie-watching experience – the hype of a franchise release, or a big-name spectacle (such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer), a new spin on a familiar name (the Barbie movie) or elevated, offbeat horror (this year’s surprise box office hits M3gan or Cocaine Bear). The 90s and 2000s were full of decently reviewed and profitable R-rated romps – American Pie, Superbad, The Hangover, the catalog of Judd Apatow stoner bro movies, etc – but it’s been a long time since moviegoers could rally around boundary-pushing, gut-twisting laughs.

Joy Ride, however, is one of several R-rated studio films heralding a potential new wave of big-screen raunch this summer. Last month saw the premiere of No Hard Feelings, a sex comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence as a struggling thirtysomething who strikes a deal with helicopter parents to date (as in “date date”, she clarifies) their awkward, virginal son before he goes to college in exchange for an old Buick. The trailer garnered internet buzz for its almost retro directness and double entendres (“can I touch your wiener?” Lawrence’s Maddie asks Andrew Barth Feldman’s pasty, bewildered Percy as he holds a dachshund). In August, Universal will release Strays, a live-action tale of foul-mouthed dogs fronted by Will Ferrell. And later in the month comes MGM’s Bottoms, starring The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri and The Idol’s Rachel Sennott as two queer high school outcasts who form a female fight club in order to hook up with hot cheerleaders, with a healthy serving of sex jokes and blood.

Any success would be a welcome return to form for a theatrical genre that has for years operated in fits and starts. There have been many ebbs and flows of big-screen raunch (the New York Times declared “the return of the R-rated comedy” after several years of PG-13 fare in 2005, ahead of the release of Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin), but in recent years, the pre-eminent venue for bold, ribald humor has been the streaming platforms, either in the form of comedy series (The Great or The Sex Lives of College Girls, to name a couple) or original movies (You People or Dude, both on Netflix). Even the success of Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids ($300m worldwide) and Malcolm D Lee’s Girls Trip (around $140m), which demonstrated the box office viability of raunchy comedies starring and aimed at women and Black Americans, didn’t portend a wave of imitators (though there’s a belated Girls Trip sequel set in Ghana in the works). There are, of course, one-off exceptions, such as Melissa McCarthy’s action comedy Spy, Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck or Booksmart, basically a Superbad for overachieving girls.

Comedy of all stripes is a tough sell at an increasingly internationally minded box office; moviegoers and critics have long bemoaned the death of studio romcoms, which have decamped for streaming services with a handful of exceptions, such as The Lost City and Ticket to Paradise, both starring major pre-streaming movie stars. The romcom’s bawdier, R-rated cousin, the sex comedy, has had a particularly tough time for a number of reasons. Big studios are increasingly risk-averse and committed to tentpole or franchise fare (almost all PG to PG-13, with the exception of the Deadpool movies, which mix typical action adventure with a foul mouth). Comedy, often heavy on references, risks and norms, doesn’t travel as well internationally as, say, Spider-Man.

And comedy hits often rely heavily on word of mouth – lewdness for lewdness’s sake doesn’t make a fun time. Several bids at big-tent adult fare, such as the 2015 film Vacation, have been sunk by poor reviews and reception. Appealing to audiences polarized by internet discourse is also a tall order, particularly as cutting-edge comedy becomes ever more reactive, referential, ironic and driven by the mores and trends of social media, especially TikTok. There’s a strain of internet-driven thinking which rejects sex scenes altogether as problematic or unnecessary; such logic sees the age-gap hijinks of No Hard Feelings as an issue rather than a farce. (The film seemed to anticipate this critique – “doesn’t anyone fuck anymore?” Maddie remarks while at a party of teenagers on their phones.)

Related: ‘Newsflash: we’re not all meek’: how brash, funny Asian women took over our screens

Still, positive reviews and buzz may not be enough to overcome the pull of streaming; much ado was made last year about the disappointing performance of Bros, an R-rated gay romcom directed by Billy Eichner and starring an all-LGBTQ+ cast, which was marketed heavily around its overdue feat of representation. Joy Ride will likely be seen as another litmus test for whether big comedies, particularly for those representing a minority group, can succeed again. The box office haul of No Hard Feelings is promising, if mixed. The film made around $15m on its opening weekend, and has as of writing this grossed around $31m domestically and $20m worldwide – a decent showing, though likely not enough to recoup its $45m budget before marketing (an abnormally high budget for a comedy, owing in part to Lawrence’s reported $25m paycheck).

Not that the films themselves pay much mind to tough headwinds or Hollywood’s risk aversion. No Hard Feelings may be more sweet than saucy, but Lawrence delights in the physical comedy of attempting to seduce a hopelessly clueless virgin. The teens of Bottoms are at times villainous, bizarre and willing, as usual, to go to great lengths to get laid. Joy Ride is gleefully, refreshingly vulgar, even if there’s one too many bags of drugs stuck, as Tiffany Haddish puts it in Girls Trip, where the sun don’t shine. It’s the kind of scene that pushes the boundaries of taste and humor, and which soars on a room full of people laughing with you.