For stand-up comics, there were always two paths to stardom: become a talk-show host or a create a hit sitcom. If “movie star” is conveniently absent from that equation, it’s because the list of brilliant comics whose genius did not translate to the silver screen is long and filled with some of our greatest talents. Even those who do find success in film – like the late Robin Williams, who won an Oscar and gave a handful of indelible performances – had more than a few false starts early in his career (The Survivors, The Best of Times, Club Paradise).
With Snatched, Amy Schumer is making a case to be included on that illustrious list. In her film debut, 2015’s Trainwreck, writer-director Judd Apatow crafted a soft landing spot for her, twisting her trademark bawdy humor and stories of promiscuity into a conservative Hollywood morality tale. Snatched, which starts out as an unfunny raunch-com and concludes as an unfunny thriller, is less conservative and also less good. Regardless, Schumer shouldn’t take it too hard. When it comes to failing on the big screen, she’s in the best of company.
Chris Rock – Down to Earth
Rock is inarguably one of the greatest stand-up comics of all time, but he has proven time and time again that he’s not much of an actor. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his first starring role in Down to Earth, an inexplicable remake of 1978’s Heaven Can Wait. The role should have been right in his wheelhouse – Rock plays a New York comedian who dies and comes back to life as a middle-aged, rich white guy – but the script’s blandness robs us of the comic’s trademark passion and anger. In what one critic called a “strangely muted and largely unfunny” performance, Rock seems less like an actor and more like a guy who has accidentally wandered onto a movie set. At least he learned from the experience that he should be generating his own material. He wrote and directed his next three live-action films – Head of State, I Think I Love My Wife, and Top Five – and each one was better than the last. The Hollywood remake machine was simply no place for an artist of Rock’s grade.
Ellen DeGeneres – Mr Wrong
For DeGeneres, 1996’s Mr Wrong was a blessing in disguise. This profoundly terrible film about a single woman who gets mixed up with a sociopath may have taught the TV star that the movies just weren’t for her. Perhaps if she had found a better screenplay to launch her film career we would not have gotten her groundbreaking coming-out episode of The Ellen Show in 1997 or her long-running daytime talk show. Instead, she attached herself to a bizarre screenplay that would have worked better as a thriller than a comedy. Bill Pullman plays the handsome devil who seduces DeGeneres’s lonely bachelorette, then refuses to let go after she breaks it off. He stalks her, bribes law enforcement officials, and even resorts to kidnapping. With a sharper point of view, Mr Wrong could have been a incisive takedown of the regressive rom-coms that were so ubiquitous in the 1990s, instead of being a footnote in her distinguished career.
Tom Green – Freddy Got Fingered
It’s hard to remember, but in 2001 Tom Green was on the rise. Following his hit prank/talk show on MTV, he had earned positive buzz with supporting comic performances in 1999’s Road Trip and 2000’s smash Charlie’s Angels. Someone over at 20th Century Fox thought it was a good idea to let him write and direct his own movie. It turned out to be one of the most controversial decisions in recent cinematic memory. Depending on your perspective, Freddy Got Fingered is one of the most worst films of all time or a visionary lowbrow comedy. With gags involving roadkill and elephant ejaculation, as well as a sequence in which Green erotically canes his disabled love interest, it was ripped to shreds by critics (“Nothing on screen is abused quite so savagely as the audience itself,” wrote USA Today) and largely ignored at the box office. Its release date – six weeks after 9/11 – surely didn’t help. In the years since, it has earned a few more supporters who appreciate its absurdist humor, but not enough to let Green get anywhere near a studio-owned camera ever again.
Steve Martin – The Lonely Guy
Martin has had such a long, successful career in showbusiness that it’s easy to forget there was a period when he couldn’t buy a hit film. His hilarious stand-up set translated magnificently into 1979’s The Jerk, but after that came a series of flops, none more pronounced than The Lonely Guy (which Roger Ebert, in a famously vicious review, called “the kind of movie that inspires you to distract yourself by counting the commercial products visible on the screen”). Martin plays a greeting card writer who gets dumped in an early scene, and experiences bachelorhood in a heightened, almost socially-dystopian version of early 80s New York in which men are divided up into successful womanizers and self-proclaimed “lonely guys”. It’s a dreadful misuse of its star. Martin is at his best when he is the unbridled force of energy in a staid environment. The Lonely Guy practically makes him the straight man, a terrible waste of a unique comic talent.
Richard Pryor – The Toy
Of all the comedians on this list, Pryor was the most honest about his cinematic failures. When Larry King asked him what 1988’s Moving was about, he quipped: “It’s about two hours too long.” He had no reason to hold back, as he had already been very clear that he only made movies in the 1980s for, as he called it, “the monies”. The Toy, however, may have been his most cringeworthy cash-in, as it exploited the racial honesty that made his stand-up so fierce. “What do you buy the kid who has everything?” the trailer asked. The answer, according to the film, is “a black man”. Pryor plays an unemployed journalist who takes a job as a rich kid’s paid friend to make ends meet. As his character humiliates himself in scene after scene, The Toy functions unintentionally as a meta-commentary on Pryor’s own career. Pryor took $2m to make this disappointing comedy, proving that money can make people do anything on screen and off.
Eddie Murphy – The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Murphy had quite a few flops early on – The Golden Child and Harlem Nights – but he didn’t hit the unwatchable garbage phase of his career until the early 2000s. Imagine That and Meet Dave could easily fit on this list, but instead let’s linger on his first and most famous failure of the century. Pluto Nash had been in development since the 1980s and endured dozens of rewrites before finally going into production in 2000. They should have waited longer. This space comedy about a nightclub owner played by Murphy, endured record-poor test screenings, forcing the studio into costly reshoots that increased its budget to $100m (a record for film comedy at the time). Regardless, nothing could fix this space wreck. The critics were perplexed by its badness (“one and a half hours of pure blankness,” said the Washington Post), and it grossed just over $4m domestically. Space has never been so cosmically unfunny.
