Taika Waititi mocks Todd Phillips after the Joker director’s comments about “woke culture” ruining comedy movies. He first gained prominence as the director of the smash hit comedy The Hangover, as well as its two sequels, but Phillips has left the genre behind with his latest effort, a gritty drama starring Joaquin Phoenix as the DC Comics supervillain.
Given his background in comedy, many were indeed surprised when Phillips was announced as the writer and director of Joker, the first movie built entirely around the iconic Batman villain. With the movie now set to hit theaters, Phillips and Phoenix have received acclaim from critics for their dark new vision of The Joker, but have also been hit with controversy. Phillips himself fed some of that controversy with recent remarks about how the current PC culture is ruining comedy by making it impossible for people to be funny. “It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can’t do it, right? So you just go, ‘I’m out,” opined the filmmaker, indicating that he made Joker partly in response to what he perceives as an impossible set of circumstances for directors who want to make funny movies.
After Phillips’ comments about the difficulty of making comedy in the face of political correctness, well-known comedy director Waititi weighed in with his own response, appropriately posted to Twitter, the very outlet that was singled out by Phillips as an engine for “woke culture.” See Waititi’s mocking comeback in the space below:
Indeed, Waititi serves as a fine example of a filmmaker who is entirely undaunted by any possible backlash against his movies as he continues making very distinctive comedies. In fact, Waititi’s latest movie Jojo Rabbit is about as risky as films get in terms of subject matter, with its storyline about a young boy in Nazi Germany who has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend. Waititi not only wrote and directed the film, which has received critical praise and derision in about equal measure, he put himself further on the line by portraying Hitler himself.
Clearly, Waititi does not agree with Phillips’ assessment of the state of the culture, and believes it is absolutely possible to still make funny movies that push buttons and make satiric points even in the face of Twitter. But while Waititi remains committed to the art of comedy, Phillips appears to have given up entirely on the genre that made him famous, and indeed put him in position to branch out into Joker. Given the box office projections for Joker, it appears Phillips has adapted himself well to darker, more dramatic filmmaking, so he likely won’t have to dive back into the world of comedy again any time soon. Of course, dramatic films can be very controversial too, as Joker is doing a good job of demonstrating.
Source: Taika Waititi/Twitter
