Gross-Out Comedy
The gross-out comedies popularized in the late-1970s -- and then again in the late-1990s -- took the scatalogical shocks of such trash films as John Waters' Pink Flamingos and Andy Warhol's Bad and married them to the tropes and formulas of popular slapstick comedies. Though Mel Brooks experimented with gross-humor elements as early as 1974 (Blazing Saddles' notorious flatulent-cowboy scene), the genre's true high-water mark was set with the enormously successful National Lampoon's Animal House in 1978. These films presented low-brow bodily humor -- including toilet gags, sexual embarrassments, prosthetic body parts, and gastronomical mishaps -- in the larger context of a plot-driven comedy. Caddyshack, Porky's, and countless early-'80s films followed, but the subgenre would fall out of favor until the Farrelly brothers pushed the envelope of bad taste with their sweet-natured, late-'90s efforts Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary, which would spawn a slew of imitators. The Weitz brothers brought the subgenre back to the realm of teen-oriented comedy with American Pie, which they admittedly modeled after Porky's.
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