Why did Jack Nicholson turn to comedy in the 21st century?
Many of his greatest cinematic performances were injected with varying degrees of humour. However, comedy still wasn’t a genre that Jack Nicholson dabbled in all too often until the latter stages of his career, and he had a good reason for doing so.
His Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, The Departed‘s crime boss Frank Costello, and even The Shining‘s Jack Torrance, to name just three, were more than capable of making audiences laugh through the way he brought the character to life. Still, comedic cinema remained a largely untapped vein.
That began to noticeably change towards the turn of the millennium after the star deliberately chose projects that weren’t as intense, serious, and dramatic as the ones he’d used as a springboard to cement himself as one of the all-time greats.
The star-studded sci-fi caper Mars Attacks!, the Academy Award-winning As Good As It Gets, the acclaimed About Schmidt, Adam Sandler’s riotous Anger Management, Nancy Meyers’ rom-com Something’s Gotta Give, Rob Reiner’s moving buddy picture The Bucket List, and his final credit in James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know were all comedies in one way or another.
As Nicholson explained to Total Film, it was a conscious pivot that he fully committed to after an event that changed the world. “The way I reacted to 9/11 was I decided I didn’t want to do any movies that are sad or critical,” he said. “I decided I didn’t want to make my living depressing people or making them go home sick, so I just decided I wanted to do comedy for a while and study it for a while. It doesn’t mean everybody should do that, but that was my reaction.”
Acknowledging that he’d done “five or six comedies in a row”, it hardly dampened his creative spark when he won his third Oscar for As Good As It Gets in the late 1990s. He also landed his 12th nomination for About Schmidt and found himself shortlisted for a Golden Globe in the ‘Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy’ category for Something’s Gotta Give at the dawn of the 21st century.
Even when he segued out of the hard-hitting dramatic work that had defined his illustrious career up until that point, Nicholson mastered it so effortlessly that he was still being showered in praise, adulation, and accolades. That’s the sign of a true genius, with his move into more overtly comedic projects hardly dampening his abilities to deliver a powerhouse turn.
Five of Nicholson’s six final on-screen appearances came in comedies, and the only outlier among that sextet is The Departed, in which he still conspired to have audiences roaring in the aisles after several of his more outlandish improvisations on the set of the ‘Best Picture’ winner were kept in the final cut.
