The movie Steven Spielberg was told he wasn’t funny enough to make: “Give it to a director who does comedy well”
There are few things Steven Spielberg can’t do, but he ended up ruling himself out of the running to direct a comedy that went on to become a major box office hit because he was told in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t funny enough to make it.
As a filmmaker, Spielberg’s game has few holes or shortcomings, which is why he’s one of the all-time greats and the single highest-grossing in history. However, a genuinely hilarious comedy is notably absent from his illustrious back catalogue, so perhaps the harsh words carried more truth than he was willing to admit.
Ironically, the first major misfire of his career came when he tried to be funny with the wartime caper 1941, and he’s never tried to tickle the funny bones of audiences to the same extent since. Plenty of his movies have humour and are capable of having folks rolling in the aisles, but never again has he even contemplated making a straightforward comic flick that places rapid-fire jokes and sight gags at the forefront.
In the 1990s, there was no bigger comedy star in Hollywood than Jim Carrey, whose name alone was as close to guaranteeing commercial gold as the genre had. Partnering up an A-list funnyman with an A-list auteur couldn’t have been anything other than a runaway success, only for neither of them to end up involved when cameras started rolling.
By his own admission, one of the main reasons why Spielberg has steered clear of comedy for over 40 years is because the person he trusts and whose opinion he values the most thinks he’d be crap at it, which was the deciding factor in the Academy Award winner opting not to take the plunge at the turn of the millennium.
“My wife says I’m not funny enough,” he told Total Film as to why he’d been avoiding comedy for so long. “I was preparing to direct Meet the Parents when she read the script. She said, ‘You’re not directing this movie; give it to a director who does comedy well.”
In the end, Jay Roach—who could do comedy well, having previously helmed the first two entries in the Austin Powers franchise—was given the job. Meet the Parents cleared $330million at the box office after Ben Stiller had replaced Carrey and drafted in Robert De Niro to create an unexpectedly winning double-act. The trilogy as a whole powered past $1.1 billion in ticket sales.
Spielberg and Carrey was a tantalising combination, but thanks to Kate Capshaw laying down the law and telling her spouse that he wasn’t funny enough to make it work, Meet the Parents fell into different hands.
