What everyone loves about Jack Lemmon, an actor who’s worked in the Hollywood system from 1949 to 2000, is his ability to be modestly sad with a smile on his face. We sit down to watch him be poked and prodded by everyone around him and revel in his misery. While he doesn’t get poked and prodded to the extent that characters are done today in film. He’s not a character in a Todd Phillips film where we literally throw everything, including the kitchen sink, but rather a real life version of those characters.
In real life we don’t always hear the story of a group of close friends who go to Vegas for the weekend for a bachelor party and are forced to take a soon to be family member along which turns out to be the worst decision you’ve ever made which gets you in the position where you wake up with a tiger, baby and your best friend missing. However, in Jack Lemmon’s films he’s always the real life version of that. Or at least in the ones I’ve seen. Jack is that regular guy who’s just used constantly as a doormat for every and anyone who’s above him in life and he just takes it. You watch him suffer through all of these realities of life, that when you’re done laughing you start to worry what you would do when put in that situation which you probably will when you reach that stage in life, and we point a finger and laugh.
In The Apartment we see Lemmon suffer through the ups and downs of trying to win his way to the top of the executive food chain by loaning his apartment to his bosses in the evening so that they can enjoy their affairs with an extreme level of discretion. Watching Lemmon battle with his moral sense of right and wrong while trying to “better” himself socially and financially is one of the most tragic comedies that you’ll ever see. If you even watch the film with a serious eye, which you should, you might not even laugh out loud that much, if at all, due to the level of tragedy that’s prevalent in the film.
If I had to pick an actor working today that comes closest to that most difficult quality of being funny with making it seem the most effortless it’s Paul Rudd. Rudd has that “regular” guy appeal that allows him to do that same thing that Lemmon did so well. He’s able to be the realistic punching bag that we all never want to be. He can live that tragic life that we all hate to ever have. If there was ever a moment that I knew he was going to eventually be the next Lemmon it was in Knocked Up where he was trying to get his children excited for a day at LEGO land and responded “LEGOLAND!!! YAY!!!”. That is completely Lemmon-esque in the best way.
With that said though there’re so many things that are different about comedy today that makes it harder and harder for a Lemmon student like Rudd to fully embrace his tutelage. The films of the 50s and 60s were always so broad but not using as much shock treatment as comedy of today uses. Today comedy, almost every one of them, is all about shocking us into laughter. Rudd’s filmography includes: Our Idiot Brother, Dinner for Schmucks, I Love You Man and Knocked Up. While I still haven’t seen Our Idiot Brother, which goes for the shock treatment through “how stupid can we make this guy” kind of comedy, I can say with all of his other roles that I’ve seen is the most normal of characters that exist in these insane worlds that we watch comedy in nowadays.
So what I really want to say is that I believe that the comparison is apt, however I doubt he’ll ever reach the level that Lemmon did but I blame that on the style of comedy of today and how it dramatically differs from back in the 50s. We’re never going to see another The Apartment being made in Hollywood ever again.