Red is Not Funny
Wikipedia defines common symbolic connotations of the color Red as:
Passion, strength, energy, fire, love, sex, excitement, speed, heat, arrogance, ambition, leadership, masculinity, power, danger, gaudiness, blood, war, anger, revolution, radicalism, socialism, communism, aggression, summer, autumn, stop, Mars (planet), respect, Gemini (star sign), December.
Red is also associated with the Nazi party, AIDS, Red Cross, emergency, dynamite, and roses. Most of the words are extreme, a lot are even negative. All of them are likely to draw some amount of emotion from a person, and the color red itself can have a physical effect on the body--increased blood pressure and heavy breathing.
The one thing that is clear from all of this is that red is not funny...
The clumsily obese sans type; the blinding white background safely voiding the cutout actors of context. It's a design ploy as low brow as the films themselves--a desperate attempt to simply be recognized. They dance, jump up and down, and scream at the top of their lungs to get a reaction of any kind... since they must realize that nobody is laughing.
I suppose red is also the color of doomed comedy.
Addition: For Steve-o (not quite in the same family as the above trends, no?).
32 Comments
Welcome
Subscribe to the feed
fun with dick and jane
Thanks. Yet another one.
Good call, but what about this guy?
http://www.the-frat-pack.com/crashers-images/poster2.jpg
Um.
You bothered with more screenshots than I did, but this ground has been covered. I suppose I should applaud your focussing on colour rather than typography, a brilliant new analysis.
Oh, someone has already said that hollywood comedy dvd covers have obnoxious type.
You really shouldn't say something if one of the other millions of blogs on the internet talks about something similair.
Actually Joe, you did focus on color remember?
Showing more screenshots shows that it's not a racial thing but a movie type thing, but thanks for bringing up something completely unrelated.
Nice collection. Next up: research why everybody has matte pink lips in romantic comedy posters. Even the dudes. What's the deal?
Bowfinger was pretty good, actually.
Er, the typography for "Airplane!" was in red on the poster, and it was inarguably funny.
Same with the original posters for "Animal House", "Arsenic and Old Lace", "Better Off Dead", "A Christmas Story", "Repo Man", "The Kentucky Fried Movie", "The Jerk", "Top Secret!", and many more.
Nice selection of samples to bolster your argument, though.
Bowfinger was really, really good.
I think the key point why red is used is because it is "energetic", a classical signal color.
It doesn't want to say "I am funny", it screams "Pick me! Pick me! Over here!". I guess you could have made a similar screenshot collection from most other genres except comedy.
Neat post. But I have to agree with Steve-o here... the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. If you carefully choose your examples you can show anything.
It would be interesting (and a lot more substantive) if you tried doing a survey of movie posters for all comedies released in a single year, and compared the colors and fonts used to their box-office gross. As it stands this doesn't really say much other than that you know how to exploit selection bias. ;-)
hey jt,
you're wrong about one thing. red is not the color associated to the nazi party, their color is brown.
t
Indeed, it was. My theory: Red is mainly the colour of senseless, brainless action movies, and other genres that cater to basically the same audience. Hence what we see above. Bowfinger is a persiflage of the making of senseless, brainless action movies, so the red type is à pro pos. Note the sarcastic gradient to black.
OK, so Bowfinger isn't the pinnacle of sophistication, but it's genuinely funny.
Most of these use the color red contextually, tastefully, or didn't use red - with the exception of Animal House which although hysterically funny is low-brow and obnixious.
View the covers in question. No inline images :-(.
I guess we responded at the same time to steve-o, and your cover for "Better Off Dead" further makes your point that these are in a totally different family.
I won't argue the merits of Dodgeball (which I enjoyed), but at least the red type was supposed to represent the color and texture of the playground ball around which the game is played. It should be noted that Dodgeball was also a successful movie in box office terms. A little Stiller goes a long way though...
Knocked Up had a red title.
Wedding Crashers had a red title
! Word. darrign fireball accident...found yo ass...very astute...j
I would like to point out that the criterion collection edition of The Royal Tenenbaums has the title in red. Obviously its a small font size and most of the cover is taken up by a family picture of the tenenbaums. but its still red and its a very funny movie.
Nice post. You know what else isn't funny? Gill Sans Ultra Bold. ugh.
Superbad was also red
I did some quick research myself using my movie ratings in Netflix and pulling the posters from IMDB.
Gotta say, this thesis doesn't seem to hold up for me.
You can see the movie titles I pulled up in this link.
Patrick, I think you've misunderstood my point here. I do not say in the post that all bad comedies use the red on white titles. I'm saying it is a trend that a lot of bad comedies have this similar type/color treatment, for the simple reason that red gets people's attention (as opposed to relevantly portraying to the particular movie).
Certainly there will be bad comedies that aren't red, and there are some--albeit few-- good comedies that do use this bold red on white type treatment.
With the abundance of movie posters that come out a year with these stark white backgrounds and goofy red fonts, it seems obvious that the marketers behind these advertisements think they're on to something good.
A relevant quote attributed to Paul Rand seems to sum this up well: "If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it red."
Advertisers must figure these movies are so not "good" that they better do both.
This is all so retarded it hurts. The people who wrote these "unfunny" movies did not design the posters. And I bet that a huge chunk of these posters were designed by people who had yet to see the movie. Also, a lot of people love the first American Pie movie (and it's equally, in my opinion, unfunny sequels) but they did great at the boxoffice. Ditto Bowfinger, Dodge Ball and The Nutty Professor 2.
I don't think it's a real accurate or intelligent critique if you look at all comedy posters with red type as bad. You have to, as previous posts have said, look at them individually. Some of them work perfectly with red type. A Christmas Story for example...What colour, besides christmas red, would you prefer?
I do agree though that there are a lot of examples above that are simply using red on white because it is so eye-catching. It's unfortunate how down-hill movie posters went...
I forgot to ask: have you seen the related article on SpeakUp?
Interesting post. You can easily draw similar ideas from magazines here in the UK. There are a whole range of magazines that use very similar bold red typography as titles/logos. The content is as dubious as the afore mentioned films. This also runs true for a lot of the tabloid newspapers in the UK who employ, again, very similar bold red lettering in their logos.
These magazines and newspapers aren't known for their quality content, more their trashy celebrity content that few care about but many read as escapism. The films above, I believe, act in the same way. It appears then that this type of colour and typography usage is excellent at targeting the type of person this level of comedy/content is aimed at, almost too well.
I'd be very interested in hearing what the newspapers/magazines/films have to say on this subject though.
I thought I was the only one that noticed this. No one I have talked to about it had realized it before.
by the way there is alot of movies out there in general, and it also depends on each particular persons sense of humor. Not some paranoia about the red color titles. your crazy man, your like those people who count oddities like babe ruth died on the date that was exactly like his jersey number and when the red sox would win the world series again...
Tucker, are you serious? Hahaha. You need to take a writing 101 course.