ABSTRACT
To modern-day audiences, vulgar teen comedies from the past can often seem offensive in terms of their stereotypes and attitudes. Shifting attitudes to sexuality and representations of gender may also account for the waning popularity of the vulgar teen comedy after the early 2000s. Successful gross-out comedies were still released, but it became more common for adults rather than for teens to feature in gross-out themed pictures, a trend exemplified by movies such as Bridesmaids (2011). This shift was related to wider social changes in which the boundaries of ‘youth culture’ became more blurred, with ‘youthful’ tastes and attitudes increasingly featuring in the way older age groups constructed and expressed their identities. The vulgar teen comedy itself, however, still survived. International versions of the vulgar teen comedy appeared in films such as the British film, The Inbetweeners Movie (2011), while female-oriented movies such as Blockers (2018) and Booksmart (2019) updated and reformulated the vulgar teen comedy’s conventions in a way that addressed contemporary attitudes to gender and sexuality.
