“There’s no hidden message,” Devine said of his new movie. “I feel like nowadays you get to the end of what you think is a comedy and you’re like, ‘Was that about global warming? Is there some deep hidden message that I’m supposed to recycle more?’”

Von joked that he is planning on making a movie about “trans-portation”, which will feature “a “riveting scene where a short bus admits that he’s a skateboard.” …

“I’ll pitch movies and every executive is like, ‘Yeah but why should we make this movie now?’… Cause it’s funny, bitch! What do you mean?” Devine continued. “Whatever happened to we just want to make people laugh?”

[What happened? Corporate DEI scores, that’s what happened. But this isn’t really all that new either. Woke progressivism has been coloring comedy content for decades. My favorite example is the 2002 rom-com “Two Weeks Notice” with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, in which Grant plays a kinda-Trump developer figure and Bullock plays an activist attorney who gets roped into working for him in trade for salvaging a community center. It’s filled with anti-capitalist rhetoric about the unconscionable excess of profit, which is even more ironic given the salaries paid to its two stars. IMDB used to list those, but at some point quietly removed them. — Ed]