Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg: A Nerd and Proud of It

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Joel Ryan / AP

British actor Simon Pegg

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Doing comedy and sci-fi together can be tough. When it's great, it's great — you get something like Young Frankenstein. But then you have some questionable films ...
Spaceballs

Right.
It's interesting that you bring up Young Frankenstein because those two films are great examples of [how] parody really works. It really works when it's done with love. Mel Brooks is a big fan of the Universal horror films and you can see that in Young Frankenstein. There's so much love and tender care put into the way it looks and into the jokes. He doesn't really care about Star Wars. Spaceballs is full of throwaway jokes. There's no affection in it.

Everyone said that the reason Shaun of the Dead worked was because it was such a respectful homage to the zombie genre.
Yes, because we love it. It's easy to make fun of stuff like science fiction and horror because they're not serious. They're soft targets. You've got to suspend your disbelief a little bit. If we were making fun of anything in that film, it was romantic comedies. It wasn't zombie films.

Do you think the best comedy stems from affection?
I think the best comedy is smart. I don't like easy comedy. I don't like parody that simply involves recreating scenes from other films. I thought the idea of the Scary Movie films was odd because Scream was essentially a parody. It was a postmodern reworking of the '80s horror films. So why make a parody of a parody? There are a lot of those movies recently. I remember seeing a Borat character pop up in one and say, "Nice!" There's no joke there. There's laughter created from seeing the same thing again.

Isn't that insulting to the audience?
We're constantly underestimated as filmgoers. The marketing machine is so desperate not to challenge anybody because they know we take a little cajoling to go see something that takes some thought. What they want to do is get people into the theaters, and they'll do that anyway they can. That's why if you look at the majority of movies, they're all childish geek fare. That's why the comic-book movies are so popular — because it's easy to go and see that stuff.

Do you ever watch a preview for some of these superhero films and say, "This is so much better as a comic?"
Yes, and I think the same about books as well. There's this odd consensus that a book is automatically a template for a film. A book is a medium of itself. It has its own set of rules and criteria. It doesn't just automatically translate. Even good adaptations will prove that. They've done really well with the Harry Potter series. They've been valiant in their attempts to bring it to the screen, but every film is a truncated version of the book. J.K. Rowling gets a lot of stick in literary circles, but she's very good at writing children's fiction. She's not James Joyce, but James Joyce hasn't sold as many books as she has.

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