Here's something we all need: a good laugh. I think Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are funny guys, but comedy has a short life. Seen any "Hans and Franz" sketches lately? Right. So a funny movie that didn't follow the typical "funny movie" formula showed up at Sundance two years ago. I sat in a freezing cold library auditorium turned theater at 11:00pm and complained to my friends that I just wanted to go to bed. Then this little movie called Napoleon Dynamite started to make me laugh. I thought it would do great, but a year later when I heard my wife's boss quoting it, I realized it was doing greater than I ever expected.

At Slamdance this last week I was disappointed to see several films riding in after the Napoleon invasion. The premise was basic: make a movie with a goofy outcast and laugh at him/her for 90 minutes. I walked out of one and wish I'd walked out of the other (I won't mention the titles here because I think these filmmakers will have enough trouble connecting to an audience without me pestering them). Napoleon Dynamite had a fresh quality at the time. A quality with a short life span that makes imitation boring and, in this case, kind of mean. Why do I want to laugh at somebody who's kind of sad for 90 minutes?

So. People started salivating when they saw how well Napoleon was received. They thought Jared Hess had hit on some magic formula, like the very best combination of hops and barley and malt combined in the perfect way to make the perfect beer. But what they missed, was the fact that it was the freshness of Napoleon-the characters, the plot (or lack of)-that made it work. It wasn't anything that could be put on a checklist with the header: if you can meet these ten criteria then you will have made a hugely successful comedy. So people have this mental checklist in their heads, and they've completely lost the freshness, the unexpectedness which means of course, they don't have a hugely funny movie. They have a stale batch of brew we've all tasted before and long ago lost our wonderment about.

I find it ironic that this lesson is absolutely nothing new. It learned and preached time and time again. Yet at a festival like Slamdance, I still see young filmmakers taking the safe way to Park City.