Mick LaSalle, the SF Chroncle’s movie critic, says that while comedy might be universally appealing and durable, comedy films can go “from delightful to pointless within a generation.”

Watch Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx or Jackie Gleason, and the years fall away. Yet just try to sit through a Martin and Lewis movie– it’s excruciating. Even weirder is watching things that you once thought funny, say Frank Gorshin’s impressions or Freddie Prinze’s stand-up routine. The audience is laughing, and they seem to mean it, and yet what’s so funny about Prinze calling himself a “Hungarican,” just because his mother was Hungarian and his father Puerto Rican.

Right away, Mr. LaSalle is on shaky ground. He’s the movie critic, but he’s conflating movies with standup. An entire article could be written on whether or not a comedian’s performance does or doesn’t hold up (and why or why not). We recently posted on our experience watching some Dean Martin Show DVD’s. We laughed heartily at Buddy Hackett’s and Flip Wilson’s, but we found Bill Cosby‘s set to be flat and lacking in punchlines.

But standup has a better chance of holding up over the decades than does a movie built around a standup comic.

But this article is (ostensibly) about movies– comedy movies. And we’re not sure we agree with LaSalle’s theory as to why comedy movies (and the comedian who stars in them) might capture our fancy one day and seem unwatchable in reruns. He traces the arc of a handful of comics to make his point.

Comedians have their moment, seem invincible… and then the power ebbs away. Eddie Murphy was one of the biggest stars of the 1980s, and then some time around “Harlem Nights” (1989), the graph started pointing downward.

An inspection of Murphy’s IMDB filmography doesn’t detail the ebbing of Murphy’s power at all. It shows quite the opposite. Check out Murphy’s box office here. Eddie Murphy may not make Mr. LaSalle laugh, but he’s making someone laugh… how else to explain that, worldwide, his movies have grossed $6.2 BILLION? His average gross is $99 million. His average opening weekend is $22 million. (And we’re fairly certain those figures aren’t even adjusted for inflation.)

It might be argued that Murphy’s power to make LaSalle (and all the folks who yukked their way through “Delirious”) laugh, but through “Harlem Nights” and “Pluto Nash” and “Norbit,” he’s managed to make high-profile movies that amuse… someone. (Someone whose power has ebbed away is not scheduled to make the third sequel to a movie he made a quarter-century ago.) If he’s talking about the power to make a good movie– ie: quality– he’s got a point. But it isn’t the genre to blame, it’s the process. And the process fails comedians just as often as it fails heartthrobs, action dudes and beauty queens. (It’s just that when they release a “funny” motion picture, people get reeeally hostile when it doesn’t turn out… funny.)

The problem with comedy movies is that they are (mostly) headed up by hot comedy stars (Richard Pryor, for instance) and that the process of making the movie isn’t usually an organic one, like it was for, say, Woody Allen. Such “vehicles” (that word should tell you something right there about the care taken in the creation of said films) are often the most egregious examples of “movie-making” that Hollywood has to offer.

Formula plus funny often equals steaming turd.

There’s one other factor that LaSalle seems to ignore. Maturation. We all grow up. Our sense of humor matures. It’s easy to say (fill in the blank) “isn’t funny any more.” But the truth is, that person is quite often still funny… just not to you. But he/she might still be wildly funny to the golden demo.

If, on the other hand, the person isn’t funny to anyone at all and makes one bomb after another, it isn’t because the public once saw him/her as “the embodiment of some previously unknown truth about people or human nature” and is now “satiated,” rather that the comic who once amused millions is no longer concentrating on that which brung him to the dance. Or paying too much attention to formula. Or listening to too many managers, agents, studio executives or a psychic or his girlfriend or his dealer.

Murphy seems to be the man that most folks cite as having “lost it.” They compare “Norbit” to ” Delirious.” That’s a false comparison– the former is a movie, the latter is a documentary, a record of a man at or near the peak (or one of the peaks) of his standup power. But somewhere along the line, Murphy ceased being a standup comic and became a worldwide box office draw. “Norbit” unwatchable. But it wasn’t made for us.

The truth is that precious few movies have a decent shelf life.

Another truth is that humor is subjective. (And our sense of humor is not frozen in time. Our sense of humor changes, just as our sense of what’s exciting in music, food, clothing or books.)