Jagadish talks about why 90s comedy movies seem to be better than modern ones

I think he hits the nail on this. This is probably one of the most talked questions on the subreddit.

While I also enjoy 90s and 00 comedy movies, rewatching many of them today, it's obvious they wouldn't work. For example Kalyanaraman. The main story revolves around a mute girl whose marriage is fixed, talks about dowry for that, and how a guy agreed marry her a day before her wedding.

I love this film and Mr Ponjikara is my spirit animal, but this storyline would be extremely regressive today. Many of these elements would not work. And like Jagadeesh said, the settings, technology, character expectations of the audience have all changed.

And another thing, a lot of the great comedy actors (Innocent, Jagathy, Jayaram, Salim Kumar, Dileep, Suraj) were trained on stage. If you listen to interviews by Shafi, Lal Jose about them, many of these characters evolve with the story because of their improvised input. Mr Ponjikara was created after makeup. You can see that because Innocent improvs over non-spoken sequences in dubs. The younger gen don't have that experience.