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"  Published in the August 2012 issue It does not embarrass me to say that I saw The Avengers by myself, on the afternoon it opened. Four days later, I took my grown son to see The Avengers again. In 3-D. It&amp;#039;s been weeks now, and I&amp;#039;d see it again tomorrow. But really: Why? Every superhero story, franchise or not, is vaguely similar. The plot can be recounted over a single beer: Thor. Son of Odin. Crazy brother. Like a god. And a teenager. Gets locked in the fate of Earth, a planet that he protects against all reason. And there&amp;#039;s this hammer no one else can pick up. Story doesn&amp;#039;t get anyone in the seats.  And you can forget special effects as a drawing point. Flight is cool, but men had been flying long before Christopher Reeve first retreated to Superman&amp;#039;s bathhouse of solitude at the North Pole. The stuff we see now in superhero movies \u2014 skies on fire, wormholes over New York, distant planetoids, legions of dirty lizard soldiers, giant galactic cloud heads \u2014 these are small bids to up the visual ante from one superhero movie to another. The giant airborne snake ships in The Avengers, clumsily swimming the concrete canyons of midtown Manhattan, knocking the corners of perfectly good rent-controlled apartments? The audience saw them in the last Transformers movie.  Here&amp;#039;s why we go: We go for the laughs. Period. A good superhero movie inevitably features at least ten good laughs wrought from a narrative strata of self-awareness or the pure physical comedy of, say, flight and/or flights of conscience. Laughs: indifferent to angsty characterizations. Laughs: surviving lightweight philosophizing about the dread weight of responsibility and the tiresome obligations to fellow man. Laughs: timed around pure joy, because it&amp;#039;s cool to fly (unless you&amp;#039;re Superman, who has to find a restroom to get the red underwear all squared to the cape).  We don&amp;#039;t laugh because they&amp;#039;re silly contrivances, though they surely are. Nor because some B-list schmo winks into the camera to let the audience know he&amp;#039;s bigger than the comic book he finds himself trapped in. We laugh when they get it right, as when the Hulk rag-dolls the talky villain in The Avengers over his head \u2014 bam, bam, bam into a concrete floor \u2014 then grumbles a tagline. People cheered in my theater. Both times. The laughing that followed his tagline was louder than the space guns of the dirty lizard soldiers. Why not? We were witnessing the first moment in the Hulk&amp;#039;s heretofore wretched cinematic oeuvre in which he seemed self-aware. Laughing with the Hulk is fun. At their best, superheroes, and the laughs that rise out of their stories, are melded in some fashion to the actor. Consider Robert Downey Jr., who inhabits Iron Man and Tony Stark so fully that the role is his forever. Downey&amp;#039;s clear sense of humor about the conundrum of his own heroism keeps that franchise in business. The comic-book Tony Stark was a self-serious twat with a booze issue. Downey&amp;#039;s quips, Downey&amp;#039;s timing, even the fact of Downey himself, with all his history, up there on the screen, keep the viewer in line with the intent of the movie \u2014 it is a button-pushing lark.  This summer, Batman, The Dark Knight Rises, comes to mind. The pulpy arc of comic-book mythology disappeared from that franchise long ago. But the test remains the same: Do you laugh, even occasionally? Does the hero drive those laughs? When the football field collapses behind the zigzagging runner: funny. And apocalyptic. Anne Hathaway&amp;#039;s flirty Catwoman throws out the movie&amp;#039;s best one-liners. Funny. But Christian Bale&amp;#039;s wheezy, self-tortured version of the humorless caped crusader crushes laughs. The failure is self-seriousness, the death knell of the superhero, and it falls utterly on the actor. Bale doesn&amp;#039;t let the light in. And like my dad \u2014 a real superhero \u2014 always muttered to me as I slept away the mornings of my adolescence: &amp;quot;Keeping the blinds drawn doesn&amp;#039;t keep the sun from shining its ass off somewhere else.&amp;quot; If one out of every five superhero movies succeeds, then it is for one reason only: They let the light in; they reveal simple threads of self-awareness in the midst of the storm of hyperbole. They find a laugh even with some plasma spear pushed against their throat, with a doomsday device deep in their countdown. That&amp;#039;s where we are these days, all of us, spear to throat. For us, as for the superhero, it&amp;#039;s difficult to move forward without a sense of humor. See Iron Man, see Black Widow, see Bruce Banner, see Peter Parker. Ass-beat by sand giants, they still wisecrack, but most of all they get up and stay with it.  Meanwhile, I&amp;#039;ll point out that the Amazing Spider-Man hoots as he dive-bombs the city. Fun. An evocation of joy. Indulgence. You name it. Joy matters, too, in the draw of superheroes. Also note that Spider-Man subdues bad guys by ejaculating a gooey white web from the frenum of his uncocked wrist, in what has to be contemporary cinema&amp;#039;s greatest ever ode to wet dreams. Gross. Funny. The kind of laugh that promises more. And the reason why I&amp;#039;ll pony up for a ticket to a dark room on a day the sun is otherwise shining its ass off. ALL THINGS DARK KNIGHT RISES ON ESQUIRE.COM: \u2022 The Problem with Christian Bale&amp;#039;s Batman Voice \u2022 The 10 Batman Villains You Might See Next \u2022 The Morgan Freeman Story, by Tom Chiarella \u2022 Rush Limbaugh&amp;#039;s Batman Problem, by Charles P. Pierce \u2022 Spoiler-Free Style Secrets, and How to Steal Bane&amp;#039;s Jacket \u2022 The Dark Knight Rises Premiere Style \u2022 PLUS: The Prologue, The Trailer, The Batwing, The Batrobe, The Batdog, and Catwoman "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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