15 Ways The MCU Improved Marvel Mythology

To say that comics should be funny is redundant. The first modern comics were humorous pulp strips in newspapers designed to poke fun at politics, culture, and entertainment. However, as the superhero genre became synonymous with the medium, comics have often waylaid humor to be a novelty, almost always playing second fiddle to narrative and character development.

However, adapting these characters and stories to a moving, visual media like film afforded the MCU the ability to make comedy a feature of their content, not a byproduct. Take, for example, Tony Stark in the first Iron Man movie. A lot of his dialogue reads as obnoxious and arrogant, which is very intentional as that is his character at that point in his life.

However, he doesn't come off as unlikable because these lines are delivered by Robert Downey Jr., an actor with impeccable comic timing and a frightening amount of charisma. His confident performance alone brought more laughs in one movie than the Iron Man comics had even attempted to get in decades.

And it quickly expanded from there, with characters who were formerly one-note or almost anti-humor in the comics being repackaged as comedy set-pieces. Sure the comics made jokes over the years, but it never reached the level of mirth and levity that the films provide.