foundlingmother:

I think the biggest problem I have with Thor’s characterization in Ragnarok is that Thor’s not a comedian, and a Thor movie shouldn’t be a comedy. Thor can be funny, and Thor movies can have funny moments, but the core shouldn’t be comedy. That’s more mainstream entertaining (I admit, I find Ragnarok amusing/entertaining), but it’s not Thor. It never has been. Thor has always been deeply emotional, (over)dramatic, and reverent. That’s why it pisses me off to see people say that Ragnarok is what Thor movies always should have been, and the characterization is the best it’s ever been. No. This isn’t Thor. Those characters aren’t Thor or Loki, they’re the comedic simplification of those characters.

This seems right. Guardians of the Galaxy should be funny (and it is); you can get some pathos out of Star-Lord’s and Rocket’s stories (and they do), but they basically are comedians – it’s part of their character. If Thor is funny in his movies, either Thor shouldn’t be in on the joke – the way Thor 1 gets humor out of his confusion and awkwardness without resorting to ridicule – or it should be dignified and deadpan, the way Thor is in TDW (“Space is fine,” hanging the hammer on the coat rack) and Age of Ultron (“You’re all not worthy”; stepping on the Lego and then nudging it out of the way; his interactions with Vision; “as long as there is life in my breast, I am… running out of things to say”; “With the exception of this one [Tony], there’s nothing that can’t be explained”). The bickering with Loki in TDW is also good Thor humor, because we see him as a typical brother, but it never breaks character. Oh yeah, and the bilgesnipe exchange with Coulson in The Avengers.

All of this is subtle humor. In fact, I got the most examples out of AOU, probably because clever, subtle humor is Joss Whedon’s thing; he’s very practiced at making old, serious, generally dignified people funny in an in-character way (see: Rupert Giles, Angel, Shepherd Book; Spike and Wesley are less dignified, but vaguely in the same category). I’m not sure exactly which added scenes in TDW he wrote (other than the bro-boat and the shapeshifting); I don’t think he wrote the bickering in the spaceship, but he might have (in case they expanded that scene in reshoots). It’s hard to make Thor funny, so you need a writer with a specific sensibility and skill set. Taika Waititi (and Eric Pearson, however much of his script actually survived) does not have that sensibility; his way of making ancient vampires funny in What We Do in the Shadows was to deprive them of dignity. So of course we should expect that his way of making Thor and Loki funny was to deprive them of dignity.