A few films recently watched.

“The Hangover Part II” arrives much like a hangover — bludgeoning, harsh and relentless — yet it’s a notable, even groundbreaking film. It represents the logical evolution of a roughly five-year trend: someone has finally dared to make a mainstream American comedy in which nothing funny happens.

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This is not to say that nothing happens or that the movie isn’t funny. But in the vacated space where, say, jokes might usually go — you know, those familiar contraptions of setups and punchlines; the misunderstandings, mistaken identities, spoofed conventions or parodied clichés — “The Hangover Part II” offers instead shrieking, squirming, beatings, panic, a severed finger and a facial tattoo. It’s like a “Saw”-style torture-porn movie with a laugh track, into which the shaved-headed (and autonomously funny) Zach Galifianakis has wandered, lost and bewildered and looking for the exit sign.

O.K., but is the movie entertaining? Well, that’s for you to decide. It’s certainly possible that you might watch it and convulsively emit human laughter. (Please blurb that line.) More to the point: Is “The Hangover Part II” a comedy? Yes, definitely, but only of a recent strain: the now-dominant form of cinematic humor we’ll call the jokeless comedy.

This mutant subgenre is the offspring of two genetically compatible fathers: Todd Phillips, director of both “Hangover” films, as well as “Old School”; and Judd Apatow, director of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up” and the producer/midwife to a litter of similar-looking movies with mix’n’match titles. (“Forgetting the Greek”? “Get Him to Sarah Marshall”? “Drillbit Taylor Express”?) Together, like Lenin and Trotsky, Phillips and Apatow have engineered a comedic-cinematic putsch. “Old School,” in 2003, was the April Theses for this uprising, and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” in 2005, was its October Revolution.

Their movies are, at first glance, similar: profane but intrinsically sweet-natured comedies about doughy broheems orbiting one another, water bongs and adult life. Apatow’s boys are usually fringe geeks or happy outcasts (comedy nerds, career stoners), while Phillips’s characters are unhappy, neutered or denatured adults: dentists, stereo salesmen, sad-sack husbands and henpecked clods. In Apatow, the enemy is adulthood, which ruins life; in Phillips, the enemy is women, who ruin men.

What these auteurs truly have in common, though, is that they have systematically boiled away many of the pleasures previously associated with comedy — first among these, jokes themselves — and replaced them with a different kind of lure: the appeal of spending two hours hanging out with a loose and jocular gang of goofy bros. (Also: ritual humiliation. Humiliation is a big part of it, too.)

And these movies are often enjoyable. If you were to list your favorite comedies of the last five years, I bet at least three of either Apatow’s or Phillips’s films would make the list. Yet can you recall a single famous gag from any of these movies? What was the absolute most hilarious joke in “The Hangover”? (My informal straw poll suggests that it was Galifianakis’s mispronouncing “retard.”) Tellingly, the most quotable sequence from any Apatow movie is the “You know how I know you’re gay?” exchange between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which was improvised on the sidelines, then stuck into the film, and which, trust me, does not benefit from being reproduced for posterity in print. Surely there must be at least one indelible gag, line, or scene from just one of these films? If there is, I can’t identify it, and don’t call me Shirley.

All modern movie comedies can be divided roughly into two categories: character-driven and joke-driven. The first category includes movies like “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Meet the Parents,” “Manhattan” and “The Hangover”; the second includes movies like “Austin Powers,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Bananas” and “Airplane!” The primary distinction lies in their respective relationship to reality. In character-driven comedies, funny people say funny things and fall into funny situations, but it’s all contained within the realm of plausible realism; nothing absurd or unbelievable occurs. Joke-driven comedies, by contrast, start with the absurd and unbelievable and go from there. Their jokes burst the boundaries of realism; in fact, they’re often about bursting the boundaries of realism. Character-driven comedy is Meg Ryan loudly faking an orgasm in a deli and an old woman saying, “I’ll have what she’s having”; joke-driven comedy is a woman (in “Top Secret”) being asked to translate a conversation and saying, “I know a little German,” then turning and waving at a midget in lederhosen.

On TV, you might define these styles as the difference between a sitcom like “Everybody Loves Raymond” and a sketch show like “Saturday Night Live” — or, in more contemporary terms, “Modern Family” versus “30 Rock.” (Part of the brilliance of “Modern Family” is its ability to infuse a sitcom formula with an antic, joke-driven energy that stays just this side of absurd.) In fact, sitcoms, in the last decade, have taken a hard turn toward absurdity: “30 Rock” and “Community” owe more to the spirit of “S.N.L.” and “The Simpsons” than they do to “Friends” or “Cheers.” Movies, meanwhile, have gone galloping, as a herd, in the other direction. The 1990s were dominated by the braying of Jim Carrey, the “Austin Powers” franchise and the eww-gross extremism of “There’s Something About Mary” — all films stuffed to the point of asphyxiation with blatant gags. On Sept. 28, 2001, Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander” was released, a still-underrated romp about male models, featuring Owen Wilson as a flake named Hansel and Will Ferrell as Mugatu, a clown-haired fashion designer. Not surprisingly, given the timing of its release, “Zoolander” tanked.

Two years later, “Old School” came out. Then two years after that, “The Wedding Crashers.” Then came “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” — all movies that leaned on the hail-fellow joshing of actors like Vince Vaughn, Seth Rogen and, yes, Owen Wilson and Will Ferrell, now basically playing themselves. These movies were not just devoid of gags; they were explicitly, even purposefully, postjoke.

If not jokes, then what do these films offer? The primary pleasure of pretty much every comedy these days is this: Bros hanging with bros. Bromance! (In the case of “Bridesmaids,” the bros are women. But don’t worry: the film still contains the Congressionally mandated explosive-diarrhea scene.)

Sometimes these bros crash weddings. Sometimes they accidentally get people pregnant. Sometimes they’re getting roofied in Las Vegas and then, delightfully, roofied again in Thailand. (Hangover bros: We can’t believe it’s happening again! Audience: Neither can we!) This is why the goof reel at the end of some of these films — the crack-ups, the flubbed lines, the extended improvised moments — is often the most fun thing to watch, because it provides the movie’s main pleasure, further distilled. Look how much fun Jason Segel and Jonah Hill are having! I’m having fun, too! “I Love You, Man”? I love you, Paul Rudd!

It’s not weird that these films exist — you could argue that Hope and Crosby were the original bros-hanging-with-bros — it’s just weird that they’ve managed to squelch every other form of filmic comedy from existence. This after the long, contiguous reign of Mel Brooks and early Woody Allen and Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker of the “Airplane!” movies, all of whom trucked in the kind of jokes to which Apatow and Phillips are not only hostile but apparently allergic.

In part, the reason is simple: tastes change. (Or as a character in “Top Secret” puts it in a spoof of “Casablanca”: “Things change. People change. Hairstyles change. Interest rates fluctuate.”) The films of Phillips and Apatow arrived as an antidote to tired, mechanistically joke-driven comedies, like the reference-packed “Scary Movie” clones. But their movies wound up acting as a kind of comedic nerve gas, wiping out joke-comedies en masse.

Which of these two directors is most to blame? It’s tempting to finger Phillips, whose “Hangover” remains the genre’s biggest hit. That movie’s success was both surprising and predictable — surprising because it struck gold from a tapped-out, weekend-in-Vegas premise. And predictable because Phillips did this by using a surefire comedic trick: he took an effervescent and underexposed talent, Galifianakis, and plopped him into the movie like an Alka-Seltzer tab. Phillips liked the results so much he repeated it with “Due Date,” a quickie road-trip film that plays like a “Hangover” DVD extra. And Galifianakis is back again in “Hangover Part II,” though he’s looking a little fizzed out. Maybe it’s time to start printing the T-shirts — “Free Zach” — and hope that some other director will swoop in to erect an entirely different movie vehicle around him before his potent life force is sucked from him and all we’re left with is the sad husk of his genius. (See also: Jack Black.)

Really, though, the mastermind behind this joke genocide is Apatow. He’s an unlikely assassin. He is, famously, an enormous comedy nerd-scholar, audiotaping “S.N.L.” as an 11-year-old and tracking down stand-ups to interview for his high-school radio show. His sensibility was honed, however, working on TV shows like “Freaks and Geeks” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” which were themselves created as respites from the tick-tock artifice of sitcoms. Then Apatow brought that free-jazz naturalism to his movies.

Of course, there is no quicker way to self-exile in a rocking chair, shaking your fist from the porch, than to proclaim, “They sure don’t make comedies like they used to.” But they don’t. By which I mean, they literally don’t — Apatow is stridently anti-rimshot, so his films aren’t written so much as ginned up at improvisational powwows at his house. In the beginning, that approach is what made them feel so explosive and fresh. Every so often someone tosses a brick through the window of mainstream comedy, to wake us up and remind us what’s possible. It happened with “Airplane!” in 1980 and “There’s Something About Mary” in 1998 and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” in 2005.

That last film is Apatow’s masterpiece, and its lived-in bagginess was like a cool breeze let into a stifling room. Since then, though, Apatow’s films — and those of his lesser imitators — have become their own incestuous little jam sessions, bros riffing with bros, and Hollywood has once again locked the door and pulled the shades, so we’re right back to that same sense of comedic claustrophobia, except now we’re trapped in there with Russell Brand. The remedy is simple: Someone needs to toss a brick through the window. Let some air in. It wouldn’t hurt if the brick came wrapped in an actual joke.