This will not be as short an answer as you might like. John Hughes was the king, no doubt about it. But you'll note - he wasn't making Porky's. He was making Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty In Pink and movies where they lead with heart and let the humor fill in around it. You could say the same about Goonies or Stand By Me - they're funny, but they aren't just funny. They're about people who care about each other and believe in things. They are not Animal House or Better Off Dead. Those movies do still exist, but they're less common. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a funny coming of age movie. It's also one of the first things written by Cameron Crowe, who also did Almost Famous. Almost Famous is a movie that cares about people and is a coming-of-age film (that is also about Led Zeppelin). It was not sold as a coming-of-age movie, though. Not really. Boys and Girls is also a coming-of-age movie. It's squarely in that "teen" "high school" territory - it's about college freshmen. Yet if you watch the trailers, they're trying to sell it like Porky's... or American Pie. And there's the trick. The genre was pretty much dead until American Pie came out, which was raunchy by any standard. So everyone attempted to remake American Pie. Even when what you had wasn't American Pie, you sold it as American Pie - 10 Things I Hate About You is The Taming of the Shrew. Legit. Straight up Shakespeare re-cast in High School. Yet watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmjzCZr0Jw ...*American Pie.* It didn't take long for people to decide that, rather than pretending their movies were American Pie, they might as well make them American Pie. Because raunch sells. Consider: Judd Apatow really broke out with Freaks and Geeks, perhaps the most heart-filled "coming-of-age" TV show in a generation. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It legitimately leaves My So-Called Life in the dust. But it lasted one season and was cancelled. From there, he went raunchier, but with still a little heart - he made The 40-year-old Virgin. From there, it just got raunchier - Knocked Up. Pineapple Express. Dewey Cox. All the heart went out of it, and into that void jumped fucking TWILIGHT. So now your teen coming-of-age movies are at a nadir. It'll get better. But yeah. There's a cycle to everything. One of my friends pointed out that the landscape is ripe for a decent, well-written, well-acted, well-directed romantic comedy because we haven't had one in almost a decade. It's all The Hangover and Bridesmaids and other crass bullshit that is completely without any heart. The most romantic film we've had in forever is Sideways and even that gets fucked up by Paul Giamatti not being gay.