One of my convictions is that 'superhero' is not a Genre. Western, Noir, Romance, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, Comedy, these are all Genres. And you can put the superhero into any of them, from Jonah Hex to Thor. The Superhero is a WW2 era Imperial Framework you can put over genres as a Lens to play.

I agree, but I would go farther and say that Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Western are also not genres in the same way. They don't describe the story in the way that Romance, Horror, Comedy, etc do; they merely describe the trappings.

Overpowered hero who goes around fighting things with dumbass friend dates back to Gilgamesh and Enkidu

It's a very specific 20th Century American Framework & more widely Western Framework that applies to Imperial society and their specific anxieties & relationship to Power-it's what that is intended to address via genre. It's a lens you put over genres and it can fit, it isn't a genre in itself IMHO

My hot take is that comedy isn’t really a genre it’s more a flavour, it’s a romantic comedy or an action comedy, something just being funny doesn’t feel like an all encompassing enough to be a genre.

It's an interesting take. I think it's probably wrong on the merits (superhero stories have their own tropes and conventions). But it is interesting.

Just like animation is not a genre, it’s a medium!

I find genre far more useful as a flexible marketing tool to set audience expectation than as any kind of academic system of classification.

You can combine genres though. You could swap the position of superhero and any of the other genres there and it'd read exactly the same. Genres are just a short hand for a collection of tropes and conventions, it's not any special honour. If you can think of traits of a superhero story it's a genre