Play Dumb with Me: Looking Back at the Farrelly Brothers’ “Dumb and Dumber”

With The Lion King, The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and Natural Born Killers among its crop of releases, 1994 proved to be a colossal year for American cinema.  It was also the year of Jim Carrey, a B-level comedian from Toronto who had been gaining some recognition for his work on the Saturday Night Live-like FOX sketch show In Living Color. Within the span of one year, however, Carrey would blast his way into the mainstream with starring roles in not just one, but three films: The Mask, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective…and, of course, Dumb and Dumber. Starring Carrey as the romantic optimist Lloyd Christmas opposite Jeff Daniels as the adorably confused Harry Dunne, Dumb and Dumber infiltrated multiplexes all over the country on December 16, 1994. Now, as the original team behind the first film is set to try to work their magic once again with Dumb and Dumber To, it’s worth reflecting on how the original forever changed the modern-day comedy landscape.

By all rights, Dumb and Dumber shouldn’t have even seen the light of the day. The film’s distributor, New Line Cinema, expressed concern about the film’s high raunch factor; it didn’t help that directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly were unknown quantities at the time. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Peter says the studio “didn’t understand the movie. I mean we were clearly pushing the envelope… and that was the fun of it, more so then than now, because people are like, what are they doing.” But sometimes lightning can strike in the most unexpected of places. As Daniels admitted in a recent interview with the Belfast Telegraph, neither the cast nor crew had any idea that the movie would become such a massive success.

Perhaps one of the reasons for its enduring popularity lies in the way it transcended the idea that there was a specific brand of comedy for adults and a specific brand for children and teenagers. Comedies of the 1980s were dominated by both John Hughes’s teenage coming-of-age tales (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, etc.); and films like Airplane!, Caddyshack, Revenge of the Nerds, and the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, all of which relied predominantly on facial expressions and quick-witted comebacks to secure laughs. Dumb and Dumber, however, tapped into even older, more anarchic traditions: the silent-era clowning (and pathos) of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the violent pratfalls of the Three Stooges, and the absurdism of Monty Python. Although targeted toward an adult audience, Dumb and Dumber erased distinctions between high and low comedy, perfectly exemplifying the idea that physical comedy and witty banter could exist in the same film.

The film’s vulgar pièce de resistance is Harry’s three-minute diarrhea attack at his girlfriend’s place as a result of Lloyd spiking his friend’s tea with a ludicrous amount of laxatives. As disgusting as the scene may be, there’s nevertheless a certain art to Daniels’s panoply of grunts, yells, and swinging-feet motions; take out all the explosive wet-fart sounds, and it might easily pass for a silent-movie gag. Besides, Dumb and Dumber was hardly the first film to mine flatulence for humor; Mel Brooks pulled off a similar feat 20 years before with the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles. The Dumb and Dumber scene, however, would subsequently go on to inspire an increasing amount of bathroom humor in mainstream comedies—most recently Paul Feig’s hit Bridesmaids, which paid homage to the Farrellys with its own, even more outrageous diarrhea-laden sequence.

Dumb and Dumber may be remembered for its physical comedy, but it’s rarely given enough credit for its Abbott & Costello-like banter. Sure, Lloyd and Harry are nitwits, but that doesn’t mean the one-liners and puns are themselves dumb. Take, for instance, the moment in which Harry and Lloyd are asked by a cop to pull over, and Harry innocently responds, “No, it’s a cardigan.” That’s not just a clever line weaved into a ridiculous situation, but also, in its own sly way, a character-revealing moment, one that makes Lloyd look even more moronic than before. The idiocy, in fact, is crafted in the most intelligent manner possible.

All of this might have been merely painful rather than hilarious to watch had it not been for the two stars’ absolute conviction. Instead of condescending to their dim characters, Carrey and Daniels wholeheartedly embrace them, and in the process help make them halfway likable. The Farrellys clearly empathize with these juvenile characters, and as a result they somehow manage to make them endearing to the audience as well.

Though the Farrellys continued to make a name for themselves in the industry afterward—perhaps most memorably with There’s Something About Mary, which caused an even bigger stir when it came out 1998—Dumb and Dumber remains their most beloved work, at least if the existence of the upcoming sequel and an unofficial prequel from 2003 is any indication. If nothing else, the film proved not only that there could be a level of sophisticated conversational humor juxtaposed with vulgar bathroom comedy, but that it could become a worldwide phenomenon. Twenty years after the fact, we’re still feeling the gut-busting aftershocks.