There's Something About Mary

There's Something About Mary, 1998. Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly. Ben Stiller, Cameron Diaz, Matt Dillon, Chris Elliot.

When it comes to comedy, there is only one critical yardstick: is it funny? All other considerations are meaningless. Mis en scene, socio-political message, allegorical landscape, deconstructionist signifiers, and all of that other film crit bullshit is absolutely without value when it comes to comedy. All a comedy has to do is make the audience laugh by whatever means necessary. As a result, comedy is the hardest type of film to pull off. There is nothing worse than a bad comedy. Bad comedies are the absolute worst film experience.

The Farrelly Brothers have taken this to heart. They don't care about the niceties of artistic filmmaking or the conventions of good taste. They have a take-no-prisoners attitude to comedy that may very well be the most confrontational approach to filmmaking ever conceived. They dare the audience NOT to laugh at what is on the screen, knowing full well that it simply isn't possible to hold it in. They are in the one-upsmanship business. They set up their comic situations and then take the next step. And then the next. Because the situations they set up are almost uniformly vulgar, they add a certain amount of shock value to the mix that carries a hell of a jolt. To an extent, they are the spiritual children of John Waters, only they are funnier than Waters ever was.

Take, for instance, the first explosively funny sequence in There's Something About Mary: Ben Stiller gets his testicles caught in the zipper of his tuxedo the evening he is set to go to prom with the seemingly too good to be true Cameron Diaz. Most filmmakers would use this gag as a throwaway, not wanting to offend the audience. The Farrellys have no such compunctions. They follow this gag through to its logical, achingly funny conclusion and include a shot of the actual problem itself. This is a variant on Waters's turkey neck gag, but even Waters was tame with it and threw it away. The Farrellys bust it apart and examine it for a good five minutes, getting ten laughs to everyone else's one. The whole movie is like that, from Stiller's odyssey to find his lost high school sweetheart, Mary, to Matt Dillon's sleazy detective attempting to woo Mary, to Mary's seemingly infalible ability to attract stalkers and losers of every variety. This is a funny, funny movie, one that adds a little touch of guilty pleasure to intensify the experience. As such, it fulfills the central mission of comedy, but it goes it one better. The movie physically assaults the audience. The viewer is going to ache from laughing or resisting--either way.

No small feat, that.