Jeremy’s Tophunder №39: Dumb and Dumber

7 min readApr 19, 2020

You have to be smart to make stupid this funny. I think.

There’s something about Dumb and Dumber that always sticks with me. It’s not just that it’s funny. It’s not just that it hit me at the perfect time growing up. It’s not just that it stars my favorite actor at that age. It’s some strange combination of all of those things, plus a few pinches of something I can’t place my finger on and a few dashes of something I can’t quite remember.

It bugs me a little bit that I can’t fully explain why I like certain comedies more than others. When I’m writing about more dramatic movies, I can talk about thematic elements, visual styles, storytelling techniques, and acting performances. When I’m writing about comedies, I can’t come up a laundry list of reasons why I like it, I just know that it’s funny.

Dumb and Dumber is funny, and it’s incredibly dumb. But I like to think that it’s dumb in a smart way. I think all four comedy movies that I’ve covered in this space to this point actually have similar conceits — they take what would otherwise be a serious movie, and then just populate it with idiots and buffoons. That’s what Dumb and Dumber is, at its core. It’s a road movie, where two down-on-their-luck guys try to give their lives a kick-start by driving across the country. The biggest tangible difference between Dumb and Dumber and, say, Easy Rider, is that the two main characters in Dumb and Dumber, are, well, really dumb.

The run Jim Carrey had in the mid-90s is absolutely incredible. In ’94 and ’95 alone, he did both Ace Ventura movies, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber. I’m not sure any comedic actor has had a two-year stretch like that ever. He followed that up with The Cable Guy in ’96, Liar Liar (another one of my childhood favorites) in ’97. Carrey had an unbelievable ability to take a mediocre-at-best premise and spin it into gold. Other than Will Ferrell in the early 2000’s, I can’t think of anyone that could single-handedly make any move funny.

The gift that keeps on giving is Jeff Daniels, though. After making somewhat of a name for himself in serious roles like in Terms of Endearment and Gettysburg, he suddenly turns in the most ridiculous performance of his career, and then goes right back to being a serious actor. Seriously, if you look at his Wikipedia page, it lists him as an actor, musician, and playwright. The man played Atticus Finch on Broadway. He won an Emmy for The Newsroom, a decidedly serious show. Imagine if Ed Harris or Sean Bean or Ray Liotta had played Harry Dunne. That’s what we’re talking about here. Every time I watch Dumb and Dumber, and Harry gets his tongue stuck to a ski lift, or has explosive diarrhea at Mary Swanson’s house, or accidentally lights his leg on fire while trying to flirt, I get to think about how Jeff Daniels also was very convincing as a cable news host on an HBO drama. It’s an extra layer of comedy every time.

And really, I think it was actually really important for the movie.

Jim Carrey does not play well with others, and that was especially true in the mid-90s. Now, I don’t mean that to sound as if Carrey was difficult to work with, as far as everything I’ve heard, he’s an absolute pleasure to be around. I’m saying that Carrey didn’t really have co-stars. Sure, they would give him a female supporting character who sometimes was a romantic interest but sometimes wasn’t (like Courtney Cox in Ace Ventura or Cameron Diaz in The Mask), but for the most part, Jim Carrey movies only required that you wind him up and set him loose. Just look at this supercut of Jim Carrey outtakes and bloopers over the years — it almost doesn’t matter who the other people in the scene are. He’s just being Jim Carrey. Jeff Daniels is really the only co-star he’s ever had that could actually riff with him and find new laughs where there might not have been before. Not only did Jeff Daniels hold his own against Carrey (again, the best comedy star on the planet by leaps and bounds), but he actually upstaged him in a few scenes, like playing tag in the car, or when Lloyd trades the van for a scooter.

My favorite scene in the movie is at Dante’s — the hottest food east of the Mississippi — when Harry and Lloyd eat atomic peppers. I’ve watched this scene 450 times and it still gets me. When I re-watched the movie earlier this week, I was in a bad mood, and I wasn’t laughing at moments that I would normally otherwise laugh at (like Lloyd spending the last of their money on beer, a giant cowboy hat, windmill party favors, and a paddleball). When I got to the scene at Dante’s and Harry starts squirting ketchup and mustard into his mouth, I started to laugh. When Lloyd slams the bottles down on the table and tries to catch the condiment fountain on his tongue, I absolutely lost it. All of a sudden I was back.

There are so many random dumb throw-away lines that absolutely kill me. Lloyd’s “Uh, yeah, we’re in the Rockies!” when Harry asks him if he’s had an extra pair of gloves all along. Harry asking the woman at the gas station about her skis. Lloyd “remembering” Mary’s last name by reading it off the briefcase. It’s a comedy where the funny often isn’t coming from the scene, or from the premise, or from the situation, it’s coming directly from these two actors being absolute idiots.

That kind of makes it difficult to judge, though. When I watch Adam McKay comedies (Anchorman, The Other Guys, Step Brothers, etc.), I can tell that they’re trying to make a good movie that just happens to be hilarious. McKay is a talented director, and he’s backed it up with Oscar-quality movies like The Big Short and Vice. I get the same sense watching the Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and The World’s End— those movies actually have comedy layered into the very production of the movie, as shown here in a breakdown from Every Frame a Painting (which, yes, I will link to whenever I can make it relevant). Dumb and Dumber doesn’t really have that element. There’s physical comedy, but there isn’t really visual comedy.

Is that a bad thing? No, not really, because I still find the movie hilarious. A lack of one kind of laugh is made up for by plenty of laughs in other areas. When it comes to comedy, the laughs are far and away the most important component, and the quality of filmmaking is almost irrelevant. Sure, I really like Edgar Wright’s style of visual comedy, but it’s not like “loosely edited improv” (as the guy from Every Frame a Painting) calls it is necessarily a bad thing — I love improv comedy, I love sketch comedy, and I love standup comedy. None of those styles are going to bring visual laughs, so I’m not that upset when a movie doesn’t either. It’s nice when they do, but that’s not what I’m going into a comedy looking for.

I think Dumb and Dumber is a lot smarter than people give it credit for. Yes, a decent portion of the movie is just hitching your sail to the Jim Carrey tornado, but there’s more to it than that. If that’s all it took to have a good comedy, then Carrey’s career would look a lot different. There needs to be enough structure in place to keep the story tight, and enough freedom in place to find funny moments that weren’t necessarily supposed to be there. It’s a delicate balance that’s hard to pull off. There’s a reason why guys like McKay, Wright, Todd Phillips, and Judd Apatow have cranked out funny movie after funny movie for the last two decades, while most of the other hit comedies have been from one-hit-wonder creative teams, and the majority of comedies these days just suck.

When a movie like Wedding Crashers becomes huge, and the creative team has done nothing of consequence before or since, I have to assume that they just caught lightning in a bottle with the cast, who were able to take a loose script and improvise their way to a hilarious movie. That’s probably what happened, actually. The Farrelly Brothers, though, have had enough other success that I actually have to give them a lot of credit here. Hell, Peter Farrelly directed Green Book, which won Best Picture last year. It was undeserved, but it still happened. I think they’re pretty good filmmakers, all things considered. At the very least, they directed two iconic comedies in the 90s (this, and There’s Something About Mary), and this one clocks in at №39.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

21. The Other Guys

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13