Posts Tagged ‘dumb and dumber’

Dumb & Dumber 2 would have been much better if Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey were in it, if the Farrelly Brothers directed it, if it was written by someone else, if it wasn’t a sequel etc etc..

If it were possible to go back and change any of Dumb & Dumber 2’s shortcomings, we would begin by throwing out the cast and replacing it with actors who are actually funny.

We took this idea, fired up Photoshop, and made your favorite films a little bit better with the help of our long time friends, Harry Dunne and Lloyd Christmas.

The Big Lebowski

Gangs of New York

Oceans 12

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

There Will Be Blood

The Big Lebowski

American Beauty

The Departed

Transformers 2

The Dark Knight

Part of how great comedy succeeds is by offering multiple levels of awareness to the audience and to the characters within the given film or show. Most frequently, the characters are withheld information that the audience is given.

This enables the characters to go on long and frequently meaningless (mostly to the character’s ultimate goal) adventures that are extremely funny to the viewer--not because they are funny escapades, but because said viewer knows more about the character than the character knows about his or her own self.

A great example of this surfaces at the midpoint of the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb & Dumber.

Lloyd and Harry are at a payphone attempting to figure out where Mary Swanson lives so that they can return her briefcase (which they don’t know is filled with ransom cash). This is the critical moment where their dialogue and the course of their quest turns upside down.

Harry: What’s her last name? I’ll look it up.
Lloyd: You know, I don’t really recall. Starts with an S! Let’s see. Swim? Swammi? Slippy? Slappy? Swenson? Swanson?
Harry: Maybe it’s on the briefcase.
Lloyd: Oh, yeah! It’s right here.

Lloyd: Samsonite! I was way off! I knew it started with an S, though.

Harry and Lloyd were so close to figuring out where their adventure would end. But through stupidity, they become re-routed on a meaningless journey to find Mary Samsonite.

The characters know less than the audience and this amplifies their own foolishness and the comedic load of the film.

Comparing this video to Dumb & Dumber is a stretch, but somehow SFW XXX, works on the same principles. The characters (or pornstars) become fools because thay are unaware of something the viewer can plainly see. They have no idea that their scenes have been transformed into rediculous cartoons--and it’s this genuine lack of awareness, coupled with the viewer’s knowledge of what’s really going on behind the animation, that makes this video one of the greatest videos YouTube has to offer.