Better or Funnier Farrelly Comedies Than Heartbreak Kid

The "Farrelly Brothers", Peter and Bobby Farrelly have been A-number one for gross out comedy since they put Jeff Daniels on the toilet, and gave him one hell of a gross enema in Dumb & Dumber. Do you remember listening to the squeals, the swishes and the sprays in that pooping scene? The effect on an audience can be wonderful if you can spark their imagination. Those sound effects they added to that scene made a world of difference between a dud and an outrageously funny joke. It's perfectly delivered in that respect.

Since their breakthrough with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, they've gone on to make 8 feature films. Some of them were great, some weren't. Heartbreak Kid fits somewhere in the middle. Movies like Stuck on You with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear were just so disappointing. They were trying to make something that didn't work in any way, shape or form. Okay, we've got two brothers - excuse me, Siamese twin brothers, and where is the comedy? Shallow Hal was too mean-spirited. For the two guys who put "hair gel" from Ben Stiller in Cameron Diaz's hair to make a movie of bad taste is saying a lot. Then you've got the greats.

The first thing to come to mind is There's Something About Mary. The characters, the story, the dialogue, and the jokes were all there, on screen, perfectly timed to make us laugh until it hurt. Ben Stiller was in his slapstick, bumbling, and mumbling prime. Matt Damon added a brilliant twist of arrogant prick / cheap weasel / bad-natured nerd with big teeth. Cameron Diaz herself gave off the untouchable, perfect angel sort of impression that the movie needed. The Farrelly brothers were writing and directed the most wild, impressive, and outrageously funny jokes of their career. What man can forget when Ted (Stiller) yanked up his zipper only to catch himself in the teeth? Then they topped it off by actually revealing what the enflamed testy looked like. Who in their right mind would walk into a movie knowing that they would see a bulbous testicle on the big screen? It was shocking, but it worked. People were laughing so much, so hard, for so long, I don't know if any of us in the theater even caught the next joke.