Kingpin (1996)
Director: Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly

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JUMP DOWN:       1996       Skew       Centerfold       Munson      
Scale Model       Randy Quaid       Bill Murray       The Tavianis of No-Brow Comedy   
   The Irish Catholic Comedy Writer       The Repulsiveness of Physical Existence       Popularity

Kingpin, Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s follow-up to their 1994 hit Dumb & Dumber, starts out as a parody of The Natural, featuring a hapless bowler, rather than a baseball slugger, named Roy. It opens in the nostalgic long ago of Iowa in 1969 where Roy Munson’s father trains him for championship in a backlot, telling him, "You can apply everything that I’ve taught you about bowling to your daily life, and if you do that you’re gonna be decent, you’re gonna be moral, you’re gonna be a good man." Roy, however, is corruptible. As a hot young bowler in 1979 who commands a spin that makes his ball roll in place halfway down the lane before moving on to scatter the pins, Roy, played as an adult by Woody Harrelson, is the strutting disco king of the bowling alley. He tastes glory when he cops the Odor-Eaters Championship and his hometown erects a billboard proclaiming itself his birthplace. But that’s only local glory; following the national tour takes money. So Ernie McCracken (Bill Murray), the slimy, middle-aged bowler Roy defeated for the Championship, tempts Roy into hustling at a small-town bowling alley. When the losers catch up to the pair for retribution, Ernie takes off, leaving Roy to the angry yokels who mangle his bowling hand.

We then move to 1996 when Roy is a drunken, pot-bellied failure of a bowling supplies salesman who combs over his bald spot and has never got the hang of using his prosthetic hook. For appearances he covers it up with an enormous rubber hand on which he wears his Odor-Eaters ring. When he can’t make the rent on his rattrap apartment he has to have sex with his skinny, emphysemic landlady, which leaves him hugging the toilet. This reaction barely fazes her. In fact, she offers this tribute to his prowess: "What is it about good sex that makes me have to crap? You really jarred something loose, Tiger."

Roy is way past the point of hoping for an opportunity to redeem himself, but in his salesman’s rounds, with what the movie presents as the true bowler’s ability to judge a man’s game by ear alone, Roy hears an impressive, but slightly off ball. He goes to offer advice and finds Ishmael (Randy Quaid), a toweringly gawky Amish man with a blonde Dutch boy haircut. Roy sees in Ishmael a chance to get back into the game, as Ishmael’s manager, and is even willing to go undercover among the Amish to convince the reluctant booby to train for a million dollar championship in Reno.

Whether Kingpin is following the outline of the glowingly earnest Redford picture or not, it’s stomping on the canons, of sports pictures but also of taste more generally, and fermenting the juice. In fact, we’re warned in that candied opening that this will be a skewed vision--as little Roy runs to receive his father’s instruction, he leaps over a gleaming white fence and catches his foot, snapping off the points of the pickets as he falls with a thud on his face. And the entire atmosphere is tainted by the switch of bowling for baseball. To the Farrellys bowling is a gaudy pseudo-sport, a joke in itself, confirmed later in the movie when Ishmael says he feels intimidated to be in the presence of so many great athletes and the camera scans a row of fat-assed smokers and face-stuffers and beer-guzzlers.

Ishmael’s outlook echoes the churchy self-seriousness of the rhetoric of televised sports coverage, and the juxtaposition of what he says with what we see imparts to Kingpin some of the ambiguous qualities of the mock heroic: Is the point that humans fall short of the ideal or is the ideal itself being ridiculed? Kingpin has it both ways and so all the plot elements, regardless of their source--The Natural, Witness, whatever ends up in the sinktrap of the Farrellys’ minds--is subject to the same debasing process, just as in the Mad magazine-type send-ups Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Hot Shots. Still, the plot of Kingpin is more sustained than in these movies or than in Dumb & Dumber. And it holds together better than the plot of the Farrellys’ 1998 watershed hit There’s Something About Mary, in which the theme of beautiful girls bringing out the stalker in men was too central to ignore but not really made into anything. The stronger narrative of Kingpin makes its low vision that much more penetrating. The bugs under the rock have a story.

There’s also a girl in Kingpin, one out of a boy’s centerfold fantasies. Seventeen years after Roy’s first attempt, the national tour still takes money, and so Roy trains Ishmael in the hustling that he himself had learned from Ernie McCracken. After one of these bill-paying cons blows up in their faces, Claudia (Vanessa Angel), a pricey bimbo, latches onto Roy and Ishmael. She turns out to be the most talented of the three in hustling, her specialty to distract the other bowlers by bouncing around in the next lane in a farmer’s daughter get-up. And Angel is as game for her whory routines as Thelma Todd was for hers in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. But Roy and Claudia’s best passage occurs when they clash over how to handle Ishmael’s career. In one incredibly smooth bit Roy tries to ditch Claudia and she goads him into a fistfight, which parodies the tough girl-cop role of recent years. Roy doesn’t want to hit a woman but she’s so tough he ends up giving it to her, using her mammoth breasts as punching bags.

The Farrellys had to strain in Mary to appeal to girls because by inclination the brothers give it to gallantry in the neck alongside all the other Christian virtues. (Their movies make you feel that if comedy isn’t violating taboos it isn’t doing its job.) Kingpin does in fact have a romantic comedy ending but the romance by itself doesn’t have any grip on the story--the chick enters late and disappears for the climax. More typical of the movie’s darker tinge is the moment when we first see the grown-up Roy. As he exits his apartment he says to an old man who’s on an oxygen tank but still smoking, "Hey, Herb, how’s life?" and the old guy growls, "Takin’ forever."

Roy’s father told him that one day when people say the name Munson they’re gonna think, Winner. Instead, as we see when it casually drops from people’s lips, Roy’s name has entered the slang lexicon as meaning a guy at the top of his game who blows it. Roy Munson is a terrific loser-role and Harrelson is right for the part in that he seems not to have developed beyond childish impulses. He’s believable as a man who would fall and never figure out how to rise, or even to stay down with adult dignity. His best scene is his lame attempt at impersonating a dictionary salesman, which, next to Ernie McCracken’s expert sleaziness, really does make Roy look small. (The fact that poor Roy isn’t corrupt enough to be a successful anti-hero is one of the most perverse uses of pathos in our movies.) And Harrelson has a good stretch from the point when he stages a mugging of his landlady with a friend so he can "rescue" her and trade on her gratitude to beat his back rent (he does several hilarious things with hot coffee, each one of which is as funny as surprise can make a gag) to his pretending to be Amish in order to talk Quaid into becoming a professional bowler (he starts off on the wrong foot, offering Ishmael’s mother the hearty greeting of an Irish priest).

Harrelson’s comic specialty, however, is optimism unwarranted by his circumstances or his capability to deal with them--a revision of Harold Lloyd for a less optimistic age. This should make him the perfect hero for the makers of Dumb & Dumber since the premise of that movie was a pair of buddies too stupid to stay depressed. Kingpin is supposed to be blacker, sticking very close to male dread of what it means to live out every day of a failed life. And it’s funny precisely because the situations are so unglamorously base and fetid. Still, you miss the kind of lift that Harrelson can give a downward spiral (most notably in White Men Can’t Jump). Harrelson radiates only when Roy has some hope of gain, no matter how short-term. His waves here are distinctively dim and wobbly, but he can’t always dominate scenes in the ways he needs to. Woody Harrelson behind cloud cover isn’t as perceptibly a star. (He did pull it off in the pitiably underrated Palmetto, but that was a far more sophisticatedly darkling comedy.) Harrelson had never let himself look such a donkey, and he’s a shade too depressive in the last third when the propulsion slows down.

What holds Kingpin together and gives it scale--and marks it as an advance over Dumb & Dumber--is its thorough alertness to the comic possibilities of the story and setting. I had the same feeling while watching Terry Gilliam’s Monty Pythonesque medieval vaudeville Jabberwocky (1977). The point there was to take the kind of English nuttiness we recognize from comedies of the ’40s and ’50s and transport it into the past to exploit the comic possibilities of anomaly and anachronism. (You could say that Gilliam takes time by the fetlock.) What was impressive in Jabberwocky was that the past was so thoroughly appointed. For sketch comedy to work at this length, the makers have to imagine the details of a unified time and place as fully as if they were attempting a realistic panorama, though the result doesn’t have to be "realistic," just consistent. It’s the method of the historical novelist corrupted by tummlers.

The result in Jabberwocky was purposely ludicrous and yet it’s not an illegitimate way to sketch the past, which always involves imaginative recourse to some set of conventions contemporaneous to the makers but not the characters. Thus, Jabberwocky is no more fundamentally absurd than an opera with a medieval setting, such as Il Trovatore ("Burn, baby, burn!"); the difference is that when Jabberwocky makes you laugh the makers intended it. Gilliam has said that he derived this way of envisioning the movie from Breughel and Bosch paintings, with their "great sprawling worlds." 1   Kingpin is set in an imagined contemporary subculture the way Jabberwocky is set in the past, and it’s no more necessary that we believe it accurately represents even the "world" of professional bowling than that we take Jabberwocky as literal historicism. Kingpin does a similarly scrupulous job of recreating its tawdry milieu in twisted detail (as in Ulysses we even know what the characters read on the toilet). It’s as contained and complete a construct as a beehive, and the Farrellys keep it humming and oozing its funky honey.

Furthermore, though the Farrellys come close to dousing the star they hired, they bring out the best sketch acting in both Randy Quaid and Bill Murray. Quaid’s Ishmael is a taffy-brained galoot, moronic but sweet. Roy sets out to corrupt him thoroughly and so starts him smoking. When it comes to coffee Ishmael objects that he’s not allowed to partake of stimulants, and Roy’s reply, "What the hell do you think cigarettes are?" is enough to convince Ishmael to take coffee up, too. Roy leads Ishmael, his great pancake-face free of stress, from virtue to vice with no intermediary steps. Ishmael goes along with Roy because the bank is about to foreclose on the community where his family lives and, as in a melodrama about a boy’s arrival in the big city, we see innocence as a lack of corruption rather than resistance to or protection against it. Quaid’s Ishmael is depraved without being coarsened; he’s too much of a simpleton to harbor any self-loathing over what he’s sunk to. The comedy of the middle section centers on what Roy is making of Ishmael and Quaid, playing Ishmael as the jackalope of dumbbunnies, takes over.

Murray’s Ernie McCracken is the far opposite of Ishmael: the only sincere emotion he feels is bad sportsmanship. In a sense this means that Ernie is even less human than anyone else in the movie and so Murray is able to update his old Saturday Night Live spitball characters, on a grand scale. One of the great virtues of the Farrellys’ blanket raunchiness is that it’s impossible for actors to hang onto their vanity. Murray flips his away like a frisbee, appearing in the 1996 sequences in tight, sateen country-western duds with a head of hair that seems to be 100% combover.

By the final championship rematch we see that Ernie has gone on to greater glory as the man who, with his mediagenic flamboyance, is said to have done for bowling what Muhammad Ali did for boxing, and Murray’s gestures are just right for the kind of star Ernie is. He’s so confident of his hold on his public that in a TV spot for an organization he set up to help the sons of (large-breasted) single mothers, he covers up his naked lust only with smarmy double entendres: "These kids nearly got Munsoned. But they’re back now. Through the Unified Fund I found out if you give a little you can get back a whole lot more."

Ernie has that combination of garishness, insignificance, and ubiquity that mark so many media stars (many of whom, unlike Ernie, have no discernible talent at all). And he is something to watch bowling. His ball is made of clear lucite with a red rose in the center, and when he makes a strike he works up the crowd with pelvic gyrations no man with hips should attempt. Ernie is Murray’s most baroque slimebucket, and is so thoroughly free of any attempt to make us like him that he comes to have the hard surface of berserk plausibility. You know him in the way you know the people you meet in life who are impossible to know.

But even moviegoers who appreciate how sustained the comedy and Quaid’s and Murray’s performances are may overlook the Farrellys’ moviemaking skill. In Dumb & Dumber Jim Carrey’s dream sequence of social success in Aspen stood out from the rolling-downhill shenanigans. Neatly enclosed by shots of Carrey behind the steering wheel, the sequence’s gags were varied but with a rhythm that held them all together. It had more moviemaking flair than any part of Bob Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, a truly dumb movie which that same year won the critical and box office lottery.

Working with the same technical team as they had on Dumb & Dumber, the Farrellys made a notable advance with Kingpin. The camera glides into the extensive, vividly-colored settings and catches the action which has been worked out in depth. Likewise, at times the transitions have an unexpected visual fluidity--a shot of a road over a bridge disappearing to its vanishing point cuts to an analogous shot of a bowling lane. Moviemaking like that isn’t purely pictorial; the flow of the images enhances the funny tackiness, perhaps more evidently when a shot of Roy screaming as his hand is chewed up in the bowling ball return mechanism dissolves to a tree-eating machine to make the transition from 1979 to the present of the story. This is meretricious comedy-sketch bad taste at its most visually sumptuous.

Altogether Kingpin is the handsomest American slapstick movie made in color for the widescreen. The highly-touted Jerry Lewis comedies of the early ’60s were drawn with crayons by comparison and don’t move nearly as smoothly. (Kingpin looks bad only in some of the Amish interiors where the congregation wear pastel colored shirts in designer toilet paper colors. And the insistent use of song hits with an eye to soundtrack sales is not suave.) The Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II have more kinetic flair, but they’re overpoweringly idiomatic. You feel as if you were watching them through novelty spex. Kingpin is more traditionally accomplished, and on a larger scale. Among post-1996 comedies both Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Alexander Payne’s Election have shown more stylistic finish, but their kinds of comedy aren’t as antithetical to the idea of planned and achieved visual beauty. Kingpin is unapologetically juvenile in its jokes but mature in its technique, and some of the shooting is so sophisticated, so far beyond the requirements of the genre to reach its audience--a 450 degree pan when Roy is training Ishmael, for example--that I’m tempted to call the Farrellys the Tavianis of no-brow comedy.

Peter, who received sole credit for directing Dumb & Dumber, seems to be the leader of the brothers. Their five features are consistent with Peter’s two enjoyable comic novels Outside Providence (1988) and The Comedy Writer (1998) (in Outside Providence two prep school boys are chewed out by a Dean who points at one and then the other and says, "Dumb. Dumber."  2  ), but Peter’s solo writing is more ambitious. (And with passages on a higher cultural plain: the narrator of The Comedy Writer cites Nabokov’s great "(Picnic, lightning.)" as an example of writing he loves.  3 ) Though the narrator-hero is the son of a radiator repairman in one and of a doctor in the other, the novels share a distinctive narrative voice and a comically tormented Irish Catholic adolescent’s outlook. Like Huckleberry Finn they’re also both episodic tales about the development of a boy’s conscience. The young heroes are trying to do something productive with their lives without outraging decency, while prey to a thousand perverse thoughts and impulses. The same imps romp through the movies and Peter’s books, but as a novelist he tries to take responsibility for them. The very bad boy confesses to the internalized priest.

In The Comedy Writer the protagonist Henry Halloran is an aspiring screenwriter who takes home the disturbed teenaged sister of a woman whose suicide he happened to witness. The girl ends up weeping in his bed; the scene turns sexual when, as Henry puts it, "I crawled out of my underwear and slid up to her face and … wiped her tears with my cock." 4   Afterwards he feels he owes her "whatever it is that decent guys owe the women they bang," 5   despite the fact that he’s repulsed by the size of her bush. (He comments after a sight of her naked, "It looked like a raccoon was on her lap." 6 ) Later, when he has lost interest in her, she tries to arouse him by saying, "I know you want it, Catholic boy. I know you want to fuck me up the pooper. You’d probably like to do it with that crucifix," at which he silently prays to God "to forgive her for saying it and forgive me for imagining it." 7 

The one sin you can’t hang on the Farrellys is hypocrisy, and it’s legitimate to make the leap from Henry Halloran to Peter Farrelly not just because they’re both Hollywood comedy writers but because Peter imagined this whole scene, both the girl who demands anal sex and the guy who guiltily resists and responds. That’s what makes the Farrellys’ movies so seductive--shamelessness without a cover of sanctimony, for a change (i.e., no Clintonian ex post facto sniveling and no thought that frankness alone buys indulgence). This is possible because the Farrellys’ shamelessness is founded in shame. But they don’t let that hold them back. Each movie is a gassed-up series of episodes based on the endless varieties of our fallenness. And there are no incitements to hypocrisy, either, as there are in As Good As It Gets, for instance, which gives the audience Jack Nicholson’s bigoted rants and abuse of his neighbor’s dog for enjoyment while at the same time prodding them to cluck their tongues. (The audience can straddle this gap because they know all along Nicholson will reform in time for last-act hugs.)

Like the brothers’ movies, Peter’s novels overlay the temptations and repulsiveness of physical existence that both spook Catholic schoolboys and make them snigger, and build expert gags around them. Their work taken whole features jokes about disease, torture, dismemberment, and death; boogers, vomit, semen, and shit; lust, homosexuality, and bestiality. And the jokes are all conceived with the fever of adolescents who are starting to feel and do things they know they "shouldn’t." The Farrellys on page and screen preserve the sense of humor of that time in life when compulsions start winning out against the proscriptions of family, school, and church, and everything a boy wants to do seems the more intense and desirable because he’s not supposed to. It’s also the time when boys begin to figure out that all the adults warning and chastising them are veterans of the same sins, and so there’s a liberating air of defiance in the Farrellys coming clean by talking dirty.

Peter’s novels do have an edge of good-boy solemnity that belongs to coming-of-age stories. The title Outside Providence, a pun on the capital of the Farrellys’ home state, and Henry The Comedy Writer pining over his dead ex-girlfriend from high school whose name was Grace, indicate the more sedate literary uses of Catholic themes in the novels. Likewise, Kingpin has a degree of boyish earnestness. At some level it’s a sad story about a guy who fails to live up to his father’s ideals, and it sags a bit toward the end when Roy and Claudia, implausibly transformed into Roy’s concerned girl, go back to his home town and Roy opens up to her. Thus, the bit of softness translates into infelicity of narrative control, a problem that got even worse in There’s Something About Mary when they tried to expand their audience. But you never have to fear meretricious earnestness from the Farrellys. On-screen their comedy works because it’s opportunistic without apology.

There is a limitation inherent in what they’ve done. The Farrellys are willing to depict the extremes of behavior and accident that boys may imagine but don’t want to talk about. The graphicness of their slapstick fantasy--Daniels in Dumb & Dumber with diarrhea, Harrelson in Kingpin drinking from a pail of bull semen, Ben Stiller in Mary with his entire package caught in his zipper on prom night--makes their movies memorably immoderate. But this also locates them on the slender border between fearlessness and squeamishness.

I became aware of this while reading The Comedy Writer when Henry, basically a lonely nice boy, can’t score with the pro who lives across the hall. Thinking about her with a trick while masturbating onto his stomach, he says, "[T]he thought of tasting my own semen suddenly appealed to me, but then I came and I thought, What the hell was I thinking?" 8   Though this could be taken as a cameo of the mystifying change that orgasm works in men’s moods, later this stray desire will represent to Henry the nadir of his existence: "All I could think of was ... this flabby-assed Porsche-driving pig, who was probably married and had three kids, getting his nut off while I was free and single and pushed to the point where I was considering tasting my own load across the hall." 9   You might think that natural curiosity would push any guy to taste it, but no matter, this just doesn’t sound like the lowest you can sink. An intellectual quester like Michael Tolkin makes it one of the intriguing pleasures for his adulterous protagonist in his book Among the Dead. 10   Is it lower than lining up outside the door of a party girl? In any case it helps measure the dimensions of a box the Farrellys are in: a truer, deeper dislike of any physicality that lies beyond strictly conventional bounds.

Kingpin is the Farrellys’ riskiest picture yet, and, not coincidentally, their funniest, but though it’s a completely commercial comedy it was a financial flop. (As were Buster Keaton’s The General, the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby, and Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours when first released.) Avoiding imponderable and accidental causes, you can see that Kingpin has in excess the quality that all comedies have of threatening the requisite happy ending with disaster. Kingpin, like The Natural, is about a prodigy who blows it twice. But the Farrellys also make their hot young star physically unattractive as well as depressed, which to the average moviegoer is a graver offense than the easier-to-take fact that Roy’s second shot at glory involves corrupting a member of a religious community. It’s about repulsive low-lifes and doesn’t make the least gesture toward "innocence," which is what normally enables a lot of people to take scruffy slapstick heroes. (The Three Stooges don’t go for innocence, either, and this probably accounts for why girls tend not to get them. They’re children not even a mother could love.)

Dumb & Dumber evaded a conventional happy ending just by sticking to its premise: Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels were too stupid to get laid even when a busload of balloons summoned them. The target audience didn’t care if the guys didn’t get the girls provided they could look at their tits anyway. And There’s Something About Mary shrewdly dealt with the seemingly natural reluctance of women toward slapstick. (In The Comedy Writer Henry, who’s pitching a script, observes of female studio executives that "they didn’t seem interested in comedies, at least not the ones I was writing." 11 ) By making the heroine of Mary a ravishing, sporty tomboy with a foul mouth, unexpected sense of humor, and gurgly horse giggle, and giving the picture a conventional romantic comedy plot, the Farrellys made Mary a gender cross-over, a movie girls could happily concede to their dates. (It was worth seeing for Cameron Diaz’s hairstyle alone.)

But the Farrellys are so interesting because they work in the male realm of comedy. They simply can’t joke at the same consistently high level about things that aren’t close to their own fears and fantasies. Just as the sensitive scenes of George Wendt as a homosexual that they added to the 1999 movie adaptation of Outside Providence didn’t play at all, the most famous joke in Mary--Cameron Diaz unwittingly using Ben Stiller’s cum as hair gel--didn’t take for me because a stylish girl like that would think it was gross to use hair gel off a guy’s hand. (Since Mary never knew what had happened, the comedy was clearly centered on the guy’s fear of exposure. This just isn’t the kind of mishap girls live in fear of, and the awkwardness of Diaz’s gesture in this scene seemed inevitable.) The Farrellys can’t work from a girl’s perspective. Theirs is decidedly that of adolescent heterosexual males, which means in some ways both the most and least adventuresome.

Kingpin rips out like an uninterrupted flatulent dream, but even at their best the Farrellys don’t just exploit male discomfort over physicality, which has been a sure source of laughs at least since Aristophanes--they regret it and regret the possibility that we can fantasize and act outside of what’s "normal." (Unlike Nabokov, Lolita.) There’s a prissiness at the heart of their outrageousness. Maybe there usually is (though you could argue that this distinguishes them from Lenny Bruce, for instance), which is why they’re capable of connecting so solidly with a mass audience (as Bruce was not, in his own lifetime, that is). But you can’t linger over the jokes about homosexuals and the demands of frightening women for too long without thinking that at some point these boys may have to grow up.

And after seeing Me, Myself & Irene (2000) you can speak about the Farrellys more specifically as white boys in the same terms. The story is rooted in white male fear of sexual inadequacy vis-à-vis black men: a sweet Jim Carrey develops a second personality to give vent to his rage after his wife, who has presented him with obviously black triplets, leaves him for her black lover. What’s odd is that in the opening the moviemakers assume the audience will identify with the processes of Carrey’s reaction to his humiliation, but then don’t go into it any further. (When Carrey’s rage comes out it isn’t directed against the ex-wife, her lover, or their sons, in themselves or anyone who resembles them.) For the rest of its lleennggtthh the picture simply exploits the incongruity of Jim Carrey’s three black sons speaking about physics in ghetto dialect. It becomes like Pudd’nhead Wilson reduced to thoughtless and repetitive burlesque sketch material. (Lou Reed’s three-minute pop song I Wanna Be Black is much more revealing about white men’s fixation on black men. 12  ) At first you trust the Farrellys in Me, Myself & Irene precisely because they have the guts to make you uncomfortable with racial material. Then you just become uncomfortable because they’ve failed to exert control either by intelligence or instinct.

The problem for "outrageous" comedians of the moment like the Farrellys is that their own work recalibrates audience expectations. They’ve altered pop culture so that the same material seems exponentially less over-the-top now than it seemed in 1994. (This has also happened with South Park.) And the history of popular comedy, with its bewilderingly swift and irrevocable shifts, will show that sometimes only a few years separate seeming outrageous and hip from seeming square, the kind of comedian your Dad finds funny.

The Farrellys have not yet shown the aesthetic-ecstatic visionary quality of Henry Miller, but they certainly have the same strange combination of wallowing and buoyancy. And there are moments of self-awareness in Peter’s novels that go beyond anything they’ve put on film so far. (For instance, Henry’s admission in The Comedy Writer: "A couple nights later I dreamed I was fucking my younger sister’s ugly girlfriend with the tremendous ass, which upon awakening I found upsetting. Not because I was fucking her, but because I wasn’t." 13 ) Having tasted mainstream popularity with There’s Something About Mary they seem a bit unmoored from their impulses; Shallow Hal (2001), their previous offering, plays more like an act of contrition for the sentence just quoted than like a comedy. But perhaps it’s still not so far-fetched to hope that Peter the novelist will figure out how to make comedies for adults--works charged with a deeper power to entice and outrage--from the same rank material they processed so brilliantly in Kingpin.

1. Gilliam has said: Gilliam 72. (return to text)
2. Dumb. Dumber.: Farrelly, Providence 160. (return to text)
3. Nabokov: Farrelly, Comedy 148. (return to text)
4. I crawled: Farrelly, Comedy 257. (return to text)
5. whatever it is: Farrelly, Comedy 260. (return to text)
6. raccoon: Farrelly, Comedy 278. (return to text)
7. I know you want it: Farrelly, Comedy 293. (return to text)
8. [T]he thought of tasting: Farrelly, Comedy 65. (return to text)
9. All I could think: Farrelly, Comedy 68-9. (return to text)
10. Michael Tolkin: Dead 157. (return to text)
11. female studio executives: Farrelly, Comedy 146. (return to text)
12. I Wanna Be Black: The song is on Reed’s 1978 Arista album Street Hassle. The astonishing lyrics are available online at: http://ww21.tiki.ne.jp/~wildside/tabs/i_wanna_be_black.html (return to text)
13. A couple nights: Farrelly, Comedy 64. (return to text)