Movies Test the Limits of Bad Taste

Is this funny?

In the 20th Century Fox comedy, “Me, Myself & Irene,” opening Friday, Jim Carrey plays a Rhode Island cop who does the humane thing by shooting an injured cow he finds lying in the middle of the road. When the cow doesn’t die, he shoots it again. When it still doesn’t die, he empties his gun into the animal. Then, its head still jerking, Carrey pounces on the cow and tries to strangle it.

Is this funny?

In DreamWorks’ teen-oriented “Road Trip,” oddball MTV comedian Tom Green dangles a squirming mouse over his open mouth to show a snake how to eat a rodent. Green then puts the mouse into his mouth, leaving its pink tail wiggling between his lips.

Or, is this funny?

In Dimension Films’ soon-to-be-released teen horror parody, “Scary Movie,” comedian Cheri Oteri of “Saturday Night Live” fame spoofs “The Blair Witch Project” by standing in the woods with a flashlight shining on her face as mucous cascades from her nostrils.

Over the last few summers, comedies like “There’s Something About Mary,” “American Pie” and “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” have become blockbusters in part by grossing out audiences. They’ve replaced tamer or more subtle romantic comedies (Julia Roberts’ films as notable exceptions) as Hollywood’s most reliable form of humor at the box office.

The latest entrant into this genre is “Me, Myself & Irene,” written and directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the same brothers who made “There’s Something About Mary” and “Dumb and Dumber.” Their new film ups the ante for grossness with its sexual and bathroom humor that would have been unthinkable in mainstream movies a generation ago.

Keenan Ivory Wayans, who directed “Scary Movie,” believes that if you’re a filmmaker doing one of these over-the-top comedies today, “you have to measure your starting point where the last guy left off.”

By all appearances, the starting point is moving down the road at a rapid clip. Studios are looking for new ways to poke fun at race, religion, gender, age, and even the physically and mentally impaired. And if ticket sales are any judge, Americans are loving it. Crude humor is riding a national wave of popularity--particularly with the young males who have become Hollywood’s main meal ticket.

A generation ago, the 1972 underground classic, “Pink Flamingos,” earned director John Waters the moniker “Pope of Trash” for an infamous scene involving Divine and a handful of doggy poo. How does the “Pope of Trash” react to Hollywood’s current embrace of crudity?

“What used to be called sick humor is now called American humor,” said Waters, whose upcoming summer film, “Cecil B. Demented,” accuses mainstream Hollywood of co-opting the violence and raunchy sex once reserved for small, exploitation movies. “The biggest movies in the world now contain sick humor.”

The line has also been crossed in other areas of pop culture, from the graphic sexual lyrics of rapper Eminem and the coarse ramblings of radio “shock jock” Howard Stern, to the frank language and nudity seen on cable TV shows like “Sex and the City” and racy jokes (remember when Bill and Monica were in the news?) dispensed by late-night talk show hosts Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien.

“We are living in a time when it’s pretty hard to find anything outrageous anymore,” said Michael DeLuca, president of production at New Line Cinema, which saw the domestic grosses on the “Austin Powers” sequel top $205 million last summer.

“I think each generation gets more and more tolerant of situations and subject matters that previous generations might have considered taboo,” DeLuca added. “We are now dealing with a generation where the cat’s out of the bag with every single subject. . . . Society as a whole has moved into a taboo-free zone.”

Take “Scary Movie.” In one scene that spoofs the opening of “Scream,” Carmen Electra plays a woman being chased through her house by a masked, knife-wielding intruder. Armed with a baseball bat, she throws open the front door and clubs two masked people standing on her porch--only to discover they are kids out trick-or-treating.

“If you want to make the summer comedy, and you know Eddie Murphy is out there [with ‘Nutty Professor II: The Klumps’] and Martin Lawrence is out there [with ‘Big Momma’s House’] and that is your competition, you have to be out there and be as daring and bold as they are,” Wayans said.

‘Coarsening of Society’ Is Seen

Mark Honig, executive director of the Family Television Council, a Los Angeles-based group that advocates bringing more responsibility to entertainment, believes that the prevalence of gross-out humor not only leads to a “coarsening of society” but affects impressionable young people who often mimic what they see at the movies and on TV.

“In television, it’s led by that carnival known as ‘WWF Smackdown!’--the wrestling show,” Honig said. “Now you have major studios trying to tap into that market by trying to appeal to that lowest common denominator.”

How far has comedy come? Or, perhaps, how far has it fallen?

For a clue, look no further than the pilot for comedian Robert Schimmel’s new TV sitcom on Fox, which opens with the star getting a proctological exam.

Such raunchiness has flourished for years on the stand-up comedy circuit. But Hollywood really took interest two years ago when “There’s Something About Mary” made more than $176 million domestically by featuring scenes like Cameron Diaz wearing an unusual handmade gel on her blond locks.

“I think the Farrelly brothers have raised the raunch bar,” said David T. Friendly, co-producer of “Big Momma’s House.” “They have taken on any subject.”

In today’s crude comedies, almost anything is fair game. In “Road Trip,” a college student steals a bus from a school for the blind. In “Me, Myself & Irene,” mental health advocates are upset over Carrey’s character, who suffers from a split-personality disorder--the mild-mannered, hard-working Charlie Baileygates versus his hyper-aggressive, Dirty Harry-voiced alter ego, Hank.

For filmmakers pushing the boundaries of bad taste, the challenge is less about avoiding offending audiences than it is about making the material seem both fresh and funny.

In its review of “Me, Myself & Irene,” Daily Variety wrote: “The really outrageous sexual humor is present, to be sure, but it has a certain dragged-in quality, as if the [Farrelly] brothers had a gross-out quota to fill and inserted the penile/rectal/vaginal gags, so to speak, wherever they could.”

Major studios and big-name stars may have avoided this type of humor a generation ago, but no longer. ‘Road Trip,” for example, was released by DreamWorks SKG, the studio formed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. The film was produced by Ivan Reitman, who directed such mainstream comedies as “Ghostbusters” and “Twins,” and Tom Pollock, a onetime studio chief at Universal Pictures and past chairman of the American Film Institute.

“I have been a fan of these kinds of movies since I was 14,” Pollock said, noting that while he ran Universal, he green-lighted two of comedian Adam Sandler’s sophomoric early romps, “Happy Gilmore” and “Billy Madison.”

Pollock believes that, just as every individual has their own sense of what’s funny, comedy should reflect those differences. There is the high-brow comedy of “Some Like It Hot” and “Tootsie,” he noted, and low-brow fare like “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”

Still, Pollock believes there are limits to what the public will stomach.

“It isn’t just about pushing the envelope,” Pollock said. “Where you don’t want to go is being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous.”

In “Road Trip,” Pollock said, the script called for Green to simply hold the mouse above his head and say, “You are going to die.” But the irrepressible comedian surprised everyone by putting the rodent between his lips.

“He was not going to do that and was not asked to,” Pollock chuckled. While the scene was deemed too hilarious to remove from the film, audiences did not see what happened next.

“There is an outtake from the film in which the mouse actually shifts in his mouth,” Pollock said. “That did not make it into the movie because that would be gross. But putting the mouse in his mouth is funny.”

Comedian Oteri, probably best known for her portrayal of Arianna, the female half of the Spartan Spirit cheerleader squad on TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” believes the audience “will always turn on you” if they think the joke has gone too far.

“If you do something just for shock value, then I say, ‘Shame on you,’ ” Oteri said. “I think you have to have a story and depth of character if the audience is going to allow you to get away with things that are politically incorrect. I think people will forgive you if there is real thought behind a character or the story.”

While good taste may be out, filmmakers say gross-out comedies won’t click with the masses unless they are good-natured at heart and have likable characters. Both “There’s Something About Mary” and “American Pie,” for example, were warmly embraced by critics and audiences for their underlying sweetness, while the darker Jim Carrey comedy, “Cable Guy,” was rejected for being mean-spirited.

Even Charlie Chaplin Tested the Limits

As far back as Charlie Chaplin, whose Little Tramp playfully lifted women’s dresses with his cane, comedians have regularly tested the boundaries of bad taste in search of laughs.

“Chaplin wasn’t socially acceptable,” said Tony Macklin, a film historian at the University of Dayton. “We look back on that now and don’t recognize it, but a lot of people thought he was dirty.

“I think, in a way, the Farrelly brothers are really descendants of the Three Stooges,” he added, “but they take it further because the culture allows them to.”

Half a century ago, American moviegoers were shocked at the mere mention of the word “virgin” and the sight of a bed in Otto Preminger’s now-tame-looking 1953 comedy, “The Moon Is Blue.” And in 1964, United Artists refused to release Billy Wilder’s comedy, “Kiss Me, Stupid!” under its UA banner because its Dean Martin-Kim Novak sex romp was deemed too racy for the corporate label. Instead, the film was released under UA’s art house banner, Lopert Films, and references to the movie’s setting--Climax, Nev.--were removed from its advertising.

Through the years, Hollywood has regularly tested the waters of raunchiness, whether it was Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” in 1974, “National Lampoon’s Animal House” in 1978, or “Porky’s” in 1981.

Lowell Ganz, who with partner Babaloo Mandel has written such mainstream comedies as “Night Shift” and “Parenthood,” said studios are aiming at a specific demographic when they make raunchy comedies.

“They’re chasing 14- to 24-year-old boys because that is the most devoted moviegoer, who always shows up on Friday night, doesn’t wait to hear what the reviews are,” Ganz said. “Something appeals to them and they go.

“I really have no specific problem with obscenity or bad taste,” Ganz added. “It’s bad comedy that I object to. Babaloo and I watch everything, back to Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, and there’s quality there. There’s a way to do it so that it’s good and smart and fresh and hasn’t been seen before.”

Wayans believes audiences now tolerate cruder comedy because society itself is cruder.

“We have been shocked to the point of numbness,” Wayans said. “The idea of somebody coming to work and shooting six people is commonplace. The first time you heard it, you went, ‘Oh, my God!’ It totally affected your life. Now, it’s just another nut.

“I think that’s why [gross-out] comedy works so well now,” he added. “People want relief. If you’re going to shock them, they’d rather you shock them by tickling their funny bone.”

Andy Horton, a professor of film at the University of Oklahoma and author of a book about writing comedy screenplays, said Hollywood may think it’s daring and brash when it crosses the line of bad taste, but it really isn’t new.

As far back as ancient Greece, Horton noted, gross comedy has been a staple of entertainment.

“Aristophanes wrote some of the grossest jokes and some of the greatest poetry,” Horton said. “Ancient Greek comedy combined lower-body humor and spirituality all in one comedy.

“Hollywood has had the best of non-lower-body humor in the films of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra. Now they [filmmakers] have to explore the part they left out and enjoy the balance.”

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* THE INSIDE VIEW

The Farrelly brothers, who wrote and directed “Me, Myself & Irene,” defend the movie. F6