In the opening scene of 1994’s Dumb & Dumber a limo driver pretends to be an in-demand lecturer in the rarefied air of medical academia, in order to impress a woman waiting for a bus.
After Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) fails at both attracting the woman he sets his sights on, and at convincing anyone he’s a doctor, he climbs awkwardly back to the driver seat where he puts on his driver’s cap, and speeds off to his destination: an enormous mansion. His passenger for the day will be the upper-class Mary Swanson, whose kidnapped husband will serve as the MacGuffin of the film.
Dumb & Dumber, though unabashedly dumb at times, is also the story of two dreamers who are summed up by Larry’s lament, early on, “I’m sick and tired of having to eek my way through life”.
The film is surprisingly one of hope (the opening shot is a close up on a “Hope St.” street sign): the working class hope of a better life, and how unattainable that really is. Especially when you’re really, really dumb. (Spoiler alert: neither Harry or Lloyd get what they seek in the film, though they do get to spend a cool million dollars in just under a week.)
And I say surprising as someone whose seen Dumb & Dumber at least a dozen times, but who probably hasn’t sat down and watched it all the way through in over a decade.
If you are writing the characters of Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) and Lloyd Christmas, one of the things you are doing – consciously or not – is pointing your buffoons at whichever parts of society you choose, their stupidity the outstretched finger, drawing the viewer’s attention to things we take for granted but for whose “grantedness” would not be apparent to someone, not dumb, but less indoctrinated to the societal assumptions we stopped seeing long ago, if we ever saw them in the first place.
Really basic things like how much we should pay to sleep indoors, or how many hours we expect to be forced to work per week, can be pointed out very directly by two nitwits with a briefcase of cash.
As absolutely ridiculous as Dumb & Dumber can be (the Carrey-improvised “most annoying sound in the world” bit comes to mind) it can also say lot with little amount word.
I mean, as the pre-Kevin Malone Lloyd and Harry would probably say,
Limited Dialogue
Harry, like Lloyd, also works in service to people a class above him, as a groomer and transporter of dogs.
That is until he loses that job, after having invested in making his own transportation over-the-top on-brand for that company. Not completely unlike the way “rideshare” companies profit off the use and depreciation of their drivers’ privately owned means of production. These “here, you buy the car and then drive it for us” companies might even have impressed Karl Marx for their ability to extract wealth out of property they don’t own.
Some of these companies even made their drivers put these goofy fucking hairballs on their car.
Privilege check but also real talk: when I was in high school I started interviewing for my first summer job.
I went to one interview and the guy told me it would be a 40 hour a week job, and I stopped him right there. I said, “I don’t want to waste either of our time any longer, but I am not ready for that kind of commitment”, only less eloquently and more mumbled, while excusing myself and walking out.
Harry: Can’t believe we drove around all night and there’s not a single job in this town. There is nothing, nada, zip.
Lloyd: Yea unless you wanna work 40 hours a week
This joke still surprises me even when I know it’s coming, but it’s a lot smarter than it lets on.
In 1890,
The US government began tracking workers’ hours. The average workweek for full-time manufacturing employees was a whopping 100 hours.
Business Insider
By 1926, the Ford Motor Company was implementing a 5-day, 40-hour workweek. Despite what this clean, capital-centric timeline might imply, it wasn’t Ford’s idea.
1906: The eight-hour workday was instituted at two major firms in the printing industry.
September 3, 1916: Congress passed the Adamson Act, a federal law that established an eight-hour workday for interstate railroad workers. The Supreme Court constitutionalized the act in 1917.
September 25, 1926: Ford Motor Companies adopted a five-day, 40-hour workweek.
But those changes were not the work of two major firms in the printing industry, congress, and the most famous motor company in the world.
It would take the deaths of at least 707 people between 1850 and 1926 to bring the work week down to 40 hours. And that’s just counting the incidents Wikipedia knows about.
Out of the 79 incidents Wikipedia lists between 1850 and the Ford Motor Company implementing a workweek that has not changed in 95 years since, I just want to share 3. Almost every incident on this timeline is just as jaw-dropping.
November 13th, 1887
Thibodaux, LA
Dead: at least 35
Thibodaux Massacre: Louisiana Militia, aided by bands of prominent citizens, shot at least 35 unarmed black sugar workers striking to gain a dollar-per-day wage and lynched two strike leaders. “No credible official count of the victims was ever made; bodies continued to turn up in shallow graves outside of town for weeks to come.”[15]
April 18, 1912–July 1913
Kanawha County, WV
Dead: an estimated 50 violent deaths
Paint Creek Mine War: a confrontation between striking coal miners and coal operators in Kanawha County, West Virginia, centered on the area between two streams, Paint Creek and Cabin Creek.[61] 12 miners were killed on July 26, 1912 at Mucklow. On February 7, 1913, the county sheriff’s posse attacked the Holly Grove miners’ camp with machine guns, killing striker Cesco Estep. Many more than 50 deaths among miners and their families were indirectly caused, as a result of starvation and malnutrition.[62]
April 20, 1914
Ludlow, CO
Dead: 5 (plus 2 women, 12 children)
Ludlow Massacre: On Greek Easter morning, 177 company guards engaged by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and other mine operators, and sworn into the State Militia just for the occasion, attacked a union tent camp with machine guns, then set it afire. Luka Vahernik, 50, was shot in the head. Louis Tikas and two other miners were captured, shot and killed by the militia. 5 miners, 2 women and 12 children in total died in the attack.
Wikipedia
What the first timeline from Business Insider left out is all those who fought and died so we could have weekends and limit our working days to “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what you will“.
I like (like?) to think that at the time of this slogan’s invention no one in the industrial, Western, capitalist world could conceive of the notion of “free time” and so they could only come up with…”uh, you know…for what you will… Yea”.
The meme actually lived on and peaked in 2019 with the addition of Gritty, himself becoming something of a faux-serious labor rights icon.
Harry and Lloyd’s refusal to give up 40 hours every week is played successfully for laughs. I’m not trying to explain a joke, or why someone shouldn’t laugh at it.
But hopefully we laugh, and then we question. When did I stop being mad at having to work so much and just give in?
It seems like Millenials are catching on to Lloyd’s exasperation.
It’s almost as though the standard work week was implemented at a time when only one gender was paid for their work, and the other (there were only two to chose from) gender was forced to stay at home and do all the chores for free. Not saying we should go back to that setup, but we should all definitely have one day a week for the work of home and life. Otherwise, we’re not really getting 8 hours for “what we will”, but rather, “for what we must”.
They Knew What They Were Doing
It’s not really revolutionary to have rich people be the bad guys.
It used to happen a lot in the 80s, and Dumb & Dumber is only 4 years removed.
But watching the trope now, it feels less like a character type we’ve been watching for the last 15 years, and more like fun alley-oops at rich people’s expense.
When Mary’s family is deciding whether to tell anyone about their kidnapped husband (of course you tell everyone about your kidnapped husband everywhere you go what the fuck), they suggest to Mary that she keep up appearances, “go skiing and attend parties”. You know, the normal stuff we adults are always doing.
When the film’s big bad is talking to his hired hitman, who is calling him from a diner, the rich bad guy reminds him sarcastically, “your bread plate is on the left”.
In contrast is our duos situation: out of money on the road to Aspen. At one point, Harry yells at Lloyd, “we don’t have enough money to go home, we don’t have enough money to eat, we don’t have enough money to sleep“.
It’s another one of those lines that will make you laugh but also remind you how ridiculous of a world we live in where, on the edge of my city’s downtown, directly across the street from towering skyscrapers sitting empty, is this scene:
Can anyone tell me what the fuck the point of this is:
If right across the street you have this:
The Farrelly Brothers may have just been playing off well-worn movie tropes, but they successfully put us on the side of the hapless blue collar duo, tired of “running from creditors”, beating the odds against an upper-class foe.
As the Farrellys said in an interview for EW:
The Andy Griffith Show was great because it always made you laugh, bit it had a little heart, or message to it. And we wanted to do that. And in fact, when we started doing it – Dumb & Dumber is out first movie – we have that scene in the beginning of the movie where Jim’s at the window, and he gets totally serious, and he says…(clip from movie)
Lloyd: I’m sick and tired of having nobody
The studio looked at that and said, “cut that”. They said, “that’s a bunch of bull.” Like, “what are you, kidding? This is a comedy” and I said, “no, no, we need this”. And they kept fighting and we said, “look, in 2 minutes he’s selling a dead bird to blind kid in a wheelchair, you better like him”. And that was our argument, always, that there should be one other layer of reality
Earlier in the film Harry and Lloyd show that “little heart”, and their working-class solidarity, by picking up an extended family/group of migrant workers without a moment’s hesitation, and spend the trip singing songs alongside them.
At another point, after our lovable, dumb duo decides to spend the money in the MacGuffin briefcase, they make a promise only poor people would make: “right down to the last cent, whatever we borrow we pay back”. If you think I’m being flippant, rich people don’t even pay back the government for the debt they incur living in an advanced society, also known as “taxes”.
The richest Americans are hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the Internal Revenue Service, according to a comprehensive new estimate of tax evasion, with the top 1 percent of earners accounting for more than a third of all unpaid federal taxes
WaPo
Towards the end of their journey Harry and Lloyd adorn, arguably, the loudest suits in film history, to attend a benefit for an endangered species of owl.
Early on at the gala, Mary introduces H&L to one of her equally wealthy friends who literally laughs at their suits, thinking they were being worn ironically. Their colors to garish, to un-muted to be considered “classy”, much less, worn sincerely.
A few minutes later Harry and Lloyd kill one of the two birds the benefit is being held to save (retribution for the killing of their pet bird at the hands of the hitman at the beginning of the film).
Not only are Harry and Lloyd laughed at for their new-money taste in clothes, but their appearance, and killing of the scared bird, undermine the entire event they are attending.
The death of the owl removes from the rich their sense of false self-importance: they’d rather try to save an animal with only two members of its species remaining (low probability of success) than help people who could use it. They want to be seen as God-like saviors of an entire species rather than buy meals to feed the children experiencing food insecurity in America (high certainty of success), a number that rose to a staggering “27.5% of households with children” during the coronavirus.
Saving species of animals is absolutely important.
But it’s also important to note that the Farrelly Brothers chose a fundraiser for its rich characters that does not involve helping any people. And then they had their working class characters make a mockery of the entire affair.
It reminds me of the way the world’s richest men are fighting to go to space instead of fucking helping anyone. Now if only I was there at their ribbon cutting ceremonies in the fan-danciest pair of slacks I could find.
Oh my goodness! an incredible article dude. Thank you However I’m experiencing problem with ur rss . Don抰 know why Unable to subscribe to it. Is there anyone getting an identical rss drawback? Anybody who is aware of kindly respond. Thnkx
Hi my friend! I wish to say that this article is amazing, nice written and include approximately all vital infos. I抎 like to see more posts like this.
I was just looking for this info for a while. After six hours of continuous Googleing, at last I got it in your website. I wonder what is the lack of Google strategy that don’t rank this kind of informative web sites in top of the list. Usually the top websites are full of garbage.
This design is spectacular! You obviously know how to keep a reader entertained. Between your wit and your videos, I was almost moved to start my own blog (well, almost…HaHa!) Excellent job. I really loved what you had to say, and more than that, how you presented it. Too cool!