Every summer seems to spawn one out-of-the-blue hit comedy, and this year’s is “There’s Something About Mary,” which mixes a romantic plot with audaciously raunchy humor.
Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who directed and co-wrote “Mary,” have experience in violating good-taste boundaries for a laugh; their previous two movies were the Jim Carrey smash “Dumb and Dumber” and the Woody Harrelson/Randy Quaid A-mish bowling comedy “Kingpin.” Bobby, at 40 the younger Farrelly by a year, spoke from south suburban Boston about making a movie that will forever change people’s associations with hair gel and stuck zippers.
Q. Do you guys use hair gel?
A. Not very often and not anymore, no.
Q. Um, so how much of the movie is autobiographical?
A. A lot of the stuff, actually – and it’s true with all our movies – we take from things that have happened in our lives or in the lives of close and twisted friends. Like the zipper scene was an incident that happened at our house at a party in about the eighth grade. One of the kids at the party went up into the bathroom and just tangled up his manhood to no end. After about an hour of struggling with it, my parents – my father’s a doctor, my mother’s a nurse – they had to go in and free willy, if you will.
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Q. Have any groups given you flak for the movie’s treatment of handicapped people, dogs or anyone else?
A. It’s funny because most of the people think some other group is going to complain. We have a lot of friends that have mentally challenged siblings, and they were with us when we were making the movie, and they didn’t feel that it was in any way offensive. Nor did we, because the people that matter in this movie – namely Cameron Diaz’s character and Ben Stiller’s – the way that they treat (Mary’s mentally challenged) brother is the way that people should treat him. The other guys are scoundrels, and in no way are people saying that this is right, and in fact it’s so wrong that that’s probably where the humor in it comes in.
Q. The key seems to be that you don’t condescend to those characters.
A. The brother is named Warren. He’s based on a guy who’s a very good friend of ours from our hometown of Cumberland, R.I., and his name is Warren. Warren’s a guy that we hung out with all our lives. He had a great sense of humor, he loves to laugh, he loves to laugh at himself, he loves to be the butt of jokes, and he loves to play jokes on other people. So we were just thinking, let’s get a character like this and make him a guy that you don’t have to treat with kid gloves. Maybe he’s the butt of a joke. Maybe he dishes out a couple of jokes. That’s how Warren is in real life.
Q. Your brand of comedy isn’t particularly inhibited.
A. No, it’s not inhibited. We don’t do it for shock value. We don’t do it to see how far we can go. At the same time we don’t pay attention to what would be considered political correctness or that kind of thing. We just go where we think the laughs will take us. We find that the whole concept of political correctness is the death of comedy. It’s a nice idea. I’m sure it has good intentions, and it probably works really well in the workplace, but in the world of comedy it doesn’t work.
Q. Is there anything that you filmed for this movie that you decided, “No, this is in just too bad taste to leave in?”
A. It’s just a matter of how much you leave in. Like when (the sun-withered woman played by Lin Shaye) was making out with her dog – which incidentally was not in the script; the dog just started licking her during a shot, and she just went for it. We could have left in so much of that that it’s absurd. We cut it down to an amount that people find funny.
Q. Some of the humor still makes some people uncomfortable. They say, “It’s gross-out humor.”
A. I don’t consider it gross-out humor at all. You go to the theater and watch it with people. There’s 50 laughs in the movie. Some of them you could say are gross. But the point is we’re not there to be gross. Gross doesn’t make people laugh. Funny makes people laugh.