After watching DIRTY LOVE, a friend and I had a discussion about what makes a comedy like this work and why DIRTY LOVE failed so miserably in comparison to a film like DUMB & DUMBER. Both films include characters that are stupid idiots who fart, pee, and generally act in an obscene and vulgar manner, but DUMB & DUMBER is undeniably the better and funnier film of the two (even people who loath DUMB & DUMBER would certainly agree on this point). Why? The answer we came up with is that it has to do with the human element of comedy. When there is no humanity to be seen in the characters, the audience finds it difficult to identify with the improbable situation the characters find themselves in. There is a big difference between seeing Jenny McCarthy wallow in a puddle made of her own menstrual blood for no reason except to degrade her character even further than she already has been degraded and a scene in DUMB & DUMBER in which Jim Carrey accidentally kills one of the last two of a certain kind of owl in the world. The DUMB & DUMBER example, crude as it is, is a comment on society and the values of the characters and also was an expertly set up and executed joke. DIRTY LOVE's supermarket scene is just embarrassing.
Review of Dirty Love
