The comedy scene Jim Carrey refused to shoot
The comic talents of Jim Carrey spread so far and wide that sometimes his slapstick humour and eccentric characters can almost border on going too far. With legendary characters in the likes of The Mask and Ace Ventura, Carrey is one of the true masters of comedy, and his legacy in the film industry burns as bright today as it did back in the 1990s.
However, even Carrey has refused to perform some scenes, not for the sake of saving face, but for the good of a narrative. One such instance came in the 1994 buddy comedy Dumb and Dumb, directed by Peter Farrelly, written with brother Bobby, focusing on a pair of stupid but good-natured friends who set out on a journey to Aspen to return a briefcase full of money to its owner, unknowing it had been left as a ransom.
The film ends with Harry and Lloyd bringing their adventure to a close by walking home in dejection without a dollar to their name and no transportation. It’s at that point that a bus full of bikini-clad women shows up, asking the pair if they would mind being their “oil boys”, but in typical Dumb fashion, they advise the bus that there’s a town a few miles down the road.
Rather than accept the invitation, their stupidity seems to ignore the opportunity, but the hilarity is not over there because Lloyd suddenly realises their mistake and flags the bus down. He then tells the women that the town is, in fact, a few miles down the road in the other direction, which is yet more quality writing from the Farrelly Brothers.
Interestingly, the end of Dumb and Dumber was not always the way the film was going to be brought to a close. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Peter Farrelly once opened up on other options for the ending, including one where the pair are offered a job by a hotel concierge, which was “amusing, but it wasn’t good enough.”
Eventually, the bikini bus idea came up, but the film’s studio seemed to think that the pair ought to get on the bus for a happy ending. However, the Farrellys weren’t up for this, with Peter noting, “They’re too dumb to get on the bus. And we felt like we were going to be comfortable with that ending.”
The compromise was for both ways to be filmed, but the Farrellys still felt sceptical about even giving the studio the chance. “We kind of suspected that if we did shoot it both ways, the studio would make us use the other one, and we really didn’t want to use that ending,” Peter said, “Like the traditional happy Hollywood ending where they go driving off and everyone’s happy. And so we did not ever shoot that.“
Farrelly was backed by Carrey himself, who also understood that the best way to finish the film was in another moment of tragedy. Farrelly signed off, “We went out there, and we told Jim Carrey, too, we said, ‘Jim, well, they’re also asking us to have a scene where you guys get on the bus.’ And he basically said, ‘I am not stepping foot on that bus. I won’t do it.’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, well, we agree.’ So we never did shoot it the other one; we went back and told the studio we ran out of daylight, and we couldn’t do it.”
