Summer of ‘96: Big personalities try to save two lackluster comedies

Eddie Murphy and Jim Carrey are the standouts in two high-profile films.

First off, an apology. 

This has been a busy summer, much busier than I’d anticipated. In my day job, we’re preparing for a return to normal operations after a year and a half of change. As one of our organization's communicators, this has kept me extremely busy crafting a variety of web content, emails and the like, on top of writing several in-depth magazine articles for another project.

Outside of work, we’re in a constant state of flux. My son started day camp at our rec center, which is good, but means we’ve had to take some time to acclimate to a new routine. My wife works at a church and is often out in the evenings or weekends taking care of things. We’ve had some vacations, pre-planned events and other obligations around the home, and it’s eaten up pretty much all the time we have. 

Evenings and weekends are my time to write my newsletter and blog posts or record and edit my podcasts. But truth be told, the aforementioned busyness hasn’t left me in much of a place to do that over the last few weeks. By the time I’m done with work, we’ve eaten dinner and the kids are in bed, I’ve been mentally drained. I’ve been retreating to the couch to read for an hour or watch something fairly non-taxing, and writing about any of that has been the furthest thing from my mind. 

So that’s put a bit of a crimp in my outside-the-office projects. I’ve squeaked out a few blog posts for Patheos because I’m under contract to keep that going. But We’re Watching Here has been on a short hiatus and I haven’t done much with The Jesus Junkyard Podcast in a few weeks. And this newsletter has taken a hit. I’ve gotten something out each week, but haven’t hit the targets I’ve wanted. And a lot of that is just because this business of returning to normalcy is keeping me more occupied than I imagined. At work, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch, and I’ve had to keep new communications balanced with other ongoing demands. At home, I feel like our evenings and weekends are suddenly caught up in a flood of activity that was on hold for a year, and now everyone wants a piece of us that they couldn’t get 12 months ago. It’s not a bad problem to have; it just doesn’t leave time for much else. 

The good news is, I think that’s going to start changing. I can feel a bit more stability creeping in, I’m finding myself more energized and focused at the end of the day, and the anxiety that had been a little more constant in recent weeks is starting to ebb. I’ve talked to Perry about sitting down to do our next We’re Watching Here in a week or two, and I’m starting to map out some more Jesus Junkyard blog posts. I think we’re going to get back on stride soon with this newsletter, returning to pumping out the weekly email as well as the Sundays with Spielberg on a more consistent basis. 

This week, we’re going to hold off on another Sundays with Spielberg and, instead, do another Summer of 1996 piece, this one about two high-profile comedies from 25 years ago. 

A comeback and a disappointment 

Going into the summer of 1996, the comedy everyone was looking forward to was The Cable Guy. 

For those who weren’t around then, I don’t know that I can stress how big of a deal Jim Carrey was at this point. I honestly can’t think of another comedian who blew up so quickly, going from being “the white guy on In Living Color” to the world’s highest-paid actor in the space of two years. Just between 1994 and 1995, he did Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Batman Forever, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, and each was a big fat hit. 

As a teenage boy, I was all in on Carrey. Critics might have tut-tutted about him speaking through his butt cheeks in Ace Ventura, but my 15-year-old lizard brain thought it was the height of comedy. I could quote The Mask and Dumb and Dumber verbatim; I didn’t think there was anything the rubber-faced jester couldn’t do, and I wasn’t alone. Carrey dominated the box office and, as he did so, his asking price soared. 

Carrey became the first actor to make $20 million when he signed on to Ben Stiller’s The Cable Guy, which made the film a must-see for the funnyman’s devotees and a curiosity for those who wanted to see what $20 million might buy them. But they recoiled at the dark comedy, which featured Carrey in an unpleasant, antagonistic role as a cable repairman who becomes too enmeshed in the life of one of his clients (Matthew Broderick). The film received a critical drubbing and only made $60 million at the U.S. box office; half of what Dumb and Dumber brought in. I was among the unimpressed; Carrey’s performance bounced off me and clattered to the floor, the film’s dark tone never particularly engaged, and the satire never hit. 

Meanwhile, I don’t recall anyone looking forward to the Eddie Murphy-led remake of The Nutty Professor. Murphy — who, in the 1980s, hit Carrey-level heights — was coming off a series of disappointments, including the inert franchise-killer Beverly Hills Cop III and the dead-on-arrival Vampire in Brooklyn. I don’t know if people were necessarily pining for a remake of a Jerry Lewis vehicle. And while director Tom Shadyac had been behind Carrey’s breakthrough in Ace Ventura, most of the credit for that went to the film’s lead. 

I couldn’t have been that familiar with Eddie at that point. I was too young to have seen his SNL heyday or stand-up routine. The previews, which seemed to be a series of fat gags, didn’t entice me. It wasn’t until the film received solid reviews for Murphy that a friend and I decided to see it while I dropped my brother and a friend off to see something else. 

And readers, to this day, I don’t know that I laughed harder at a film than I did during my first viewing of The Nutty Professor. When that first family dinner erupted into a symphony of flatulence and dirty jokes, I lost it. I know it’s cliché to say that I laughed until I cried, but that’s what happened. Tears rolled down my cheeks, I struggled for breath, my stomach hurt. Every single fart was the funniest thing I’d heard. At 42, I probably shouldn’t admit to this, but I’m also old enough to know that nothing is funnier to a teenage boy than passing gas. 

And again, I wasn’t the only one. The Nutty Professor received solid reviews for Murphy’s performance, with some critics suggesting that an Oscar might be in order. It earned nearly $130 million at the box office and spawned a (truly wretched) sequel in The Klumps. It was the first of Murphy’s occasional comebacks. And it positioned Shadyac as the go-to director for comedies featuring big personalities, to varying degrees of success (I think his 1997 reunion with Carrey, Liar Liar, might be the actor’s best purely comedic performance, but 1998’s Patch Adams is a nadir for Robin Williams). 

Twenty-five years later, I don’t hear a lot of people talking about The Nutty Professor; it seems The Klumps and Norbit affected its reputation negatively. And The Cable Guy has turned into a cult hit, with people praising not only Carrey’s unhinged performance but also Stiller’s satire (assisted by his producer, a then-unknown Judd Apatow). 

So, a half-decade after one film left me breathless and another left me cold, how do they shake out? 

Funnymen dominate 

In some aspects, both The Nutty Professor and The Cable Guy couldn’t be more different. The former is a broad, raucous comedy. The Cable Guy aims to be darker than a typical Carrey vehicle, with Lou Holtz Jr.’s script casting a satirical eye at our media-obsessed culture. And yet, the key appeal with both films is that they provide a delivery system for funny personalities to run rampant over everything in their path. 

Few things bring me more joy than an engaged Eddie Murphy performance. And that’s because I don’t know that there is another comedian who harnesses the same amount of skill, edge and charisma. His smile is a weapon, and few big-name comedians are as adept at disappearing into a role. 

In the mid-90s, Murphy was coming off a long string of frustrated and flailing paycheck performances as he toyed with becoming a romantic lead, pivoted back to action star and made a brief dalliance into horror, all without any of the charm and vivacity that powered his most memorable performances. And he must have known this, because he throws everything he has into The Nutty Professor’s multiple roles.

Sherman Klump is a tricky character. Played by Murphy in a giant fat suit, much of the script treats him as a living, breathing fat joke. But Murphy understands just how to play him and imbues him with warmth, humor, intelligence and pathos. Sherman isn’t oblivious to his weight or how people view him; he’s trying to slim down, but also can’t see that his worth is not tied to the scale. As woos a colleague (Jada Pinkett-Smith), Murphy helps us understand why Ms. Purdy might be attracted to him but he also captures the loneliness of a man who knows how the world views him and doesn’t fit in with his loud-mouth family. 

Murphy creates a sympathetic character to anchor the film, and then goes wild, filling the cast with outrageous characters who steal the rest of the film. He’s most successful as the various members of the Klump family, whose two dinner scenes are still the highlight. Murphy portrays all but the youngest member of the family, and it’s still enjoyable to watch the characters interact, from Mama Klump’s “Her-ca-les” to Papa Klump’s in-your-face flatulence to Grandma Klump’s shocking sex talk. The two sequences, which both devolve into extended fart jokes, are the points where the movie is the funniest, and it’s easy to see why the sequel built itself around the entire Klump family (even if doing so was a disaster). 

Less successful are Murphy’s two other creations. Buddy Love is the Eddie Murphy stand-up persona gone wild, and Murphy plays him as an anthropomorphized, six-foot piece of testosterone. This is what happens when you unleash Eddie on a movie, and some of it is very funny, such as the sequence when Buddy terrorizes an insult comic (a then-unknown Dave Cappelle). But a little goes a very long way, and after awhile the volume becomes wearing. Murphy eventually found a much better way to undercut his persona’s toxic masculinity in Bowfinger, when he offset the arrogance with paranoia. And we won’t devote much time to Lance Perkins, the Richard Simmons-esque fitness guru played as one long gay joke. 

I was mesmerized by Murphy’s performance when I first saw this film, and immediately bought the VHS of his SNL bits. I’m still amazed by his energy and versatility, even if a familiarity with his act revealed how much he was pulling out old bits. The Nutty Professor is one of the high marks of his career, even if it also set him up for a spell of increasingly banal and shrill family comedies. 

With The Cable Guy, I had a visceral and negative reaction to Carrey’s performance in 1996. Revisiting it, I don’t think Carrey’s the problem. Yes, Chip Douglas (one of the character’s many names) is off-putting, but that’s by design. And 25 years on, he doesn’t seem to be too much of an outlier from the rest of Carrey’s career. 

The actor has a fondness for characters who don’t seem at home in the world, and that characteristic has led to strong performances in films like The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Man on the Moon. I think the quick ascent to stardom jarred something in Carrey and he often wrestles with feeling like he’s that square peg that doesn’t fit into the world’s round hole. At times, it leads to fascinating performances; other times, it indulges a weirdness that falls flat (looking at you, The Number 23). 

But his work in The Cable Guy isn’t bad. Chip’s not one of Carrey’s lovable kooks. He’s a man raised by television, whose only ideas of social interaction come from what he’s seen play out on the screen. He has no sense of propriety or boundaries. He bursts into Broderick’s apartment telling inappropriate jokes, not understanding where the line is. When he plays pick-up basketball, his antics sour the fun. He tells dirty jokes at a family dinner with Broderick’s character and his girlfriend (Leslie Mann). When his tokens of friendship are rebuffed, he resorts to kidnapping. He’s not a good guy. 

And Carrey portrays him as a loud, unsettling menace. Sometimes, it’s very funny. The lisp he gives Chip feels like an affectation Adam Sandler would adopt for one of his characters, but Carrey both has fun with the impediment as well as shows how this is yet another thing that keeps Chip isolated. When the character goes all-in on something, it’s fun to watch; the Medieval Times sequence is still very funny, and I can’t help but laugh at the film’s Silence of the Lambs gag. And Carrey is a magnetic performer; whatever he’s doing, it’s hard to take your eyes off him. I don’t know that his karaoke rendition of “Somebody to Love” is funny, but I do know that it’s riveting. 

This is a film where another actor could have brought in another take on Chip and changed the whole tone (the film was originally to star Chris Farley, and I imagine that would have been a cuddlier take). Carrey and Stiller, however, wanted to go darker and a bit more unpleasant. I can understand why audiences who loved Ace Ventura and wanted more of that were a bit baffled by Carrey’s abrasive take, but I’ll give him credit for going for it. It’s big, it’s sometimes very funny and it dominates the movie the same way that Murphy lords over every single scene in The Nutty Professor. These are both very funny, very skilled performances. 

Unfortunately, they’re both in pretty bad movies. 

Struggling to keep up 

The best star-driven comedies have directors who can keep up with the talent at the center and make the film’s world just as weird and vibrant as they are. It’s why Adam McKay’s films with Will Ferrell work so well while the comedian’s other collaborators struggle, or why the Austin Powers franchise works while Mike Myers’ other comedies fall flat.

Both Murphy and Carrey suck the air out of their respective films. Their performances are memorable — in Murphy’s case, classic — but the films surrounding them feel lifeless and inert. 

I remembered The Nutty Professor as a fun kids’ film, and considered watching it with my kids. I’m glad I chose not to do that, as I’d forgotten how dirty the film is. Two minutes in, it has its first boner joke; two minutes later, a character drinks hamster poop. Granny Klump’s musings are vulgar and graphic, and I’d forgotten there’s a sequence that reveals that Sherman, while Buddy Love, engaged in an orgy. 

I’m not a prude, and just two years later I fell head over heels for There’s Something About Mary. But the dirty jokes feel at odds with the film’s tone, which also has animal gags and fart jokes aimed at the teen set or below. As a result, some of the film’s funniest and most shocking moments feel out of place in a film about acceptance and self-confidence and the film’s non-Eddie bits just feel too silly for the chaos Murphy brings. The Nutty Professor is a strange beast, in that it has a focused, masterful performance at its center, but the rest is lazy and loose. Its mix of dirty and sweet never meshes. 

If Shadyac loses control of his movie, I think Stiller just was out of his depth when he made The Cable Guy. He had one film under his belt, Reality Bites, and some episodes of his TV show. But with The Cable Guy, he appears to be overwhelmed by his star and unable to hit his satirical targets, although it’s not for lack of trying (and Stiller would eventually handle satire well with Tropic Thunder, one of the funniest films of the aughts). 

There’s some interesting stuff in Holtz’s screenplay, but I don’t know that the film’s condemnation of TV obsession really sticks. Yes, there’s a murder trial reminiscent of the Menendez murders that captivates the country’s attention (and features Stiller in an amusing cameo). But other than Chip, none of the characters are particularly addicted to it or influenced by television. Broderick’s character just wants Chip to hook him up with free cable, but we don’t get a ton of scenes of him watching TV. Only Chip seems influenced by TV, but there’s not much commentary to that aside from “the dude watches too much TV.” When the film is centered on the weird relationship between Carrey and Broderick, it’s funny, but when it attempts to say something about culture, its reach exceeds its grasp. 

The Cable Guy doesn’t flail the way The Nutty Professor does whenever its star isn’t on the screen. It just kind of sits there. It doesn’t help that it’s a dark, grungy-looking movie, and that its alternative soundtrack immediately dates it. Its bigger problem is that no one aside from Carrey has much of a pulse, even if there are people I like in this, including a young Jack Black and David Cross. This is a movie full of people in front of and behind the camera who would go on to do some great things; but in this film, they seem to just sit down and try to get out of the way of Carrey. 

Casting Broderick as the film’s protagonist is its biggest problem. When the actor plays a milquetoast character, he evaporates, with the exception of something like Election (still three years off at this point). There’s a thread running through this that his character is not exactly a good guy; he’s manipulative and kind of morally flexible. But Broderick doesn’t do anything with that; he’s not funny, but he doesn’t have any personality as the straight man, either. This is a role Stiller could have brought something funny to; he might have been a better fit as the put-upon man at the mercy of a creep with no boundaries. 

In the end, I can understand my reaction to both films 25 years ago pretty well. The Nutty Professor was delivered right at that teenage brain that wanted something a bit edgier and dirty but still laughed at fart jokes. And I wasn’t quite ready for Carrey’s dark comedy at that point in my life, so I understand why I recoiled. 

Two and a half decades on, I understand why I haven’t revisited these much. Sure, the performances are funny, but both actors have done better work in the ensuing years. And the movies themselves don’t have enough for me to go back and recommend them. 

But hey, after telling you why I hadn’t had much time to write lately, I spilled about 3,000 words on two films I don’t care much about! I’m back, baby! 

Next week: Given that I spent so much time on these two films this week, I’m going to forego a Chrisicisms section. Next week -- all Chrisicisms! We’re going to talk about Marvel’s Loki and Black Widow, the weird summer movie season, Quentin Tarantino’s novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and more!