dumb and dumber 1 — vs my own week, a table

dumb and dumber 1 is a film. my last week is a sequel nobody greenlit. somewhere between aisle four and a manager mistake at checkout, the supermarket became a soundstage, and i started keeping a comparison table on a sticky note that has, since wednesday, lost two corners. the bowl cuts in the movie are gentler than the cart i pushed home.

11:14am, a thursday. drafted from the desk. carla is downstairs at the vendor coffee thing the calendar pretends is a meeting. forty minutes, give or take a pastry. the second monitor has a doc titled “comparisons (working set)” open and forgotten. the air fryer at home is unplugged. the receipt from the supermarket is, for reasons i cannot defend, still in my coat pocket.

so. dumb and dumber 1. the first one. the original. lloyd, harry, the dog van, the briefcase, the bowl cuts, the parakeet. you have seen it on a hotel television. you have, quite possibly, never sat down and watched it on purpose. that is fine. the film survives that kind of viewing.

dumb and dumber 1 is the original 1994 farrelly brothers comedy starring jim carrey and jeff daniels as two men driving a small dog-shaped van across the country to return a briefcase. on a closer read, it is a quiet defense of being earnestly, openly dumb in a country that prefers competence. compared with my actual week, the movie is gentler. the table below proves it line by line.

THE MOVIE. IS NICER. THAN MY WEEK.

that is the thesis. i am going to defend it with a table, six paragraphs of context, a supermarket scene, a wall of digital insults i am still auditing, and one footnote about a pension. for the broader category this comparison sits inside, see the pillar i wrote on dumb at this same desk a few months back; the present post is the comparative addendum that pillar earned by being too short to hold a table.

1. dumb and dumber 1, the brief plot recap

here is the film in plain language. lloyd, played by jim carrey, is a limo driver with a haircut you could time on a kitchen clock. harry, played by jeff daniels, is a dog groomer with a van shaped, deliberately, like a sheepdog. lloyd drives a woman to the airport. she leaves a briefcase behind on purpose. lloyd, believing he is doing a kind thing, takes it and decides to return it. harry, lacking better plans, comes along.

they drive from rhode island to aspen. the briefcase is full of money. lloyd and harry, not opening it for a long stretch, treat each other and the country with a patient, unembarrassed kindness that has, since 1994, aged better than most of the comedies released that december.

the supporting cast is mostly sharks. the woman, the men chasing the briefcase, the aspen crowd — all of them, in their own register, more dishonest than lloyd and harry will ever be. the haircuts are misdirection; the kindness is the point. for the longer version of that argument, see the manifesto-length post i filed on the same film from this exact chair. the imdb page for the original still lists the runtime at one hundred and seven minutes, which is eleven minutes shorter than the all-hands i sat through last week and considerably more useful.

2. the supermarket scene vs my actual supermarket scene

there is a moment in dumb and dumber 1 where harry is shopping. brief. functional. he buys what the trip needs. nothing escalates. that, in a comedy of its era, is restraint.

my supermarket scene last saturday went the other way. i went in for milk. i came out with three bags, one of which, on the bus home, turned out to contain a man’s umbrella i had not paid for and a packet of gum i did not buy. the self-checkout machine is a small adversary. i had bagged my own groceries and a stranger’s. we had redistributed the inventory of one row with the calm, unsmiling efficiency of two men who would not meet again.

the milk, of course, was not in any of the bags. the milk was on the conveyor belt, alone, watching me leave. the manager called. he met me at the bus stop with a bag of milk and a small, careful question about whether i had paid for the umbrella. i had not. i paid for the umbrella. i kept the gum. the milk was, by then, an hour out of refrigeration and a metaphor. lloyd and harry would not have left the milk on the belt; they would have made a friend of the cashier and walked out with a coupon. that is the kind of week they had.

3. the table, drafted at the digital fridge

here is the comparison table. it lives, in its first draft, on a sticky note on the side of my fridge — i call it the digital fridge because the note is, in fact, a doc on my phone i open while the kettle boils. the table is eleven rows in the working version. seven of those rows, on a recent count, are, somehow, about cheese. that is the fault of the week.

the table is incomplete. it will keep growing. the doc has, since the kettle, gained one new row about a parking meter and lost a row about a sock. the working set audits itself.

4. the pension take, briefly, in the cart

row four needs a footnote because it is doing more work than the rest of the table. a pension statement arrived three weeks ago. i opened it. i panicked. i closed it. it lives, in shame, on the radiator, where it has yellowed at one corner in a way that suggests both heat damage and judgment.

the take landed in a slack i am mostly muted in. dave responded with a thumbs up. the take held up under peer review of one.

5. the wall of insults i posted afterwards

here is the part i did not plan to write. after the supermarket incident i went home, opened a doc, and started an audit. the wall of insults audit. each line is a small, polite insult i have leveled at myself, in writing, since saturday. one insult per line. no repeated metaphors. no word longer than three syllables. those are the rules.

the insults are all true. “the man who left milk on a belt and walked out richer in umbrella.” “the kind of shopper who would buy a fourth fork.” “a tenant who waters a dead plant on a schedule.” the doc is at sixteen lines. it will reach forty by next sunday. older lines retire into a smaller appendix called “insults that have stopped being funny.”

the related impulse, in cross-cluster terms, drove me to write a longer entry on why moron is the gentler word inside the harsher family — the wall of insults is, in shape, a private moron-language doc, written by me, for me, with the same softness the public version of the word now mostly lacks.

compare this with the movie. lloyd and harry insult nobody. when wronged, they mostly look confused for half a second and then move on. they do not run audits. they would consider the wall, if shown it, a kind of homework.

6. verdict, the movie is gentler than my week

the air fryer is still unplugged. the receipt is still in the coat pocket. the doc is still open on the second monitor, with one new row about a parking meter, which i will not get into here because the parking meter is, frankly, a separate post.

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