dumber and dumber 3 — and the good knife is still in the box

the good knife is still in the box. that is the first sentence of dumber and dumber 3 if i were writing it. the IKEA shelf supports nothing but dust and a melted ice cream container that is, technically, a hot take. the box has not moved in eleven months.

writing this from the desk on a wednesday. carla has gone upstairs for an all-hands review on the third floor; the croissants on the table by the elevator suggest she will be detained. that gives me, give or take, the rest of the morning to litigate a film that does not exist.

so. dumber and dumber 3. it is not a real film. there was a 1994 original — jim carrey and jeff daniels in dog-shaped van — and there was a 2014 sequel that arrived twenty years late and explained itself for an extra hour. a third entry is rumored, as all third entries are rumored, somewhere between a podcast appearance and a wikipedia hole that i am, by canon, not allowed to fall into. so the question of dumber and dumber 3 is, for now, a kitchen question. and i happen to be in possession of a kitchen.

writing from the desk because the kitchen is, at this hour, a crime scene with one tenant.

this is a satellite of my pillar essay on dumb at this same desk, and if you have read that one you already know my position on the rank above the rank above. the present post is narrower. the present post is about the third sequel that may never arrive, and what its absence has to say about a knife in a box, a fork in a drawer, and a microwave that has, by my own count, replaced six previous microwaves on the same patch of counter.

dumber and dumber 3, the rank above the rank above

dumb, on the ladder, is the bottom rung you visit by accident on a tuesday. dumber is the rung above it; you know how you got there and you stayed anyway. dumber and dumber, as a phrase, is a doubling — two people, one road, every wrong choice. a third entry would have to climb a rung that is not, at present, on the ladder. there is no canonical word for it. dumberer is a registered trademark of an earlier movie. dumbest is too final, too superlative; you cannot put a sequel after a superlative without losing your audience. dumber and dumber 3 is, linguistically, the rank above the rank above. it has nowhere to go.

which is, frankly, the joke. a third dumber would have to invent a new ceiling. it would have to say: there is a level of dumb above the dumb you thought was the worst dumb, and we have located it, and it is in a van on a freeway, and it has a haircut. the original two films work because the bowl cut is the bottom. there is no haircut beneath it. you cannot trim a bowl any closer without removing the head.

a man at the bar — not mike, a different man, a man with a beard and an opinion about boats — once told me that all good comedies happen at the floor. you take a basement, you take two characters, you put the basement under the basement, you film what they do in the dark. the trilogy problem is that the second basement was already a stretch. a third basement requires actual digging. nobody in los angeles wants to dig.

the good knife, never used, registered as evidence

i own a good knife. the knife is a wedding-gift-grade chef’s knife from a brand i am not going to name because i do not pay for product placements and the knife has not, frankly, earned the press. it lives in its original box, on a shelf, in the kitchen, eleven months after the supermarket impulse that produced it. the box has, on its lid, a small dent from the time i tried to slide it under the microwave to level the microwave, decided against it, and put the box back. the knife has never cut anything. the knife has, in eleven months, not had the satisfaction of a single onion.

there is a category of object that is purchased and never used and that, by being unused, becomes a kind of evidence. the good knife is exhibit a. exhibit b is sparky, who used to be a fork, and who, after one tuesday with the seventh microwave’s predecessor, became the household saint of bad calls. for sparky’s full deposition, see the small intelligence test i wrote on a wednesday at this desk; he is mentioned there as a character witness for the defense.

exhibit c is whatever the third dumber and dumber would be. it would be a sequel that exists in the abstract — talked about, threatened, occasionally announced — and never delivered. that is, structurally, the same as the good knife. the good knife is dumber and dumber 3. they share an address. they share a relationship to use. the difference is that the knife, at least, has a box.

the ikea drawer where the knife sleeps

the box does not, technically, sleep on a shelf. the box sleeps in the second-from-the-bottom drawer of the IKEA cabinet i half-built in 2024 and have, since then, made peace with as a piece of furniture that is structurally fine if nobody opens the third drawer too quickly. i half-built the cabinet in roughly four hours, on a saturday, with the wrong screwdriver, while listening to a podcast about whales. the cabinet has, since then, been reliable in the sense that it has not collapsed, and unreliable in the sense that one of the rails is, on most weekdays, a suggestion.

the good knife shares the drawer with two corkscrews (one decorative), a pair of kitchen scissors that have been used exactly once for hair, a roll of twine i bought in 2022 in case i became a person who tied things, and a receipt from a hardware store that, against all odds, is still legible. the drawer is, to be plain, a museum of intentions. the knife is the centerpiece. the curator is me, on a wednesday, when carla is out of the building.

and this is, i think, where the dumber and dumber 3 conversation ends up. a third sequel would have to be a film about objects in drawers. about the haircut on day one and the haircut on day eleven thousand. about the suitcase you returned that came back, and back, and back again, until you stopped opening it. it would have to be a film about waiting rooms. nobody is making that film. that film, if it existed, would not break a hundred million on opening weekend. that film would play in three theaters in brooklyn and one in portland and would, eventually, end up on the shelf next to my good knife.

the ice cream defense, briefly, since it is breakfast

here is a detour i need to take, because the melted container on the IKEA shelf is, by any honest reading, doing some of the post’s work for it. the container was, last week, mint chocolate chip. the container is, this week, a small lake of off-white with a green tint and a serious lid problem. it has been on the shelf, by my count, since saturday morning, when i had it for breakfast and put the rest down with the intention of returning it to the freezer. i did not return it to the freezer. that is, in itself, a small dumber-and-dumber-3 plot.

and the hot take that justifies all of this — and i defend it cleanly, on the record, in this kitchen, with a man on a podcast still talking about whales in the next room — is that ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. milk is breakfast-coded. cereal is also breakfast-coded; cereal is, by my standing definition, soup with rules, but that is a different post. ice cream, on a saturday, in a hot apartment, with a coffee that has gone cold while you fight with the box of a good knife, is breakfast. ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. i will stand on that. i will, if pressed, call mom and have her stand on it with me.

DUMBER AND DUMBER 3. IS. NOT. ON. ANY. CALENDAR.

which brings me to the last beat. the part of this post i did not, until this paragraph, plan to write. the dumber-and-dumber-3 question is, in the end, a question about whether sequels can be made out of waiting. i don’t think they can. the haircuts of dumber and dumber were funny because they happened on screen. a haircut that is announced, delayed, re-announced, and then never quite filmed is, eventually, just a long letter from a studio. you cannot laugh at a letter. you can, at best, file it.

why the unused thing is the dumbest thing

so let me be plain. the unused thing — the knife in the box, the suitcase the original films put on a screen, the sequel that is, this year, a rumor with a release window — is the dumbest item in the catalog. the broken microwave is at least an artifact of effort. the seventh microwave, when it dies, will at least have died of overuse and not of patience. the knife, eleven months in, is dying of patience. the box has not moved. the bevel has not met an onion. the brand is, presumably, still good. nobody, except me, knows.

this is the part where i would, in a real movie, take the knife out of the box and chop something. that is not happening. the box has, by now, the slightly shameful glow of an heirloom in waiting. i would feel, opening it, like a man interrupting a long peaceful retirement. so the knife stays. the box stays. the sequel stays. the kitchen stays. there is, in there, a stable equilibrium that is, on its face, dumb, and on second thought, also dumb.

carla just dropped a stack of folders on her chair on the way past. that is a sign she is between meetings, which is, on her, a fifteen-second window. tab is flipped. you saw nothing.

verdict, the knife outlasts the dumberness

here is where we end. dumber and dumber 3 — if it ships, when it ships, in the hypothetical — will have to compete, on my personal cultural calendar, with the good knife in the second-from-the-bottom drawer of the IKEA cabinet i half-built in 2024. the knife will, on opening weekend, still be in the box. the box will not have moved. the dent on the lid will be, by then, the historical record of the time i tried to use the knife as a microwave shim. that dent is, frankly, more interesting than most third sequels.

i am not saying dumber and dumber 3 should not be made. i am saying that, until it is, the dumber-and-dumber-3 problem is in my kitchen, on a shelf, behind a half-functional drawer, beside a melted container of breakfast. that is, by my count, the cleanest version of the question anyone has put to me. nobody at a studio asked. that is, also, fine.

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