Peter Farrelly: There’s Something about Mary Hair Gel Joke Was Meant for Seinfeld

The single most famous sight gag in "There's Something About Mary" was not written for "There's Something About Mary." It was written for "Seinfeld."

Rich asked Peter Farrelly which construct he was proudest of, expecting a list to sort through. There was no sorting. "It's hard to beat the hair gel in Mary," Farrelly said. "The whole setup."

The origin story is better than the joke's reputation suggests, mostly because it was built in a car, out loud, by two people who had no idea where it was going.

Farrelly and Bobby had done some work for "Seinfeld," and Farrelly had been chewing on what a great "Seinfeld" premise would look like. The pitch, as Farrelly recounted it: what if one of them took care of business before a date and lost the product?

"It's hysterical," Bobby said.

"Yeah, but what do you do with it?" Farrelly asked.

"Yeah, but where is it?"

"I don't know."

"Well, that's the funny part. Where would it end up?"

That is the whole engine of the thing. Neither of them had an answer, and the absence of an answer was the joke. A few minutes later they landed on the ear, and once it was on the ear the dominoes started falling on their own. Somebody comes over. Somebody sees it. A woman asks what it is. He says it is hair gel. She takes it and puts it in her hair. It hardens.

"I remember we were just howling," Farrelly said. And then came the part that killed it. "We thought, yeah, that's very funny, but you could never do it."

Not on network television, anyway. So the bit went in a drawer, which is where most great unusable ideas stay.

Then came the movie. "When we were making this movie, we said, let's try it," Farrelly said. The studio's response was immediate and predictable. You can't do that. That's NC-17 or X.

Farrelly's counterargument is the most useful thing in the whole conversation, because it is a real theory of comedy rather than a defense of a gag. "No, no, no, no," Farrelly said. "If it's for laughs, it's R. If it's for titillation, it's NC-17. This is clearly a laughter thing."

That distinction won the argument, and the scene went into a major studio release largely intact. Farrelly's own description of it is admirably restrained: "It was unprecedented, we'll say."

The payoff justified the fight. "It was one of the biggest laughs ever," Farrelly said. "That's a nice thing."

Rich's response summed up the case better than any box office number could. Certainly we remember it.

Plenty of movies have tried to clear that bar since, most of them by escalating the shock and skipping the setup. The reason the hair gel still works is that it was built backward from a question neither Farrelly nor Bobby could answer, then argued past a ratings board with a principle instead of a plea.