Who’s the Best Farrelly Brothers Leading Man? Jack Black, Jim Carrey, and Ben Stiller Compete for the Title

The new Paramount+ holiday feature Dear Santa doesn’t just reunite the Farrelly Brothers, who have been making movies mostly apart for the past decade. It also brings them back together with Jack Black, who starred in their 2001 hit Shallow Hal. That movie arrived during their productive first decade as writer-directors, when they would have a new big-studio, big-star comedy out every couple of years. Dear Santa is the brothers’ thirteenth feature together – Bobby directed it and Peter co-wrote it, but they both produced it, so it seems like a close approximation of their more directly collaborative efforts – and by starring Black it alters an important Farrelly statistic. As of now, the majority of their films star either Jack Black, Jim Carrey, or Ben Stiller. Which prompts the question: Who is the ultimate Farrelly leading man?

Now, there are some good Farrelly pictures without any of the aforementioned trio. Stuck on You, with Matt Damon and Greg Kinner playing conjoined twins, is charming, if not exactly laugh-out-loud funny. Kingpin, for which they tried to get Chris Farley but wound up with Randy Quaid and Woody Harrelson, is one of their best. And perhaps the filmmakers’ most impressive feat of all time was making an appealing and enjoyable movie starring proven non-movie-star Jimmy Fallon, with the baseball-fandom rom-com Fever Pitch. But most of their biggest hits – their top five, in fact – feature Black, Carrey, or Stiller. (Weirdly, there’s one movie that brought Black, Carrey, and Stiller on a single project, and it’s not a Farrelly joint. The Cable Guy has Carrey in pure-mania mode, Stiller directing with an eye toward satire, and Black playing Stiller’s slightly wild-eyed friend. It also has a bit part for Owen Wilson, who co-starred in the Farrelly movie Hall Pass.)

• Jim Carrey

  Carrey can definitely call firsties: He was there for the first Farrelly movie, and arguably still the best. Dumb and Dumber, which turns 30 in a few weeks, has the baggy plotting of a typical Farrelly joint, but it largely succeeds by putting its comic conceit right there in the title: There’s a dumb guy, and a dumber guy. As with fellow ’90s moronicons Beavis and Butt-Head, it’s not necessarily clear which is which, although Carrey’s Lloyd is, like Butt-Head, arguably the more confident of the pair. Then again, Carrey’s physical and vocal dexterity renders him more like Beavis, and in his insane breakout year of 1994, Dumb and Dumber best captures and focuses that energy. The sequel Carrey and Daniels made 20 years later isn’t as good – it’s a little meaner-spirited and coarser, even, than the original – but it still has plenty of funny moments from Carrey amidst his long-term retirement from broad comedy. Me, Myself and Irene goes further, supplying Carrey with a sort-of dual role to showcase his physical prowess; at one point, he throws himself out of a moving car.

• Ben Stiller

  Stiller, on the other hand, tends to play more of an everyman for the Farrellys, most famously as the lovesick nerd at the center of There’s Something About Mary and less successfully as the newlywed with a wandering eye in their softened remake of The Heartbreak Kid. Black’s two Farrelly pictures, meanwhile, cast him as the picture of vice: As a man who has been trained to only valuable the most superficial aspects of any woman in Shallow Hal, and as a particularly self-amused demon in Dear Santa, where he answers a child’s letter misaddressed to “Satan.”

• Jack Black

  It’s a testament to the Farrellys’ flexibility that they don’t rely on a single type of comic to bring their comedies home. They can work with nice guys or cretins – though oddly, Black, who can play both, has arguably been the most ill-served by his movies with them. In Shallow Hal, he’s mostly kind of a dull, playing a man who accidentally discovers his decency when he’s hypnotized into seeing inner beauty manifested as conventional beauty standards, personified by an overweight woman who he sees as, well, Gwyneth Paltrow. Black seems hemmed-in by the movie’s outdated would-be-instructional approach to the material. He has more room to do his thing in Dear Santa – spouting off his rococo breakdowns of syllables, singing to himself, strutting around like he owns the place – and is the most lively thing about the movie, but the Farrellys don’t actually seem to have much use for his brand of anarchy. It’s funnier when Stiller must fluster his way through a situation spiraling out of his control (thinking, most extremely, of him fighting off a hostile little dog in There’s Something About Mary) than it is to watch Jack Black attempt to tame his animal instincts just to look like a more accessible form of vulgarian.

**cue the Farrelly Fanfare**

THE VERDICT: Maybe that’s why Jim Carrey works so well in the Farrelly world: He puts the struggle between nice-guy hero and crude deviant right there on the surface. It’s most evident and literalized in the self-versus-self battle between pushover and domineering creep in Me, Myself and Irene but it’s there in Dumb and Dumber, too: Think of the famous fantasy shot where he embraces Lauren Holly, the woman he harbors a largely puppyish crush on, only to peer over her shoulder and peak up her skirt. That’s really the Farrelly trademark; as much as they’re known for mixing together gross-out humor and genuine heart, more often they’re actually letting both of those elements jostle together, even if that means their movies must find their own, sometimes discordant key. Black and Stiller both have versions of the ability to embody both lower instincts (greed, avarice, pride, arrogance) and higher ones (friendliness, empathy, attempting to do the right thing). It’s Carrey, though, who can turn those contradictions into a self-made battle royale.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.