Ariel Horn: 'Shallow Hal' not even worth the toilet humor

Save yourself the eight dollars you would've spent seeing Shallow Hal and go sit on Locust Walk and laugh at fat people. It's basically the same thing.

Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate inappropriate humor as much as the next person. So when I saw the previews for the Farrelly brothers' new movie, Shallow Hal, I thought, "Why not? It won't offend me personally, and the preview looked pretty damn funny. What could be the harm in seeing a movie that promised a couple of laughs, and a mushy-feel-good ending where a shallow guy finally sees that outer appearances aren't important, and that it's inner beauty which makes a person beautiful?

"It's just another teen movie, right?"

I knew the movie wasn't going to give way to an epic soul-searching debate about aesthetics, and I didn't expect it to.

What I did expect, though, was a movie that would use toilet-humor to make me laugh, not sheer insults alone. Sure, I expected the occasional fat joke which would make me feel awkward and mean if I found it funny -- and awkward and humorless if I didn't -- like I was some sort of "champion of the people" moralist who couldn't take a joke.

(After all, one can't expect Oscar material from a couple of producers who warn their audiences ahead of time about the content of their movies -- see Dumb and Dumber.)

What I got was a whole lot more than a couple of fat jokes. Don't underestimate Shallow Hal as merely a slow, boring and offensive movie which banks on making fun of fat people for laughs. It insults people with birth defects too! And it insults the audience by assuming that we'll leave the movie having learned how to be more caring, sensitive people.

The real kicker is that Shallow Hal claims to teach us a life lesson in the end, therefore making the cruel jokes which will certainly break the heart of some insecure 14-year-old girl out there justifiable. I think "the lesson" was supposed to be "inner beauty is more important than outer beauty." But in reality, it came out as, "inner beauty is important, but damn, jokes about fat people and people with birth defects -- now that's some funny shit!"

It even might have been "we all have some sort of deformities, so therefore deformities are A-OK and fair grounds for mocking people." Whatever it was, the Farrelly brothers exploit this "moral" to make the premise of Shallow Hal acceptable, to delicately remove our moral reservations about seeing a movie that is raking in the cash because America finds fat funny.

Because of the lesson we "learn" at the end, this movie suddenly becomes a fun family flick we can see after our Thanksgiving meals without feeling like really crappy and mean people.

Here's the thing: if the lesson would have made any sense whatsoever, maybe I wouldn't have felt so awkward during the jokes. But the fact of the matter is, the lesson just didn't work.

Granted, the movie gives you what you sort of expected and came for: unintelligent jokes on par with second-grade humor about poop. And admittedly, that was what I was looking for -- the same kind of jokes from There's Something about Mary and Dumb and Dumber. But unlike past Farrelly brothers' movies which bank on toilet humor alone for laughs, Shallow Hal relies on potty humor about people's physical characteristics for entertainment. And there's a difference.

Worse yet, the movie insults the intelligence of the audience by assuming that if the jokes about weight and deformities are woven into a tight fabric of "it's OK to be who you are" rhetoric, the movie can't be taken as the offensive trash that it is.

The Farrelly brothers want to have their cake and eat it too. And if they got the real lesson of the movie, they'd have learned that you can only have your cake and eat it too if you're willing to have a couple of million people laugh at you because you're fat.

Ariel Horn is a senior English major from Short Hills, N.J.

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