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Shrek: Entertainment for Half-witted Adults

By Mark Grueter

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“Yes, it's for the kids, but this animated sequel may be one of the most mature movies about adult relationships ever made…The picture is clever and vivacious… its moments of sheer inventiveness can still catch you off-guard, and some of them are wittily poetic.”

– Stephanie Zacharek from Salon reviewing Shrek 2

We are told Shrek movies are not simply children’s entertainment. They can and are enjoyed by folks of all ages. Zacharek finds Shrek 2 so very mature because, believe it or not, it delivers the profound message of ‘looks are not everything’. People are attracted to each other for reasons that go well beyond looks. Really? I had no idea.

Shrek 2 is actually almost entirely about fart jokes – they appear at every turn. Well, they’re not really “jokes” per se, because the gag simply involves Shrek or Princess Fiona farting, nothing more. Pretty funny, huh? Shrek also belches a lot (“Better out than in, I always say” – this hilarious line emerges and reemerges in both Shrek 1 and 2). The first film featured an array of dick jokes too - Shrek, voiced by the insufferable Mike Myers, quips “Do you think he’s compensating for something?” referring to the tall tower the diminutive Lord Farquad lives in - but the dick jokes are strangely absent in the second film. Although Shrek does get kicked in the balls, so there’s that.

Instead we get more references to pop culture. Shirley Bassett and Bob Barker get name-dropped. Clever, eh? And, of course, well known fairy tale characters scatter the landscape. The Three Little Pigs, I was sad to see, do not reappear in Shrek 2. Sad, because they were portrayed as homosexuals in Part 1, which I thought added an interesting twist. Oh, and the movie does the whole Joan Rivers thing – you know, how Joan Rivers talks about and fraternizes with celebrities as they walk down the red carpet? Yes, the filmmakers “satirize” that also. Don’t look now, but Shrek 2 is the highest grossing animated film of all-time with something like $400 million, and it’s only June.

Back to Myers - I’m surprised nobody has pointed out that he uses the same jokes and the same voices for all of the characters he plays. In Austin Powers, Myers, playing Austin Powers, asks, “Who throws a shoe? I mean, honestly?” In Shrek 2, Myers, voicing Shrek, asks, “How many cats can wear boots? I mean, honestly?” (In the latter he is referring to the only character in Shrek 2 who is mildly entertaining – Puss-in-Boots, voiced by Antonio Banderas). But the most salient connection between Austin Powers and Shrek is their shared penchant for dryly telling a dumb joke and then immediately laughing afterwards, summed up with an attempt to explain the joke that nobody laughed at. This neat trick is repeated several times in Shrek 2. And of course, Shrek is voiced with a “Scottish” accent, which harks back to Myers’ days on SNL. He has, for some time now, imagined himself skillful at English, Irish and Scottish accents.

Other than all the clever, inventive and vivacious pop culture references, the dialogue relies almost exclusively on cliché. “I hate Mondays,” “You don’t exactly smell like a bed of roses,” “Leave the bottle,” “Get your coat dear, we’re leaving,” and so on and so forth. When the lines aren’t straightforward clichés they are clumsy reformulations of clichés. That famous wit the Gingerbread Man cracks, “We’re up chocolate creek without a Popsicle stick” (I noticed that not one person in the theater laughed at this – a more intelligent audience than I had anticipated, perhaps).

In the first movie, an emotional Princess Fiona yells to Shrek: “What kind of a knight are you!?” He answers, “One of a kind.” Yes, this is the sort of thing that passes as wit in the world of Shrek. Donkey, voiced stupidly by Eddie Murphy (remember when he used to be funny? I wonder what happened. My guess, though I have no evidence, is that he found religion.), is the worst sidekick outside Jar Jar Binks. If Donkey were funny, we could forgive the fact that’s he’s annoying, but alas, he is not funny, ever. Shrek 2 closes with Donkey singing “Living’ La Vida Loca” – give us a fucking break.

P.G. Wodehouse once impetuously remarked that Charles Dickens’ books were only amusing for “children and half-witted adults.” Now, I’m no fan of Dickens and I can see what Wodehouse meant, but I do know plenty of intelligent grownups who enjoy Dickens so that’s a bit much. But I think with Shrek we can safely apply such criticism. That is to say, is not Shrek the very sort of comedy that appeals to the lowest common denominator, designed almost explicitly for people who have no sense of humor? The success of the film relies on its shameless embrace of conformity. It is made for people who, if they read anything at all, read either Harry Potter and/or The Da Vinci Code and that is all.

I also think it unlikely that even most kids truly enjoy Shrek, because most kids are not brain dead. Flatulent jokes get old, even for the mentally undeveloped. If anything, they probably just like the colors and the 3-D animation (a technology, by the way, that doesn’t interest me in the slightest) and are just happy to be at the movies.

Shrek is not art or comedy; it is not highbrow or even lowbrow; it is merely an activity, something one writes to make money, something one watches to kill time. It is the perfect movie for a culture that values conformity and embraces anything and everything so long as it is seen as harmless and inoffensive. People occasionally laugh because they suspect something might be funny or because the person next to them is chuckling.

With Shrek our culture has reached a new low in this regard, because it has been embraced, not only mass culture, but by the critics as well. If the Shrek phenomenon is not an example of cultural decline, then there is no such thing as cultural decline. And who is prepared to argue that the concept of cultural decline is a myth?

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Mark Grueter is a writer living in New York City and the Managing Editor of Canon Magazine. He can be reached at grueter@methree.net.

© 2004 Me Three