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Peter Farrelly Getty 1.jpg

Where the Hell is the 'Joke' in You Repeatedly Flashing Your Penis, Peter Farrelly?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | January 9, 2019 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | January 9, 2019 |


Peter Farrelly Getty 1.jpg

Yo pals, I’ve got a joke for you. It’s amazing, you’ll laugh so hard. So, you see, there’s this director, and he makes people look at his dick. That’s it.

Hilarious, right?

It should surprise nobody that the subtle empathetic comedy genius behind Green Book, Stuck On You and that criminal remake of Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, Peter Farrelly, is a f-cking awful person.

Now that he’s a Golden Globe winner and potential Oscar nominee for Green Book, he’s getting the cultural rewrite as a serious director who tackles lofty issues of race. While he claims that the pushback to his film from the family of Don Shirley, who they claim the film grossly misrepresents, is traumatizing him, he’s now facing reminders of his sh-tty past. The Cut has compiled a selection of news stories from the years that detail the favoured hysterical on-set ‘joke’ of Farrelly: Flashing his penis at cast and crew.

A 1998 piece from Newsweek notes how he showed his penis to both Fox executive Tom Rothman and There’s Something About Mary star Cameron Diaz. At the time, Diaz would have been about 25. Farrelly was 42. An Observer profile from the same year repeats the story:


Apparently, I say nervously, Peter showed Cameron his penis during the filming … Peter interrupts, horrified: ‘No. We did it before she was in.’ So you risked losing a big star by showing her your penis before she was on board? Peter smiles at my foolishness. ‘Of course! That’s what got her in.’ He stops smiling for a moment. ‘It’s a joke,’ he explains patiently.


How hilarious. The Newsweek piece even refers to this as one of his ‘trademark gags’.

As The Cut notes, the journalists can’t help but make this obvious act of sexual harassment seem like some harmless quirk of those wacky Farrelly Brothers, who were both grown men nearing middle age at the time. It gets to be a cute personality trait rather than, you know, a f-cking gross act of wildly inappropriate behaviour. Christ, this industry will do anything to coddle the lunacies of abusive men. Oh, it’s just a joke. They were drunk. Separate the art from the artist. Won’t you think of their careers!? But times were different then. We live in such a PC society where a good honest man can’t force women to look at their genitals without warning or consent.

And no, this won’t hurt his Oscar chances. It’s not like he’s a woman director or anything.



Header Image Source: Getty Images.