Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

Freddy Got Fingered forsakes the muddy field of infantile narcissism for the fertile, frightening ground of middle childhood.

— A. O. Scott (The New York Times)

You could say the obvious, i.e., that it’s not funny and therefore a bad comedy, but it’s part of the distinctly post-funny comedic strategy of this movie […] that whatever little humour it offers comes from the fact that it isn’t funny.

— Geoff Pevere (The Toronto Star)

Gord drives by a stud farm where four farmers are surrounding a horse and putting on gloves. We get a close-up of an enormous horse phallus. Gord screams, slams on the brakes, and then runs onto the farm. He yells, “I wanna try the horsey! I wanna try the horsey!” The Gary Numan music switches abruptly to “Duelling Banjos.” Gord grabs the horse phallus and yells, “Oh, this is fun! Look at me, daddy, I’m a farmer! Look at me, daddy, I’m a farmer!” The scene ends. This incident is never referred to again. Does that scene sound funny to you? It has no setup, no buildup, and no punchline. Most of the “gross-out” comedies of the era render their grotesqueries to look at least a little artificial and thus digestible, but this horse instrument is plainly real, and decidedly un-photogenic. This scene goes against almost every “rule” of comedy. Dear reader, I have laughed out loud every time I’ve seen it.

[…]

Certain of Green’s comic ideas, like a subplot about child abuse and a running gag in which a small child is brutally maimed, feel like the ideas of a kid who is just old enough to understand what taboos are but not quite old enough to have developed judgment and a capacity for empathy. This may not be your idea of a good time, but I sometimes wish I could easily recapture the sheer unselfconsciousness I brought to creative projects in my adolescence […].

[…]

The film has a sense of free-flowing disrespect towards the institution of a Hollywood movie, and of a Hollywood studio comedy in particular […] but without getting too pretentious, I think it helps to have had one’s faith in society’s institutions irreparably damaged to appreciate a movie like this.

— Will Sloan (2021)