The Hair Gel Gag Was for Seinfeld

Peter Farrelly walked through the origin story of one of the most infamous sight gags in comedy history, and it turns out the hair gel bit from There's Something About Mary was originally pitched for Seinfeld.

Rich asked which construct from the Farrelly brothers catalog Peter was proudest of. The answer came fast. It's hard to beat the hair gel in something about Mary. The whole setup. A guy is nervous before a date, takes the pressure off, and the result lands somewhere it absolutely should not.

The development was unglamorous. Peter and Bobby Farrelly were driving, tossing around ideas. Peter had been thinking about what would make a great Seinfeld bit, because they had written for the show before. What if one of the guys, uh, lost the product. Bobby thought it was hysterical. The question that made it hysterical was where it ended up. The ear. Then the layered escalation. Someone comes over. A woman. She sees it. He tells her it's hair gel. She takes it. She puts it in her hair. It hardens.

The Farrellys howled in the car. They also knew they would never get it on network television.

Years later, when they were making There's Something About Mary, they pitched it to the studio. The studio said it couldn't be done. NC-17 or X, they said. Peter's push-back was a clean delineation. If it's for laughs, it's rated R. If it's for titillation, it's NC-17. This was clearly a laughter thing. Unprecedented, but a laughter thing.

They got it in. It became one of the biggest laughs in movie history and a scene people still reference decades later. Peter is proud of it, rightfully. The craft of taking a premise that would feel crude in any other hands and engineering it into a comedic set piece is the entire Farrelly brothers thesis in one bit.

The fact that it started as a rejected Seinfeld pitch is the kicker. One of the most quoted comedy moments of the nineties was originally meant for Jerry and George and the gang, then survived the commute from a TV writers' room to the studio because two brothers in a car kept laughing at the absurdity of where a small amount of product could realistically end up.

Comedy math at its finest. Network no, feature film yes, audience never forgets.