Daily Inspiration Quote by Bobby Farrelly

Farrelly’s line lands like a neat little moral boundary, and it’s also a sly defense of the kind of comedy he helped mainstream: broad, physical, sometimes humiliating, always pitched as harmless because it’s “just a joke.” By defining “too far” as the moment “somebody gets hurt,” he shifts the debate away from offense, taste, or power and onto an almost playground-standard of ethics: real injury counts, bruised feelings don’t. It’s an appealingly simple rule, the sort you can imagine being offered in an interview when the conversation inevitably turns to whether comedies like There’s Something About Mary or Dumb and Dumber would survive today’s discourse.

The subtext is strategic. “Somebody gets hurt” reads as an objective metric, but it quietly smuggles in a question: who gets to decide what “hurt” is? A pratfall injury on set is obvious. Humiliation, stereotyping, or a joke that reinforces a social hierarchy is harder to tally, which is exactly why the definition is convenient. It frames the comedian as a responsible craftsman who cares about consequences, while insulating the work from critiques about punching down or normalizing cruelty.

Context matters: Farrelly comes from a 1990s studio-comedy tradition where shock and embarrassment were the engine, and audiences were asked to laugh at the extremity, not interrogate the collateral damage. His “line” isn’t really a line; it’s a reframing. The real claim is that comedy remains innocent until it produces measurable harm, a standard that protects the joke-maker more than the joke’s target.