Dumb and Dumber Codes and Conventions

Codes:

From the film title 'Dumb and Dumber" we as the audience can expect this film to offer a quite humorous aspect to it. This is because we connote being dumb with having a large lack of knowledge or common sense, therefore when a 'dumb' person is confronted with a seemingly simple task/social situation, they make botched job of it. This is humorous to see as fictional films tend to go overboard with characters qualities, so if a title is named after that quality, it is going to be very over accentuated, therefore the situations and events that occur will be the kind you would never see in reality. This is humorous to the audience because we as humans like to see difficulty in with other people performing seemingly menial tasks. This makes us feel superior to the person struggling, which causes the feeling of humour. Other events that give us the feeling of superiority over someone is witnessing events/emotions such as embarrassment, fear and physical pain, all of which are conventions of comedy movies such as this one.

Conventions:

At the beginning of this opening sequence for the film 'Dumb and Dumber', we see the very famous actor Jim Carey (mainly staring in comedy films) in the back seat of a cab then struggling to get to the front of the cab whilst Dancehall genre music plays (an up-tempo style of dance music). These two features are conventional of each other as well as a comedy film due to the fact that they are in contrast - the music itself isn't humorous, but because it was paired with that scene (Jims character struggling to get to the front seat of a vehicle - a menial task) it made the upbeat tempo and lively dance style to it more exaggerated therefore making it quite funny to the audience because they are in such contest.

Later on in the scene we see the second character in the film introduced, straight away we see the comedy side of his character due to the fact that he is dressed in a funny costume, and then walking towards a car that is decorated in the same way as him. This is conventional to a comedy film because seeing the character in this costume is very random and has not linked up to the plot yet; the audience simply links it to the title Dumb and Dumber therefore seeing the character as just being rather dumb. Also, the car he is driving is decorated as a dog...this is also a very random feature to the film and if this was something seen even in reality, it would be seen as comical because it is very unexpected and weird.