People love seeing their favorite artists collaborate with one another, and the powers that be are well aware of it. If two people have been doing notable things in the same area, it’s a safe bet that the idea of bringing them together in some way has been floated around behind the scenes. This unfortunately doesn’t always end up happening the way everybody was hoping, though. Let’s take a look at a few instances where comedy legends technically worked on the same project, with not-so-exciting results.
5. LAUREL AND HARDY AND THE THREE STOOGES
When it comes to comedy teams from the first half of the 20th century, Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges are among the best remembered. Unsurprisingly, both groups appeared in a film together during that time, but as fate would have it, they didn’t interact with each other on-screen at all.
In 1934’s Hollywood Party, Jimmy Durante (as “Schnarzan”) throws a big party in honor of adventurer Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl), to which the Stooges show up looking to score some autographs. Laurel and Hardy make their cameo a little later as a pair of lion salesmen who wind up getting into an egg fight with actress Lupe Vélez. Though it seems like a huge missed opportunity on paper, Laurel and Hardy were already an established, Oscar-winning team when the film was made, and the Stooges would only start making the short films that would immortalize them later that year.
4. MEL BROOKS AND WOODY ALLEN
Before they went on to direct some of the most memorable comedy films of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen worked together in television. Here’s the twist: Neither comedian was acting just yet, and they only served as writers for Sid Caesar. Brooks was first hired by Caesar in 1949, whereas Allen came around in the late ‘50s and continued doing projects for Caesar into the ‘60s, occasionally being joined by Brooks.
Despite being warned that Brooks would eat him alive, Allen got along well with him, and the two would walk home together every night. But because writers weren’t always properly credited in those days, it’s hard to even decipher which specific sketches they collaborated on.
3. JIM CARREY AND BEN STILLER
The fact that Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller were in the same movie back in the ‘90s seems like it should be a better-known thing, no? But if you haven’t watched 1996’s The Cable Guy recently, it might have slipped your mind that Stiller had a small role in the film.
In case you’ve forgotten, he played Sam Sweet, the former child star who murdered his brother, as seen in a couple of segments where Carrey and Matthew Broderick are watching his story unfold on TV. Stiller also directed the movie, so he and Carrey spent quite a bit of time with one another off-screen. Judd Apatow suggested Stiller after getting rejected for the directing gig himself. Stiller would land his breakthrough role in There’s Something About Mary the following year.
2. MIKE JUDGE AND THE SOUTH PARK GUYS
Beavis and Butt-Head and South Park have been getting compared to each other since the latter first hit the airwaves in 1997. And although the shows’ characters have technically crossed over on more than one occasion, there’s only been one time to date that Mike Judge has really collaborated with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Remember that scene at the end of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, where we got to see Kenny’s face for the first time? You know, when he speaks a grand total of three sped-up words?
According to the film’s credits, that brief piece of dialogue was actually provided by Judge, who was also supposed to lend his voice to the Season 1 South Park episode “Damien,” but they weren’t able to edit the audio in time.
1. GEORGE CARLIN AND RICHARD PRYOR
1976’s Car Wash featured an ensemble cast that happened to include both George Carlin and Richard Pryor. That’s right, director Joel Schumacher (of Batman & Robin fame) managed to get two of the biggest stand-up comics of all-time in his movie, and just like what happened with Hollywood Party above, the pair shared the screen for exactly zero minutes.
Carlin played a taxi driver on the hunt for a hooker who ran out on him without paying her fare. Pryor, on the other hand, appeared separately, as a greedy evangelist named Daddy Rich, who shows up at the titular car wash seeking donations for his questionable cause. Another strange decision Schumacher made was to cut Danny DeVito completely out of the film; the up-and-coming actor spent ten weeks working on Car Wash, and his scenes were only used in the movie’s TV edit.
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