The Farrelly brothers' Cameron Diaz–Ben Stiller comedy. The 1998 gross-out comedy that became the highest-grossing film of its kind and shifted what mainstream comedy was willing to attempt.
Rhode Island, 1985. Ted Stroehmann, a 16-year-old socially awkward high-schooler, has somehow secured a prom date with Mary Jensen — the most-popular and most-admired girl in school. The prom date never occurs; a catastrophic bathroom-zipper incident sends Ted to the emergency room. Mary moves away. Thirteen years pass.
Rhode Island and Miami, 1998. Ted, now 29, has never recovered from his teenage infatuation with Mary. He hires private investigator Pat Healy to locate her. Healy locates her in Miami, becomes infatuated with her himself, and reports back to Ted with false information designed to keep Ted away from her. The film tracks Ted's eventual journey to Miami, the multiple parallel suitors who have, like Healy, attached themselves to Mary's life under false pretexts, and Mary's eventual choice from among the candidates.
There's Something About Mary grossed $370m worldwide on a $23m production budget — one of the most-profitable comedies of its decade. The film was, in 1998, structurally important for confirming that mainstream theatrical comedy could profitably embrace gross-out material that the previous decade's broader-comedy framework had largely contained. The Farrelly brothers' previous work (Dumb and Dumber 1994, Kingpin 1996) had operated in similar registers; Mary's commercial breakthrough at this scale opened the structural space for the subsequent gross-out comedy wave (American Pie 1999, Road Trip 2000, the broader 2000s frat-comedy tradition).
What the film established was that the audience would accept extended set pieces built around bodily-fluid material, sexual-misadventure premise, and embarrassment-comedy structure if the surrounding dramatic substance was sufficient. The prom-night incident in the film's opening twenty minutes — Ted's zipper accident requiring emergency-room intervention — was the structural test. Audiences accepted it; subsequent films extended the framework.
Cameron Diaz's Mary is, on close inspection, structurally unusual for the protagonist of a 1998 comedy. The role requires Diaz to function as the object of multiple male characters' obsessions without the film falsifying her as a fantasy figure. Diaz's specific working approach — playing Mary as a recognisable specific person with her own interior life rather than as the conventional comedy-fantasy object — produces a character who registers as a real woman dealing with the absurdity of being progressively pursued by an increasing number of obsessed suitors.
The performance is, in some sense, what allows the film's central premise to function. If Mary were played as a conventional fantasy figure, the film would collapse into the kind of male-fantasy comedy whose surface premise it appears to occupy. Diaz's grounded register prevents this; the film operates simultaneously as gross-out comedy about Ted's obsession and as quieter character work about Mary's actual interior life. The dual operation is the film's specific craft achievement.
Subsequent critical reception of There's Something About Mary has, increasingly, focused on the film's structural treatment of stalking. The central plot premise — multiple men becoming obsessed with a single woman to the point of hiring private investigators, fabricating false identities, and travelling cross-country in pursuit — is, in plain description, a stalking scenario. The film frames this material as comedy.
The framing is, in 2026 retrospective viewing, more uncomfortable than the 1998 reception registered. The argument the film implicitly makes is that the obsessive male behaviour is, in some sense, ridiculous rather than threatening; the comedy is at the men's expense rather than at Mary's. The defenders of the film argue that this framing is structurally correct — that the comedy comes from the absurdity of the male obsession, which is treated as the moral problem the film identifies. The critics argue that 1998 comedic framing of stalking material has aged poorly, and that the film's structural assumption that the audience will read the male behaviour as benign-eccentric rather than as actually-threatening is no longer reliable. Both positions have textual support.