Dumb movies are never hard to find — sometimes, it might seem like there’s nothing else playing in theatres.

But the precise, painstaking and possibly sublime kind of dumb that Dumb and Dumber To represents is a whole other matter.

A belated sequel to the 1994 hit that helped establish Jim Carrey as Hollywood’s biggest comedy star and Peter and Bobby Farrelly as its preeminent laugh factory, Dumb and Dumber To is a throwback not only to the wave of unabashedly lowbrow yuk-fests that happily insulted viewers’ intelligence in the ’90s.

At its best, it’s also a reminder of the enduring potency of slapstick, a vaunted comedy tradition that ruled vaudeville stages and music halls before becoming a staple of the big screen thanks to the great silent comedians and later masters such as Mel Brooks (also the subject of a new retrospective at TIFF Bell Lightbox).

Yet as filmmaker Bobby Farrelly says in an interview, movies that emphasize this very physical brand of comedy have become as scarce as joy buzzers and rubber chickens. Indeed, its virtual extinction may be part of a larger struggle for funny movies to get some respect in an industry that assumes Marvel heroes make for better exports.

“I think it has disappeared,” says Farrelly over the phone from a promo visit to his home state of Rhode Island.

“It’s really not the type of movie that’s getting made any more, which is unfortunate. Hopefully, it’s just a phase but the studios are making movies that they know will be able to sell in the growing markets like China and Russia, like a big giant action movie or a superhero thing.”

That attitude was “one of the reasons it took us so long to get it made,” Farrelly says of Dumb and Dumber To. Since the original grossed nearly $250 million U.S. and became a steady seller on DVD, you might assume that green-lighting a sequel was a no-brainer. Such was not the case.

One factor was the failure of 2003’s Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, a charmless prequel that reimagined Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ lovable dolts as high schoolers. Like the original’s stars, the Farrellys weren’t involved with that project, rightly believing that the characters were only funny if they were grown men.

“They’re like little boys trapped in men’s bodies,” says Farrelly. “If you put them in a high school setting — well, high school kids are inherently dumb so that just detracted from it!”

It was Carrey who got the ball rolling on a real followup five years ago, having caught a TV broadcast of the original by chance and remembered how much fun they’d had making it. The Farrellys started developing the script, “but we had a real hard time convincing the studio that this was a worthwhile movie,” says Bobby Farrelly.

“They thought, ‘It’s too long ago, people have forgotten that.’ We said, ‘No, it’s been watched a lot, kids know a lot of the lines — if anything, it’s grown in stature.’

“We were quite certain that we could do another sequel but a lot of studios didn’t agree with us.”

To be fair to the suits, the respective box-office clout of Carrey and the Farrellys had dropped considerably over the last decade. While Carrey’s attempts to establish himself as a more dramatic actor was one reason for his slide, the brothers remained admirably dedicated to the art and craft of making very dumb (but often pretty smart) comedies, despite the genre’s shrinking presence on movie screens.

One underrated effort was their 2012 revamp of The Three Stooges, a profoundly idiotic movie that achieved an old-fashioned sort of comedic purity thanks to its often exquisitely staged gags.

“Of all the movies we’ve ever done, that probably had the highest degree of difficulty,” says Farrelly. “Trying to recreate what those three original comic geniuses did wasn’t as easy as it might’ve looked. Even as we were making that, the powers that be would say, ‘Well, you can just fake that with CGI.’

“We were like, ‘No, Moe, Larry and Curly never did that — they did real stunts.’ We wanted to recreate all that.”

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Though only a modest success, The Three Stooges still proved that moviegoers weren’t necessarily so adverse to slapstick. The Farrellys finally convinced a studio that Harry and Lloyd could find some love again, too. Universal agreed to help finance and distribute the project, which had a budget of between $35 and $40 million, very modest by today’s standards.

If Dumb and Dumber To is a hit—it topped the box office numbers for its opening weekend—then the Farrellys might have an easier time convincing Hollywood that their more physical brand of humour has a viable spot in the marketplace. At the very least, the movie is a testament to Carrey’s ingenuity and fearlessness as a performer. Indeed, for all of the broader moments, the smallest gags may best demonstrate his prowess.

Bobby Farrelly has a special memory of one such example, which transforms the sight of Lloyd gobbling a mustard-covered hotdog into a miniature comedy master class. “Jim likes to do a lot of takes because he wants to get it right,” he says. “By our count, he ate 35 hotdogs on the night we shot that. I’m not kidding. We were like, ‘Jim, are you all right?’ He’s like, ‘No, no, I’m good — I want to try something else.’ You couldn’t tell the difference between take three and take 32 but he ate every single one with verve and vigour.

“A little piece of a hotdog went down the wrong pipe and got caught in his lung. For two days, every time he breathed, you could actually hear this chunk in his breathing canal. We were afraid but that’s who he is: a trooper!”