That leads us to another of the movie's miscalculations. Its characters are not smart enough to be properly embarrassed. To be Jo or Gilly is already to be beyond embarrassment, since they wake up already clueless.

The genius of "There's Something About Mary" and "Kingpin" was that the characters played by Ben Stiller and Woody Harrelson were smart, clever, played the angles--and still got disgraced. To pick on Gilly and Jo is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Klein's Gilly seems like someone who never gets the joke. Who keeps smiling bravely as if everyone can't be laughing at him. We feel sorry for him, which is fatal for a comedy. Better a sharp, edgy character who deserves his comeuppance. Graham's Jo, whose principal character trait is a push-up bra, isn't really engaged by the plot at all, but is pushed hither and yon by the winds of fate.

That leaves three characters who are funny a lot of the time: Jo's parents Valdine and Walter Wingfield (Sally Field and Richard Jenkins), and Dig McCaffey (Orlando Jones), the legless pilot. Valdine is a scheming, money-grubbing con woman who conceals from Gilly the fact that she is not his mother, so that Jo can marry the millionaire. And Walter is her terminally ill husband, communicating through an electronic voice amplifier, who bears a grudge against almost everyone he can see. These characters have the necessary meanness of spirit, and Dig McCaffey is so improbable, as a Jimi Hendrix lookalike, that he gets laughs by sheer incongruity.

On the TV clips for the movie, they show the scene where Jo gets so excited while cutting Gilly's hair that she takes a slice out of his ear.

Since you have seen this scene, I will use it as an example of comic miscalculation. We see her scissors cutting through the flesh as they amputate an upper slope of his earlobe. This is not funny. It is cringe-inducing. Better to choose an angle where you can't see the actual cut at all, and then have his entire ear spring loose. Go for the laugh with the idea, not the sight, of grievous injury. And instead of giving Gilly an operation to reattach the missing flesh, have him go through the entire movie without an ear (make a subtle joke by having him always present his good ear to the camera). There are sound comic principles at work here, which "Say It Isn't So" doesn't seem to understand.

Note: The end credits include the usual obligatory outtakes from the movie. These are unique in that they are clearly real and authentic, not scripted. They demonstrate what we have suspected, that real outtakes are rarely funny.

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