Easily the most underrated collaboration between Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, The Other Guys hilariously lampoons the tropes of the “buddy cop” genre. All the familiar beats in the story of mismatched cops tracking a crime syndicate have an absurdist bent.
Ferrell established his impeccable on-screen chemistry with Mark Wahlberg as the two played a police accountant who used to be a pimp during his college days and a hotshot detective who got confined to a desk after accidentally shooting Derek Jeter. The movie has no shortage of hysterical set pieces, so here are the 10 funniest scenes in The Other Guys.
Desk Pop
Every buddy cop movie has the pair of ball-busters who like to give the leads a hard time. In The Other Guys, those characters are played hysterically by Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans, Jr., and in an early scene, they convince Allen that everyone in the precinct has done a “desk pop,” which means discharging your firearm in the office.
Allen takes out his gun and shoots it at the ceiling, leading the captain to take it off him and give him a dummy gun made of wood instead.
Realistic Explosion
In most action movies, when characters get blasted to the ground by explosions, they just get back up and dust themselves off. But in The Other Guys, Allen and Terry react realistically to an explosion.
Allen cries out, “How do they walk away in movies when it explodes behind them? There’s no way! I call bullsh*t on that!”
“Bye, Sheila!”
When Terry first introduces Allen to his wife, Sheila, played by Eva Mendes, Terry thinks he’s joking. He refuses to accept that Sheila is Allen’s wife, even as they sit down for dinner and Allen and Sheila tell Terry the story of how they met.
After dinner, Allen and Sheila walk Terry to the door and see him off as he returns to his car. They both say goodbye to him, but Terry only says goodbye to Sheila. Allen doesn’t think Terry can hear him, so he shouts, “Bye, Terry!,” and Terry shouts back, “Bye, Sheila!”
David Ershon’s Many Bribes
Every time Allen and Terry go to David Ershon’s office, they let him butter them up with cucumber-accented water and then get thrown off their line of questioning by a tantalizing bribe.
He sends them to Broadway shows and basketball games, and halfway through each event, they have a moment where they realize they’ve been conned again.
Tuna Vs. Lion
In order to illustrate how much he hates Allen, Terry says that if they both lived in the animal kingdom – even if they were from different ecosystems, like if Terry was a lion and Allen was a tuna – he’d eat him.
However, Allen counters that lions hate water and his tuna friends would develop a taste for lion and construct breathing apparatus to come onto the land and kill his whole pride. Then, he says, “Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go? Nope,” prompting Terry to pour Allen’s coffee into his lap.
Female Body Inspector
Midway through their investigation, Allen gives Terry a gift. It’s a mug featuring the FBI logo with “Female Body Inspector” written in the place of “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
As Allen tries to explain the joke to Terry, Terry just gets madder and madder until he tosses the mug out the window. Allen pledges to get over his wall of anger someday.
“I’m A Peacock! You Gotta Let Me Fly!”
All throughout The Other Guys, Terry feels trapped behind his desk and wants to be allowed back out on the streets so that he can spread his wings and fly.
But the bird he uses for the metaphor – a peacock – doesn’t actually have the ability to fly. The joke is paid off hilariously when a flying peacock can be seen in the film’s final crane shot.
Captain Mauch Unwittingly References TLC
One of the funniest running gags in The Other Guys sees Captain Gene Mauch, played by Michael Keaton, repeatedly referencing songs by TLC without realizing it. He says he “don’t want no scrubs” and that Allen and Terry shouldn’t “go chasin’ waterfalls,” but when they call out the TLC reference, he has no idea what they’re talking about.
Keaton has explained off-screen that Mauch drove his son to college and his son played TLC songs the whole way, so he unconsciously absorbed all of their lyrics.
The Gator Flashback
Midway through The Other Guys, Allen finally explains to Terry why he wants to avoid action as much as possible. Back in college, he was a pimp who went by the name “Gator.”
At first, he contests ever being a pimp, but it’s pretty obvious that’s what he was. He had gold chains around his neck and grills in his teeth. Occasionally, he slips back into the persona: “Gator don’t play no sh*t! Gator never been about playing no sh*t!”
“Aim For The Bushes!”
There are a number of fan theories about why Danson and Highsmith decided to jump off the roof of a skyscraper and “aim for the bushes,” killing themselves. Maybe they’d escaped so many scrapes from death that they thought they were invincible. Or maybe they just couldn’t handle the fact that they finally let some perps get away.
Either way, it’s one of the movie’s most hilariously unexpected plot turns. Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” sets the tone as inspiring and uplifting before abruptly cutting out as the two cops hit the sidewalk.