I Need To Reckon With The Klumps

Indulge me for a moment, if you will, and allow me to describe a sequence from the trailer for the film Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps.¹

Some context: I was experiencing something that I call “YouTube Memento Phenomenon”, which is where I will find myself watching a video on YouTube without any clear idea of the thought process that led me to that video. Memento was the movie where…I want to say Christian Bale wakes up and can’t remember where he is or any recent events, right? Because “YouTube Memento Phenomenon” is what I wrote in my proposal to the New England Journal of Medicine and if I’m wrong about the movie reference, the editorial board is going to have my ass on a silver platter. (Again!)

The phrase YouTube Memento Phenomenon might be misleading. I’m not talking about falling down a rabbit hole; the process of watching a video about soup recipes, selecting a new one from the algorithmic suggestions that queue up at the end, and rinsing/repeating until I’m watching a video of an old man cutting beautiful cross sections of leather boots. What happens is I pull out my phone, enter in the search terms “Nutty Professor 2 trailer”, hit play, and then immediately go glassy eyed and wonder what compelled me to search for this specific thing in the first place.

Now look, the internet is generally getting worse and our platforms are crumbling around us, but there is some small consolation in the fact that I can have a useless impulse like wanting to watch the trailer for Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and have that impulse immediately satisfied. Al Gore’s internet is still good for something.

Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps is the sequel to 1996’s The Nutty Professor. To all my pedants out there (and it takes one to know one), know that I double checked and the second film drops the The and is just called Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps. Regardless of what got me watching that trailer (anxious impulse, the hand of the Divine) I thought, “I gotta watch this movie. I don’t think I’ve seen the first one either. Sounds like that could make for a fun weekend, maybe I’ll call it Klump Fest.” Then this sequence in the trailer stopped me dead in my tracks:

Sherman Klump (Eddie Murphy), who is the titular “Nutty Professor”, is aboard some sort of space craft and propels himself across a fuselage by farting. An Obi-wan style force ghost of Papa Klump (Eddie Murphy) coughs in distress. We cut to a demonstration of one of Sherman’s experiments where a hamster is doused with a serum that causes him to grow to monstrous size. As the crowd flees in terror, a man takes cover under a fur blanket. We are led to believe that the hamster mistakes the blanketed man for another giant hamster and attempts to “mate” with the man. We cut to Grandma Ida Jenson (Eddie Murphy) getting into a hot tub with Buddy Love (Eddie Murphy). Ida gives Buddy a lascivious look, removes her dentures, and ducks underwater. Based on Buddy’s reaction it is safe to presume that she is attempting to fellate him.

I thought to myself, without looking up the release date, “this movie had to have come out after Y2K and before 9/11.”

I was a certified whippersnapper heading into the new millennium, but, even with limited access to or interest in the news, I was vaguely aware of the fears surrounding what would happen to our precious computers when the clock switched from 1999 to 2000. I was allowed to / encouraged to stay up to ring in the New Year with my parents for the first time, perhaps with the hopes that I would blog about it nearly a quarter of a century later. The ball dropped and everything was fine. Everything was fine! In fact, it was pretty good! With this potential crisis avoided, what could possibly go wrong now? It seemed like nothing bad was ever going to happen again.

Obviously this was not the case or lived reality across the board (particularly if you were poor/not white/queer/otherwise in a marginalized group), but heck, there hadn’t been a real nasty war or economic crash for a while. The Matrix had come out, we witnessed the McGwire/Sosa home run race, and cable television provided us with bountiful hours of crap to watch. Out of what other environment could a movie as deliriously silly as Nutty Professor 2: the Klumps have come?

NP2:TK (yeah, I’m gonna start abbreviating the title 740 words into this post) has a particular flavor of wacky abandon that I am turning over in my mind, trying to hold in comparison to films that came after. There were certainly silly, broad comedies after the loss of innocence of 9/11, but it feels like there is a difference and I don’t know why. I seek now to find out.

Here I have to call myself out on the fact that I have still not seen this movie or its predecessor. So, in the interest of following this instinct and adhering to journalistic rigor, I’ll watch them and report back on my findings. I’ll encourage you to examine a dumb thought with more time and energy than the thought deserves as well.

¹ I just want you to know that I had a great time typing that sentence.