Buddy Love
The only issue is that Buddy Love is also extremely unpleasant, especially as compared to the misunderstood and sweet Julius Kelp. Although this alter ego is a quick social success, the drawback of the potion that has a tendency to wear off rapidly at the most embarrassing an inappropriate times for Buddy, complicating Love’s pursuit of a beautiful student (Purdy). Buddy Love performs at the yearly student dance, and while on the stage, the potion starts to wear off. The students and faculty watch in astonishment as he changes back into the professor. He gives an impassioned plea that people must learn to like themselves before others can like them reciprocally. Purdy meets Kelp backstage, and asserts that she prefers Kelp over Buddy Love,
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Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The film is mostly riotously funny, but it also deals with serious themes like the true nature of our identity and the desire among all of us to be loved for who we really are. Although The Nutty Professor is a retelling of the novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lewis decided to put his own comic twist on the project by creating two unique characters. The Kelp is a slightly different take on Lewis' familiar comic persona, while Buddy Love, a handsome ladies' man who knows how to mix a mean cocktail. Some of the funniest scenes in The Nutty Professor don’t involve Kelp croaking and yelping, but him rambling on about modern music, or about why he failed to put his glasses in his locker at the gym. (“I would’ve put them there myself if I’d known there was a restriction… Some people use them for a façade, I use them for eyes.”) Additionally, the best visual touches in The Nutty Professor are the Tashlin-like blackout gags: Kelp trying to elevate his posture in a low chair by slipping a thin book under his butt; Kelp yanking on barbells so hard that his arms stretch all the way the floor; and so on. But these jokes serve a purpose, too, to illustrate how so many people—not just the movie’s hero—try to tweak their personalities, reshape their bodies, and shift their positions in ways less dramatic than the Kelp-to-Love transformation. The movie is fairly fast-paced for a Lewis' movie, clocking in at a breathless 107 minutes, and the film is filled with inventive visuals from a flashback to Julius' troubled childhood to a brilliant laboratory scene that recalls the best of thirties horror movies. Lewis' direction of The Nutty Professor is spot on, but his performance in the film is even
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The film is mostly riotously funny, but it also deals with serious themes like the true nature of our identity and the desire among all of us to be loved for who we really are. Although The Nutty Professor is a retelling of the novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lewis decided to put his own comic twist on the project by creating two unique characters. The Kelp is a slightly different take on Lewis' familiar comic persona, while Buddy Love, a handsome ladies' man who knows how to mix a mean cocktail. Some of the funniest scenes in The Nutty Professor don’t involve Kelp croaking and yelping, but him rambling on about modern music, or about why he failed to put his glasses in his locker at the gym. (“I would’ve put them there myself if I’d known there was a restriction… Some people use them for a façade, I use them for eyes.”) Additionally, the best visual touches in The Nutty Professor are the Tashlin-like blackout gags: Kelp trying to elevate his posture in a low chair by slipping a thin book under his butt; Kelp yanking on barbells so hard that his arms stretch all the way the floor; and so on. But these jokes serve a purpose, too, to illustrate how so many people—not just the movie’s hero—try to tweak their personalities, reshape their bodies, and shift their positions in ways less dramatic than the Kelp-to-Love transformation. The movie is fairly fast-paced for a Lewis' movie, clocking in at a breathless 107 minutes, and the film is filled with inventive visuals from a flashback to Julius' troubled childhood to a brilliant laboratory scene that recalls the best of thirties horror movies. Lewis' direction of The Nutty Professor is spot on, but his performance in the film is even