YMMV / Dinner for Schmucks

• Adorkable: Barry. He's a kind-hearted simpleton taxidermist who's desperate for a friend.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Needless to say, it's hard to find an audience when your movie revolves around a man being stalked and harassed.
• Awesome Music: Not only is "Fool on the Hill" the most perfect song choice for this movie period, it plays over the creation of elaborate Mouse Dioramas.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Chris O'Dowd's character Marco, the Large Ham blind fencer at the dinner, is an absolute scene stealer.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Five years later, Tim's actor, Paul Rudd, portrays a Manchild while a man in glasses serves as his Straight Man in contrast to Barry (Steve Carell) as the Manchild and Tim (Rudd) as the Straight Man. Bonus points for Randall Park (who has a minor role in this film) who appears in this certain sequel.
  • This would not be the only film where Octavia Spencer interacts with animals, who are this time Was Once a Man.
• Ho Yay: Tim and Barry definitely have their moments, especially when Barry's all chummy to Tim.
• Memetic Mutation: Therman’s laugh scene.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Future Oscar winner Octavia Spencer as the animal psychic ("She's talking to the lobster!").
  • Also comedic icon and star on Fresh Off the Boat, Randall Park, as one of Tim's former coworkers.
• The Scrappy: Darla. She's a crazed Stalker with a Crush who tries to destroy Tim's life, and we are supposed to find it funny.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Common criticism to how it was Americanized.
• The Woobie: Tim attends the dinner because he wants to impress Julie, and that decision allowed a stalker to harass him and damage his house and car, and almost cost his relationship with Julie. Barry has been treated like there's nothing wrong with his personality, while Tim and Barry's wife didn't tell him what people honestly thought about him and had to learn the hard way.

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