Jack Black to Collaborate With the Farrelly Brothers on a Christmas Comedy That Can’t Be Worse Than ‘Shallow Hal’

Black’s Super Mario Bros. Movie co-star Keegan-Michael Key will also appear in Dear Santa, though neither Key nor Black’s parts in the project have been revealed. The plot of Dear Santa sounds similar to a 2020 Syfy original movie called Letters to Satan Claus in which a young girl accidentally summons the biblical villain with the same typo, a grisly mistake that haunts her decades later. That coincidence might be because the Santa/Satan spelling similarity has been the fodder for memes and jokes since the dawn of the internet.

Twenty years ago, the Black/Farrelly partnership was an artistic low point for all the creatives involved. Shallow Hal’s story was about as skin-deep as its protagonists’ perception of women — Black played a misogynistic, wannabe womanizer who is hypnotized by self-help speaker Tony Robbins into only seeing a person’s inner beauty. He then falls in love with a 300-pound woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow, and wacky misadventures ensue. Despite the attempt at appearing as a well-meaning comedy about superficiality, the entire film was just a single extended fat joke. As we’ve previously established, Shallow Hal was “the worst thing Gwyneth Paltrow has ever done, and that’s saying a lot.”

Now, the trio are attempting a second collaboration for the holiday comedy crowd. Despite Dear Santa’s simple premise, we hesitantly expect it to be the best of their two joint projects — and if it falls short, we’ll ask Santa and Satan both for something to burn it out of our memories.

Sign up for the Cracked Newsletter

Get the best of Cracked sent directly to your inbox!

SIGN ME UP