Funny / Bridget Jones

Film examples

• The Wimp Fight between Daniel and Mark is this and a Moment of Awesome, in-universe and for the film.
  • For added hilarity they start brawling inside a restaurant...and stop politely to allow the waiters to bring out a birthday cake for another diner. And they both join in with the Happy Birthday too.
• Bridget giving a speech at the Book Launch and fighting the urge to call Mr. Fitzherbert, Mr. "Tits Pervert."
  • The microphone isn't working and so she gets everyone's attention by just shouting out "oi! oi!" and once Mr Fitzherbert comes onstage, he turns the microphone on.
• Daniel and Bridget on the pond with Daniel making a dirty poem.
  Daniel Cleaver: There was a young woman from Ealing, / Who had a peculiar feeling. / She lay on her back, / And opened her crack, / And pissed all over the ceiling.
• Bridget's speech to Mark at his parent's Ruby Wedding is both this and a Heartwarming Moment.
  Bridget: You once said you liked me just as I am and I just wanted to say likewise. I mean there are stupid things your mum buys you, tonight's another... classic. You're haughty, and you always say the wrong thing in every situation and I seriously believe that you should rethink the length of your sideburns. But, you're a nice man and I like you. If you wanted to pop by some time that might be nice... more than nice.
• Shazzer, especially in the movies, everytime she opens her mouth.
• Bridget making a fool of herself on the news.
  Bridget's Narration: Great. Am national laughing stock. With bottom the size of Brazil.
• Bridget goes on a series of job interviews to get into television. She gives rather elaborate reasons why she wants to work there ("I love the children" for example). She's turned down at each one. For the last one she gives into Brutal Honesty and says "I had to leave my last job because I shagged my boss" - and is hired immediately. The interviewer (Neil Pearson) then assures her she won't be fired if she shags the boss in this line of work.
• Bridget turning up to the Tarts and Vicars party only to discover it had been changed last minute - and she wasn't informed.

  Mrs Jones: Bridget, what on Earth are you wearing? You look like a common prostitute.
  Bridget: Well yes. That was meant to be the idea.

  • And the obtuse Una puts her foot in it later. By introducing her to a lady wearing a rather low-cut blouse and saying Geoffrey didn't get in touch with her either...
  Una: Geoffrey didn't get in touch with you to tell you that the Tarts and Vicars theme was off.
  Penny: Oh yes he did.
  beat.
  Una: ...Lovely dress. Oriental?
  Penny storms off.

Book examples

• In the first book, Bridget's comment on her mother trying to set her up with Mark Darcy: "I don't know why she didn't just come out with it and say, 'Darling, do shag Mark Darcy over the turkey curry, won't you? He's very rich.'"
• It later turns out that Mark was equally sick of his mother trying to set him up with Bridget, as he says: "Last Christmas, I thought if my mother said the words 'Bridget Jones' just once more I would go to the Sunday People and accuse her of abusing me as a child with a bicycle pump."
• Bridget complaining about how people keep asking "how's your love life?"
  Oh God. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to them and roar, 'How's your marriage going? Still having sex?' Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, 'Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo,' than, 'Super, thanks.'
• Bridget's mum in general.
• Bridget trying to cook, which results in a meal of blue soup, omelette and marmalade.
• Christmas day at Bridget's parents is interrupted by the arrival of drunken criminal Julio, who Pam had run off to Portugal with a month prior.
  Bridget: Every time I've seen Julio he had been clean and coiffed beyond all sense and carrying a gentleman's handbag. Now he was wild, drunk, unkempt and, frankly, just the type I fall for. No wonder Mum seemed more aroused than embarrassed.
  • Then Pam and Julio head upstairs, leaving a stunned party behind them.
  "Okay, everybody," said Dad in a tense, serious, manly sort of voice. "There is a dangerous criminal upstairs using Pam as a hostage."
  "Oh, she didn't seem to mind, if you ask me," piped up Granny in a rare and most untimely moment of clarity.
• Bridget's In-Universe interview with Colin Firth, which is apparently based off a real interview Helen Fielding did with Colin Firth, deliberately in the way Bridget would have.
  BJ: You know in the BBC Pride and Prejudice?
  CF: I do know it, yes.
  BJ: When they had to do another take, did you have to take the wet shirt off and then put a dry one on?

  BJ: Are you still going out with your girlfriend?
  CF: Yes
  BJ: Oh.
  [long pause]

  BJ: Do you think small British movies are the way forward?
  CF: The way forward to... [encouragingly] ...to what?
  BJ: [very long thoughtful pause] The future?
• After Bridget catches married Uncle Geoffrey at the bar with a much younger man:
  Tom: So many men up and down the country living a lie! Imagine all the secret thoughts, shames and desires eating away within the walls of suburbia, between the sofa and the French window of lies.
• Shaz, Jude and Bridget reading through Lonely Hearts ads. Followed by Shaz taking the piss ringing some of them up.
• Bridget, Shaz and the magic mushrooms.
• Bridget in the Thailand prison, becoming the most popular girl in the cell after teaching a fellow cellmate the lyrics of 'Like a Virgin.' She gives a performance on a stack of mattresses, in a sarong and her bra, at which point the British Consul appears.
  "Ah, Charlie." I said graciously, getting down off the mattress and hurrying towards him, whilst trying to pull the sarong up over the bra and retain my dignity. "So glad you've come! We've got lots to talk about!"
  Charlie did not appear to know which way to look but seemed to keep plumping for the Wonderbra direction.
• After Bridget receives a bullet in the mail, she stays with Mark Darcy and gets up in the middle of the night for some tea and gets frightened by a man-shaped shadow coming up the stairs.
  By time had realized man was Mark - naked! - realized he was also screaming. But screaming much more than me. Screaming in complete, abandoned terror. Screaming - in a half-asleep way - as though he had just come across the most horrifying terrible scenario of his life.
• Jude's wedding to Vile Richard:
  • Start off with Bridget spilling a bottle of nail vanish down the front of her bridesmaid dress (in which she describes herself as a giant puffball). She and Shazzer, who is hungover from the night before, decide to just cut it out, hoping to hide the hole behind her bouquet.
  • Then while walking down the aisle Bridget notices that Shazzer's Agent Provocateur lilac bra is caught on the heel of her shoe. She is unable to just kick it off without everybody seeing. "Instead tried unsuccessfully to flip it under my dress causing brief interlude of awkward leaping gait with little result."
  • Just as the vows begin, a baby starts crying and then two little boys kick a football down the aisle. Mark eventually gets up out of his seat, picks them up and removes them from the church.
  • Shaz fainting in the middle of the vows.
  • Jude's father giving a painfully long speech. After twenty-five minutes he's midway through describing her winning first prize for freestyle swimming at school.

Meta examples

• Renee Zellweger worked undercover at a British publishing house for a month to prepare for the role. She apparently wasn't recognised. Also she kept a framed photo of then-fiancee Jim Carey on her desk. Her co-workers thought it was odd but none of them said anything out of fear of upsetting her.
• Hugh Grant apparently thought Zellweger's Fake Brit accent was so convincing, he mistook her for a Brit. He talks about hearing her speak "in this very strange voice" at the premiere, not knowing that was her real accent.