YMMV / The Jerk

• Awesome Music: "Tonight You Belong To Me" on ukulele. And cornet, for some reason!
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When Navin realizes just how much his share of Opti-Grab's profits actually is, his head spins around Exorcist-style, only prompting light laughter by Navin.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Patty's downright sadistic abuse towards Navin (up to and including implied rape) really shouldn't be funny, but Navin cheerfully going along with it all, presumably having no idea what's actually going on, just makes it too ridiculous to be offensive. It helps that she does eventually get her comeuppance from Marie, a woman who actually cares about him.
  • Navin's Pre-Asskicking One-Liner to a racist landlord saying that he'll keep the "niggers" away: "Sir, you are talking to a nigger!"
  • The cat-juggling. Especially when the juggler misses one "kitten" and sends it bouncing off a table.
  • Carl Reiner condemning Navin for not even testing his product on prisoners before releasing it to the wide market.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: M. Emmet Walsh hilariously chews the scenery as the madman who randomly picked Navin's name out of the phone book as a murder target.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Navin's first relationship is with a comically abusive biker. A few years later, Steve Martin would play a comically abusive biker boyfriend in Little Shop of Horrors.
• Memetic Mutation: Some people cannot look for their remote/car keys/cell phone without it being "all I need."
• Sequelitis: Yes, The Jerk got a sequel; a 1984 Made-for-TV Movie called The Jerk, Too which stars Mark Blankfield as Navin Johnson rather than Steve Martin. Despite the title, it's not actually a sequel and is in fact a remake of The Jerk where Navin and Marie already know each other as pen pals and has Navin enlisting the help of hobos to stop Marie's marriage to a controlling Jerkass. With a 2.7 rating on imdb from not even 300 votes in contrast with The Jerk's rating of 7.2 from over 56'000 votes and being labeled one of the best comedies ever made with a spot on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs list, you'd be forgiven for not knowing about this sequel. If you do, the fact that you could count the number of good jokes on one hand will likely leave you wishing you didn't.
• Signature Scene: The "that's all I need" scene.
• Tear Jerker: As hilarious as the "that's all I need" scene is, it's compounded by the depressing image of Navin, now facing a slow, painful bankruptcy, drunkenly stumbling out of his house while carrying a bunch of junk, his pants around his ankles as he yells at Marie "What do I look like? Some kind of a JERK!?" It's then followed by a montage of him hopelessly wandering around LA like this, complete with tragic music and an extreme wide shot that makes him look literally and figuratively small, before finally returning to him as a bum on the street. And for a few seconds, the movie teases you by making it seem as if it's going to end like this.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Navin’s over-the-top reaction to finding his name in a phone book. While the joke remains that Navin is such an idiot that he'd get excited over nothing, the advent of social media, such as Facebook and YouTube, as well as search engines supplanting the need for phone books, makes it seem even more meaningless.
  • Navin discovers that a "Master Charge" card is stolen by checking it against a printed registry.
• Values Dissonance: Navin's encounter with some very stereotypical, larcenous, pot-smoking, low-rider driving Latino gangsters comes across a little awkward in modern times.

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