Jim Carrey's Grinch Movie Features An Incredibly Adult Joke No Kid Would Understand

There's a long history of movies for children that have jokes just for their parents peppered throughout, though some of those jokes are significantly more adult than others. Sometimes, they're a little too easy for young audiences to catch, like a "1-800-SPANK-ME" quip in Tim Allen's "The Santa Clause" that had to be removed for home video, but one joke in Ron Howard's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" is guaranteed to go right over every child's head. 

Howard's live-action version of Dr. Seuss' classic Christmas tale stars Jim Carrey as the titular green guy and features quite a few humorous moments intended for the parents in the audience, but a joke early on shows the Whos down in Whoville having a key party. You know, as in a party where the husbands drop their keys in a fishbowl and then the wives fish a set of keys out and go home with whoever those keys belong to, ostensibly to hook up. That kind of swinging behavior is pretty raunchy, and it's wild to see the cartoonish-looking Whos participating, but maybe that's what makes it so funny.

Not only do we see the Whos having their horny holiday party, but there's also a scene just a bit before in which a baby arrives on the doorstep and the husband tells his wife that the infant "looks just like your boss." Is there a Whoville version of "Jerry Springer" we can get them on?

In a flashback sequence that shows how the Grinch came to exist, we see a lavish Christmas Eve party for all of the adult Whos, and they are definitely having a key party. It's kind of a brilliant joke because there's nothing for a kid to mimic or repeat, and there's just absolutely no way they're going to understand the context. It also fits into the whole secret theme of Howard's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," which is that Christine Baranski's Who character really, really wants to bone the Grinch. Seriously, that woman wants to get groovy with the Grinch even more than he wants to ruin everyone's Christmas, making for a magical subplot just for grown-ups. (That and even kids can appreciate an overly amorous character as comedic relief — Pepé Le Pew, anyone?)

I, for one, am not going to shame the Whos for a bit of polyamory. When love is the goal, fish around in the bowl ... just don't get too mad, if your wife's boss is your kid's dad!