Wannabe legal eagle Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) scores one of her most foundational triumphs roughly halfway through Legally Blonde. Determined to help manicurist pal Paulette Bonafonté (Jennifer Coolidge) get her dog back from a slovenly ex-husband, Elle taps into her newfound expertise to befuddle him into defeat. After blinding the poor schlub with some well-deployed legalese, it is here that the law student notches up her first big win, piling the pooch into a waiting car, and Paulette's grateful arms.
'Oh my gosh, did you see him? He's probably still scratching his head,' says Elle, as she congratulates herself on a job well done. 'Yeah, which must be a nice vacation for his balls,' Paulette responds, wryly. It is a great one-liner in a film packed chock full of them – and a gag which made me laugh, with no exaggeration, for five days straight.
For some context, I watched Legally Blonde for the first time this year, a few months shy of its 25th anniversary. The tale of a sorority queen who enrolls in Harvard Law School as an attempt to win back her snotty ex-boyfriend, it is a bona-fide '00s comedy classic, and a heart-warming, feel-good hug of a film. In addition to a career-best performance from Witherspoon, it also features tremendous support from Luke Wilson, Selma Blair, Ali Larter, and four-legged scene-stealers Moondoggie and Lily, who play dogs Bruiser Woods and Rufus. Keep an eye out too, for Longlegs director Osgood Perkins, who plays a character credited as Dorky David.
Talking of Longlegs: I may be a self-avowed maven of horror cinema, but I was instantly taken with Legally Blonde, falling in love with Elle's never-say-die enthusiasm, self-belief, and refreshing lack of cynicism. Directed by Robert Luketic from a sparkling screenplay by Karen McCullah and Lutz Kirsten Smith (based, in turn, on the lived experience of Amanda Brown), it is easy to see how it became a beloved staple of the genre. Legally Blonde is chock full of fun performances, great jokes, and belly laughs… but none hit quite the same as its 'nice vacation for his balls' line.
During that fateful first screening, I devolved into a cackling mess, laughing so hard that I completely missed the next ten minutes. And, over the following five days, I would keep coming back to it, chuckling to myself on the bus, giggling while in the queue at the supermarket, or snickering from behind my desk at work. I am laughing right now, as I write this piece.
What was it about this throwaway line which tickled me so? It is not even a real joke, so to speak. It is hard to say – a combination of Jennifer Coolidge's stone-faced delivery, the off-handedness with which it comes, and mostly, being a very good 'balls' joke. Whatever the case, it instantly rose up in my ranking system to become perhaps my second favourite gag in all of cinema. The first? Hobo With a Shotgun's clever 'stops begging, demands change' news headline.
Not everyone saw the funny side. Dissecting the film for Legal Eagle, lawyer and YouTuber Devin Stone took umbrage with Elle's breach of ethics in this scene. 'She hasn't finished law school, she's never passed the bar and she has absolutely no right to call herself an attorney,' he pointed out. 'That's called the unauthorized practice of law,' he continued, noticing that if anyone found out what she had done while at Harvard Law School, then 'she'd probably be barred from entering the bar in virtually any state.'
Setting aside Elle's flagrant disregard for the rules, Elle's dog rescue is one of Legally Blonde's strongest sequences, setting up her development beyond the ex-boyfriend she sought to impress. It also speaks to the tumultuous journey to screen which had been going on – with the studio initially expecting a far raunchier film closer in nature to American Pie. 'It transformed from nonstop zingers that were very adult in nature to this universal story of overcoming adversity by being oneself,' actress Jessica Caufiel, who plays Margot, told New York Times.
In that respect, the gag takes on a whole new meaning, diverting from the puerile, ball-scratching comedy it could have been to deliver a masterpiece of female empowerment. From here, Elle goes on to represent fitness personality Brooke Windham (Ali Larter) in a murder trial, winning the respect of love rival Vivian (Selma Blair) and realising that she does not need doofy Warner (Matthew Davis) at all. As a result of resisting its more puerile urges, Legally Blonde has aged much better than many of its peers.
Describing it as 'the right feminist message and character to land when it did,' screenwriter Kirsten Smith added: 'It wears its desires on its sleeve: the contradiction [that] you can be a woman who's fighting to be heard with a very clear point of view, who's very strong and smart and also funny, fun and interested in different things, fashion and the law.'
A sequel, subtitled Red, White & Blonde, followed in 2003, although it failed to match the original film's cultural impact (and the less said about the 2009 direct-to-video sequel, Legally Blondes, the better). There is also the popular stage musical, making up what it lacks in a vacation for anyone's balls with a number of bangers and two real-life pooches among the cast. (Seriously though, I had hoped that the line would get its own song in the stage adaptation).
Only time will tell whether the imminent TV prequel for Amazon Prime will recapture the film's lightning-in-a-bottle sense of magic, although one suspects not. Still, if Legally Blonde taught us anything, it is that we should never count Elle Woods out… and could not the world use her right now? Ali Larter certainly thinks so, telling New York Times: 'You see this undeniable force, and that [Elle] never lets her self-doubt take her down. When you watch a movie like this, you believe in yourself a little bit more.'
In a landscape which has become increasingly divided, cynical and boxed-in, Legally Blonde is the hit of feel-good cheer we could all use. It is a nice vacation, if you will, for the balls of our life – balls which (to labour the unfortunate metaphor some more) have been not so much scratched as utterly pummelled into submission. I know – trust a man to take a film about female empowerment and boil it down to, uh, balls.
Legally Blonde: 25th Anniversary is out in UK cinemas now.
