24 years ago, last month, came the release of My Cousin Vinny. It’s a smash hit that no one saw coming in 1992. The movie, made on an $11 million budget, took in about six times that at the box office, and Marisa Tomei won an Academy Award for her supporting role as Mona Lisa Vito, the girlfriend with a loud biological clock to Vinny Gambini, played by Joe Pesci. Like every great fish-out-of-water story, it’s the interactions with the locals that make it so funny, and perhaps Vinny’s most famous conversation with the judge (Fred Gwynne) involves a misunderstanding that was born from a real conversation the actor had with director Jonathan Lynn.
The Tale Of ‘The Two Yutes’
In one of the funniest exchanges in the movie, Vinny says to the judge, “It is possible that the two yutes…” and Judge Haller interrupts and asks, “Ah, the two what? Uh... uh, what was that word?” Vinny doesn’t understand the question, but finally gets that the say he's pronouncing "youths" isn't clear, and says “youtthhhs.” Vinny’s New York accent doesn’t play in rural Alabama, and the confused judge makes that clear.
It turns out that scene wasn’t in the original script. According to Lynn, he got the idea from Pesci himself when they first met. Lynn told Rolling Stone what happened:
Article continues belowWe were going through the script, talking about what he would like and what he wouldn’t like. He said to me, ‘There’s these two yutes.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Two yutes.’ I said, ‘What did you say?’ He goes, ‘What?’ I go, ‘What’s a yute?’ He said, ‘Oh. Two youtthhhhhs.’ I just wrote that into the script.
Like Judge Heller in Alabama, Lynn, who is English, didn’t quite pick up on what Pesci was saying with his natural New York accent. Lynn was so amused by the back and forth that he incorporated into the movie, and the scene is now one of the most famous of the ‘90s.
It’s A Rare Example From The Movie
It also turns out, as is clear from the Rolling Stone article, that Lynn and writer Dale Launer didn’t always see eye to eye on the script. In fact, according to Launer, the writer tried hard to protect his script, telling the magazine:
I tried to take everything Jonathan put in the script back out. This is a guy that wrote and directed Nuns on the Run. That was a silly movie. His brand of humor would often not just be silly, but cliché.
However, it’s hard to deny how funny the “yute” scene is, so not even the film’s writer could keep it out of the movie. It’s hardly “cliché.” Instead, it’s a stone-cold classic.
It’s actually been quite a while since I watched My Cousin Vinny, but watching this scene again really reminded me just how charming the movie is, and that I’ll need to fire up my Hulu subscription and watch it again soon.
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