Daily Dialogue — November 27, 2018

“Stupid is as stupid does.”

— Forrest Gump (1994), screenplay by Eric Roth, novel by Winston Groom

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Callback.

Trivia: Warner Bros. gave up the rights to this film in 1988 in exchange for the rights to Executive Decision (1996), because the studio felt that the project had lost its commercial promise in the wake of Rain Man (1988).

Dialogue On Dialogue: Forrest says the line “stupid is as stupid does” at least three times, so it definitely qualifies as a callback. But what does it mean? I found this answer on Quora:

Forrest Gump’s “Stupid is as stupid does” is a variant of an old
adage, “Handsome is as handsome does.” This saying appears in J.R.R.
Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and in Herman Melville’s “Billy
Budd,” and can be traced as far back as the 14th Century.

“Handsome is as handsome does” basically means that true handsomeness
has to do with a person’s behavior, not just a handsome face. The
saying is also phrased in the forms “Pretty is as pretty does” and
“Beauty is as beauty does.”

Forrest’s version of the saying means that stupidity is not just a
surface thing derived from a person’s appearance. Stupidity is a
matter of deeds, not looks. Like the other versions, it comes down to
this: judge people by what they do, not by how they appear.