"One man's toxic sludge is another man's potpourri"::Notes on Overconsumption, Marginalization and Smell in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

As the success of stink bombs and woopy cushions would suggest, the sense of smell is an essential element to low comedy and general buffoonery. As it has historically considered inferior, repulsive and taboo, at least in Western traditional thought, the presence of smell in cultural practice necessarily leads to the dissociation of sensory perceptions and bodily experiences from canonical aesthetics and hegemonic politics. Since smell is often culturally associated with lower body functions, it seems almost too 'on the nose' that olfaction would be the sensory modality of low-brow humor and general stinky buffoonery, as the texts of the oldest mystery plays and farces suggest. While the Smell Studies Blog has made itself home for introspective, opinionated and forward-thinking pieces, I propose in this short semi-academic article to literally 'lower' the bar in order to delve into the inner workings of the oft-ignored interactions of 'low-brow' (or popular) culture, low comedy, and the lowest of the senses: smell. My somewhat informal enquiry will be constituted of a non-exhaustive study of the uses of olfaction in the dialogs and the direction of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000). The film is directed by Ron Howard, written by Peter S. Seaman and Jeffrey Price, and based on an eponymous children's book by Theodor Dr. Seuss (1957). It notably stars Jim Carrey and the Grinch and Taylor Momsen as Cindy Lou Who. While previous research works have pointed out the overall political nature of the original book and of Seuss's productions and adaptations in general, my intent here rather focuses on how smells are used in the film to infer a complex subtextual critique of overconsumption.