Well, actually it’s an interview with John Rhys-Davies — but a fine interview it is, talking about dwarves, the movies, his career, Tolkien, and some geopolitical stuff. Interesting.
But what are the books? Something’s quite nice, and then something bad goes wrong, and then there’s a fight, and then something gets worse, and then there’s a bigger fight, and then things look really bad, and then there’s a battle, and then things look really really bad, and then there’s a bigger battle, and then things look REALLY really bad. That’s the structure of the damn thing. And you can’t have that mounting tension all the way through. So we needed to find ways of releasing the tension. And we decided that Gimli was probably the way to do it. Because there’s something innately funny about Gimli.
I’m not sure I agree with the Gimli-as-humorous-relief — but he’s probably done more thinking about it than I have, and he certainly seems to have accepted it.
Yeah, I haven’t really enjoyed that the comic relief in the movies has been Pippin and Gimli… just seems wrong, but that’s basically because I’ve always considered Gimli a complete badass, based off the books.
I don’t mind Gimli as comic foil. He’s often at a point where it’s needed; he’s in much tighter jams than Merry and Pippin, which requires some relief, as he says.
I would feel better about Gimli as comic relief if he were more than that. He gets some teary/dramatic lines at time (the tomb in Moria, the pyre near Fangorn), but most of the time he comes off as kind of goofy.
It doesn’t help that many of his humorous lines are jarringly anachronistic. Dwarf-tossing comes to mind, as does “nervous system.” And many of them are “Hey, isn’t it funny that I’m short and thus unable to be as kick-ass as Aragorn and Legolas?”
Granted, the Three Hunters were a singularly humorless group in the books (per the genre), Gimli comes off as a less serious character in the movies — not in terms of humor level, but in terms of how seriously we should take him as a hero.