‘Meet The Parents’ Turns 20: The Dinner Scene Remains Endlessly Rewatchable

Greg Focker has offered to pray, but doesn’t know what to do with his hands. As portrayed by Ben Stiller, he sits at the dinner table beside his girlfriend and in between her parents, looking to make a strong first impression inside their Long Island home. So he puts his palms together, interlocks his fingers, then reverts to a worshipful gesture. Greg is Jewish, but he’s performed grace “at many a table,” he assures them. Soon he closes his eyes and begins his blessing—a long, painful initiation into a hellish weekend. “We thank you, oh sweet Lord of Hosts,” he begins, “for the Smorgasbord you have so aptly lain at our table.” Without any direction, he concludes by quoting Godspell, earning several confused glances from his potential father-in-law, Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro, doing his best confused De Niro frown). “Thank you, Greg,” Jack says. “That was interesting.”

In the middle of World War II, sociologist James H.S. Bossard wrote that “it is at the dining table, and particularly at dinner time, that the family is apt to be at its greatest ease.” Nearly six decades later, far removed from the threat of impending global fascism, director Jay Roach reconfigured that theory into a punchline. In Meet The Parents, the comedy that was released 20 years ago today, the filmmaker became the latest to deconstruct mid-century Rockwellian idyllicism, turning the dinner table into its modern equivalent—a tension-filled psychological battlefield (and comedy goldmine). “Greatest ease?” Beneath Jack’s imposing shadow, Greg, the movie’s everyman protagonist, might as well be fastening his boxing gloves. 

Although plenty of moments in this tête-à-tête comedy remain part of the cultural lexicon, few have endured as well as the dinner table scene. Endlessly rewatchable and relatable, it lasts eight minutes and captures the movie’s cringe-worthy spirit in totality. It introduces Jinx, the humanoid family cat, watches Greg stack together white lies, and lets Jack squeeze them to their last, improbable drops; it highlights Stiller’s cagey defensiveness and solidifies De Niro’s comedy chops; it provides one of the greatest line deliveries of the century and turns a mother’s ashes into cat litter. Most importantly, the scene portrays a man’s insecure implosion, building the foundation of the movie’s pugilistic dynamic and hinting at the accidental disasters to come. 

It’s the little details that make this all work, starting with the Last Supper seating arrangement, which pits Greg beside Pam (Teri Polo), in the center of the frame, as Jack and his wife Dina (Blythe Danner) sit at the table’s ends. Greg is dressed in a wool sweater, wearing a plaid collared shirt over top, clothing choices that Roach knew would make Stiller uncomfortable. And, as a substitute for his Nicorette gum, Greg nibbles on green beans with his fingers, another nervous-tic that builds to an awkward realization: the urn that stares down at them from the mantle is not one of Jack’s hidden cameras, but instead holds his mother’s ashes. 

Banking on De Niro’s “baggage of all the killers he’s played in his life,” Roach allows his Oscar-winner to unexpectedly get silly and vulnerable. At his wife’s urging, Jack reads a poem he wrote about his late mother, and even though it’s penciled down, it functions much like Greg’s spontaneous prayer—repetitive and elementary. “You gave me life, you gave me milk, you gave me courage,” he starts, a cue for the table’s next conversation. His earnestness over his mother’s cancer (an “unstoppable rebel force”) then slips into a teary-eyed conclusion that rhythmically matches Greg’s slow “day…by day…” recital. “So much love, yet so much information,” Greg responds. 

This sets up the final showdown, in which Jack asks Greg about his early life on the farm. Despite growing up in Detroit, Greg doubles down on his fabricated childhood—he had many pets, he clarifies—and begins nervously chomping on green beans again to explain the fictional origins of his cat-milking days. This is Stiller at his best. At one moment, he’s a confident storyteller who really did help nurture the runt of a kitten litter by pulling on the mother’s teat — his finger-pinch gesturing steals the scene. The next moment, he’s walked himself into a corner (“You can milk anything with nipples,” he asserts) when Jacks asks him a devastating rhetorical question: “I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?”

It’s a perfect line. A devastating line. It might be one of De Niro’s best deliveries. His long pause, his simplicity asking the question, his inability to drop the subject—they all feel part of Jack’s CIA interrogative background. They all combine to land a knockout punch, establishing another inflection point in the actor’s voluminous career. Describing De Niro, Roach told the Hollywood Reporter, “I thought he’d seem even more dangerous if he had a grandfather exterior but we hinted at that bullshit detector killer underneath.” Ultimately, the question reestablishes home-field advantage and forces Greg into the kitchen, tail between his legs. It makes the ensuing accident—Greg’s champagne cork pops and breaks the urn, spilling ashes to the floor, where Jinx urinates—feel like inadvertent revenge. 

For writers Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg, adapting the screenplay from the (little seen and exceedingly difficult to track down) original 1992 movie, every action, gesture and look has an equal and opposite consequence, and the dinner table scene epitomizes that operating procedure. De Niro and Stiller bottle the air so tight, squaring off with prayers and poems, that a cork blast becomes the only logical way to finish the evening. It’s a full-circle gag, the final shot attempting armistice, and to diffuse the lingering, unanswered question.  

“Could you milk me?” 

After 20 years, you still gasp. How did Greg Focker survive that?

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has appeared in The Ringer, GQ.com, Esquire.com, Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, and other fine publications. 

Where to stream Meet The Parents