Dave Sheridan played Officer Doofy in Scary Movie, the bumbling deputy ultimately revealed to be the man behind the Ghostface-style mask. The “Wazzup” face became a cannabis icon somewhere along the way, and 26 years later, now that his masked face appears on a PAX vape, Sheridan is still trying to work out how the culture got there first.
For more than two decades, Dave Sheridan has watched stoners fall in love with a mask he wore for about a minute of screen time. He played Officer Doofy in the original Scary Movie, the bumbling deputy who turns out, at the very end, to be the killer behind that white grinning ghost face. The role was a bit. The mask was a prop. Nobody on that set was building an icon.
Then the weed world got hold of it. The grinning “Wazzup” face turned up on hoodies, on rolling trays, in dispensary memes, at smoke sessions, until it sat somewhere in the visual vocabulary of stoner culture next to the leaf and the Grateful Dead bears. No brand pushed it there. Fans carried it, one convention photo and one meme at a time, until Sheridan could not go to a cannabis event without seeing his own masked face looking back at him.
A Second and a Half
The weirdest part is how little time the mask actually gets. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment. By any normal logic, it should have vanished into the pile of gags that make up a Scary Movie script. Instead, it outlived almost everything around it.
“What’s funny is that the mask is only on screen for about a second and a half in Scary Movie,” he says. “Yet somehow, it took on a life of its own. Over the years, that smiling mask has become more than just a movie prop; it’s become a cultural icon.”
He reaches for a comparison that lands harder than he probably intends. “For a generation of fans, it carries the same kind of instantly recognizable energy that other counterculture symbols have had in the past, like the Dancing Bears.” The Grateful Dead reference sticks. The bears were not designed as a drug emblem either. They became one because a community picked them up and carried them. Same story, different grinning face.
Sheridan has watched it happen up close. He spends a good amount of time at cannabis events doing what he calls his “Doin’ Da Doobies with Doofy” appearances, and the mask follows him everywhere. “I’ve seen firsthand how much the ‘Wazzup!’ mask resonates within cannabis culture,” he says. “The connection between Scary Movie and cannabis culture wasn’t manufactured; it happened organically through the fans.”
Built for the Internet Before the Internet Was Ready
Scary Movie accidentally invented itself as meme fodder a decade before meme culture took over the internet. Ask Sheridan why it stuck and he does not credit the writing, or not only the writing. He credits timing. The movie landed just before the internet became a machine for chopping comedy into pieces and flinging them around.
“As YouTube, GIFs, and eventually memes took off, the film’s funniest moments became incredibly easy to clip, quote, and pass around,” he says. And the lines were built for it, even if nobody knew that at the time. “Many classic movie quotes are full sentences, but some of Scary Movie‘s most memorable lines are only a few words: ‘Wazzup!’ ‘I go poopy!’ ‘Smell my finger!’ ‘Gail Swallows!’ They’re short, ridiculous, and instantly recognizable.”
“Twenty years later, people are still repeating those lines because they’re easy to remember, fun to say, and impossible to confuse with anything else,” he says. Then, because he cannot help himself: “And let’s be honest, an exclamation point never hurts comedy. Sometimes the difference between a quote and a catchphrase is just a little extra enthusiasm.”
The movie has also aged into a strange kind of inheritance, passed down to people who were nowhere near a theater in 2000. “What surprises me most is how many younger fans first saw it when they were way too young, sometimes as young as five or six,” Sheridan says. “Usually being introduced to Scary Movie by a cool uncle, a cool aunt, or an older sibling who probably shouldn’t have been showing it to them in the first place, accompanied by the phrase, ‘Don’t tell your parents I showed you this.’”
He has a theory about the movie’s afterlife. Not a coming-of-age film. Something less respectable and more durable. “It’s fascinating that the movie keeps getting passed down from one generation to the next almost like a family tradition, just a slightly irresponsible one,” he says. “Whenever someone tells me they ‘grew up on Scary Movie,’ I always correct them: nobody grows up on Scary Movie. You remain a juvenile delinquent on Scary Movie.”
Why Now
There is a reason a broad, silly, crowd-pleasing spoof is back in theaters in 2026, and Sheridan thinks it has less to do with nostalgia than with what movie theaters stopped offering. Comedy left the building somewhere in the streaming years, pushed out of theaters and into living rooms while the big screens filled up with franchises and explosions.
“The irony is that comedy is one of the few genres that’s actually better with a crowd,” he says. “There’s something special about sitting in a dark theater with 250 strangers and hearing everyone laugh at the same joke at the same time. Laughter is contagious, and it’s an experience that simply doesn’t translate the same way when you’re watching alone on your couch.”
He thinks the timing is right for a bigger reason too, one that rhymes with why people reach for the plant in the first place. “Right now, there’s a lot of stress, anxiety, and general exhaustion in the world. People are looking for an outlet. They’re looking for a release. They’re looking to laugh.” Real laughter, is his point, not the typed kind. “If we can help bring back a little more genuine laughing and a little less fake ‘LOL-ing,’ I’d consider that a public service.”
As for Doofy, the character he had no idea anyone would remember, Sheridan sounds a little amazed it is still his to play. “When we were making Scary Movie, I don’t think any of us were thinking about what people would be talking about 25 years later. We were just trying to make each other laugh.” He will take it. “They say laughter is the best medicine, and if a dose of Doofy is what the doctor ordered, then Dr. Doofy is happy to fill that prescription.”
Which brings the mask to its latest and most literal form. Earlier this year, PAX released a limited-edition Scary Movie PAX FOUR, timed to the film’s theatrical return, with Ghostface artwork, an onyx colorway to match the franchise and co-branded packaging, available while supplies last. There is also a four-part parody series, “Don’t Kill, Just Chill,” written by and starring comedian Justine Marino, that runs the horror tropes through a stoner lens. Sheridan, who appeared in the series, watched the collaboration unfold and had the same reaction a lot of longtime fans did. Of course. What took so long.
A second and a half of screen time. That was all the culture needed. Paramount and PAX didn’t create the icon. They just put it in a box.
Quotes provided exclusively to High Times through Sheridan’s team. The limited-edition Scary Movie PAX FOUR was released by PAX this summer. High Times has no commercial relationship with PAX or Paramount Pictures.
