(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Jim Carrey might not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no denying the brilliance behind the chaos – a performer with razor-sharp comic timing and a rare gift for physical comedy. From the start, he’s been a one-man force, stealing scenes no matter who he’s sharing them with. He broke through on the sketch series In Living Color, then took over the 1994 box office with a run of hits: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber.
Since then, Carrey has stayed true to himself by playing roles that lend themselves to facial acrobatics, disguises, and lengthy off-script monologues. He’s also demonstrated that he can do more than comedy. Movies like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have given him the opportunity to depart from his usual schtick and demonstrate considerable nuance and dramatic chops.
Of all the comedians out there, Robin Williams is probably the one whose career most closely mimics Carrey’s. Their comedy styles are completely different, but they both got their starts with breakout roles in television, transitioned to box office-friendly comedy movies, and took a sharp and wildly successful turn into drama. And yet, Williams is not Carrey’s comedy idol. In a 2019 piece for Time, the Ace Ventura star revealed that it’s Jerry Lewis who has always been his North Star.
“Every artist is fed by the people who came before them,” Carrey wrote. “In the same way that Jimi Hendrix learned from Chuck Berry, I learned from Jerry. He is part of my makeup. I don’t do exactly what he did, but his freedom and his disrespect for the norm is there in my work.”
Lewis was a man of many talents. On top of his comedy, he was an actor, singer, radio personality, and director and worked in nearly every performing medium – stage, radio, television, and film. He had an outsized influence on comedy. Carrey claimed that his impact can be seen in everything from Monty Python’s Flying Circus to the work of Martin Scorsese. The latter is undeniable since the Taxi Driver director cast him in his film The King of Comedy, which also happened to be the comedian’s nickname.
Carrey was drawn to Lewis from the beginning. “I’ve always had this psychic connection with Jerry Lewis,” he explained. “When I was six or seven years old, I’d be sitting in my house with my family and have this really palpable feeling that one of his movies was on. I’d turn on the television, and, sure enough, Money From Home or Living It Up would be playing.”
Whether or not there was a literal psychic connection between the comedians is not for us outsiders to know, but they did hit it off at Lewis’s 90th birthday party in 2016. Carrey even remembered an interview in which Lewis was asked whether he could see himself in Carrey’s work. The comedian responded that he did see the connection and that he may, in fact, have “fucked [Carrey’s] mother a couple of decades ago.” A true legend.
When Lewis died in 2017, the Dumb and Dumber star took to Twitter and wrote, “Jerry Lewis was an undeniable genius, an unfathomable blessing, comedy’s absolute! I am because he was!”
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter