Carrey is a one-man synthesis of movie comedy: he mixes the physicality of the silent comics, the wisecrackery of screwball comedy and the warp-speed extravagance of the classic cartoons. Doesn’t this make him the greatest comic of all time, a mutation of Buster Keaton, Richard Pryor and Bugs Bunny? No, it just makes him three times as crazy as any other comic, including Steve Martin and Robin Williams. The craziness lies in Carrey’s sheer esthetic impudence: anything goes, and goes fast.
This comic effrontery, when performed with Carrey’s goofball grace and rhythmic verve (he’s called himself “Astaire on acid”), is irresistible, especially to kids, who mis-spend their days looking for a utopia that has no proprieties. In an age awash in dirty-word comics, Carrey has revalidated vulgarity. When animal sleuth Ace Ventura is mocked by the cops, he whips around, bends over and talks to one of his mockers by manipulating his buttocks, thus transferring the organ of conversation to the organ of elimination. Carrey’s comedy often goes into the toilet, speaking not at all metaphorically. This is one reason some critics, safely grown up and acculturated, are offended by him. But Aristophanes, who turned profanity and scatology into poetry (or vice versa), would love Carrey. When Scan Young, as a police lieutenant, goes into the john, Ace asks her: “Is it number one or number two? I just wanna know how much time I have.”
Yes, this isn’t Carrey Grant talking. But have you noticed, there are no Gary Grants anymore. In a polymorphous-perverse culture that could well be called eclectic barbarism, Jim Carrey gives us the comedy we deserve. That’s what Aristophanes did for his audience, enacting their most disreputable fantasies. His plays crackle with gross-out gags about bodily functions, along with evocations of innocence and charm. A couple of millenniums later, Carrey provides a similar mix. In “Dumb and Dumber,” his Lloyd Christmas (hey, professor, notice the redemptive symbolism of the name) is an adorable blend of low IQ and high hopes. Confessing his love to his rich dream girl (Lauren Holly), poor Lloyd asks what his prospects are. “One out of a million,” she gently replies. His eyes lighting up, Lloyd says, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”
The nondumb and the grimly mature may wince at this, but it’s hard to resist the sheer irrational poignance of Lloyd’s impossible romantic dream. Lloyd is a postmodern version of Harold Lloyd (is the name a deliberate echo?) playing those sweetly optimistic wimps who aspire beyond their station. The great physical comics, Keaton, Lloyd, Chaplin, were underdogs who had nothing but their surrealistically resourceful bodies with which to fight the overdogs. Mack Sennett, the great comedy director, boasted that his movies “whaled the daylights out of Authority and Pretension.” America’s silent comedy was the most democratic of art forms, filled with the brashness of a country feeling its oats. Carrey may lack the sublime slapstick poetry of Keaton, but he’s recalling that tradition with every stretch of his suitcase mouth and every twist of his Silly Putty body.
Another of Carrey’s comic ancestors is of course Jerry Lewis. (In “Dumb and Dumber,” Carrey sports a Lewisdike Buster Brown haircut.) But Lewis embodied the comedy of regression; curled up and cater wauling, he always seemed to be wearing an invisible pacifier. Carrey’s is a comedy of aggression. Lewis, confronted by gifts, was a cringing, crotch-shielding infant. But Carrey as Ace Ventura treats his astonished squeeze (Courteney Cox) to an epic copulation, turning the bed into a trampoline of lust. What’s funny is Ace’s unabashed sexual joy and the Aristophanic exaggeration of his sexual prowess.
Carrey’s comic kineticism reaches breakaway velocity in “The Mask,” rocket-boosted by some brilliant special effects. When nerdy bank clerk Stanley Ipkiss puts on an ancient Nordic mask, he turns into a hurtling hybrid, a Carrey toon whose propulsive protoplasm can attain any shape and any speed. In an amazing dance sequence, Carrey envelops nightclub tootsie Cameron Diaz in a cyclonic fandango, his legs twisting into terpsichorean taffy as he whirls and hurls her in an ecstasy of motion. This hilarious sequence transcends the computer morphing that’s endemic in today’s movies. Carrey rides the special effects like a rocket into his own comic space, a space where he’s become a blazing new star.
