Jim Carrey: Fun and Funnier

Introduction :

A

PROMISEKEPT

IT WAS AN EARLYmorning in 1985. Jim Carrey had just come off another late night shift at one of the L.A. comedy clubs. Usually Jim just went home after a gig, but on this particular night he swung his old Toyota toward ritzy Mulholland Drive in Hollywood Hills. He parked his car, stared down at the city below, and allowed himself to drift off into a fantasy world in which he was one of the stars rich enough to live in the Hills.

Jim had come to Los Angeles to make his professional dreams come true. Sure, he liked being a standup comic—the sound of a live audience laughing at his impressions and jokes kept him charged up—but he imagined much more. He wanted to be an actor. And he didn’t just plan on doing comedy films, either. He wanted to try his hand at more serious fare as well. Someday he hoped TV and movie audiences would learn to love him as much as the people who flockedto the comedy clubs to see him strut his stuff night after night.

Sitting there in the early morning haze, Jim took out his checkbook and wrote a check for ten million dollars, payable to Jim Carrey on Thanksgiving 1995. The note in the memo read, For acting services rendered. Jim stared at the postdated check for a while before folding it carefully and tucking it in his wallet for safekeeping.

Writing that check was a symbol of Jim’s eternal optimism. At that time, Jim barely had ten thousand dollars in his bank account, never mind ten million! But he planned on making it big. He expected to be a star of major proportions, someday earning at least ten million dollars. Of course the irony today is that Jim’s actual success has overshot his ten-million-dollar goal many times over. His usual salary now stands at about twenty million dollars per film.

The road to megasuccess has not been smooth for Jim Carrey. Over and over again, he has come up against roadblocks and failures that would have turned an ordinary man away from showbiz and into a life of selling insurance or something equally safe. But of course Jim Carrey is no ordinary man. He’s a fighter who has a deep belief in his own talent and a conviction that in the end talent will win out.

It’s always been my pattern, he told Entertainment Weekly . I try something, totally suck, go away, and come back. And then I kill.

That’s an understatement. In the past ten years, Jim Carrey has starred in everything from innovative television( In Living Color ) to record-breaking comedy films ( The Mask, Dumb and Dumber ) to intense dramas that have allowed him to stretch his talent as an actor ( The Truman Show, Man on the Moon ). Along the way he’s won two Golden Globe awards and the hearts of millions of fans.

Still, Jim never did get to buy himself that house on Mulholland Drive. Don’t feel too bad for him, though—he now lives in a mansion in the ultra-chic Brentwood section of town.

Awards. Mansions. Huge bank accounts. Not bad for a skinny Canadian kid who had to quit school to help his homeless family stay alive. Jim Carrey’s life is a true rags-to-riches story. Not even the movies could make up a tale with this much drama. It could only happen in real life—in Jim Carrey’s life!

Chapter1 :

A CHIPOFFTHE

OLDBLOCK

JAMESEUGENECARREY WASborn on January 17, 1962 in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, a small town about 30 miles outside of Toronto. By the time of Jim’s arrival, there were already three other small Carreys in the household—Jim’s older brother, John, and his two sisters, Pat and Rita.

Jim’s dad, Percy, was a saxophone player who’d led a jazz band when he was a teenager. Jim’s mom, Kathleen, known as Kay, had been a singer with the band. After they got married, Percy put down his sax and took up the respectable and responsible trade of bookkeeping. Kathleen worked as a hairdresser for a while, but she eventually traded in her scissors for motherhood.

Although Percy left the showbiz life behind when he got married, he still had the makings of an entertainer in his soul. He was a funny man who loved an audience. He was a major joke teller and a practicaljoker. No one, not even Percy’s own family, was exempt from his endless stream of gags. One of his favorites was letting the kids’ pet mouse loose from its cage, just to watch Kathleen leap up on a chair in fear.

Percy adored making people laugh, and he loved it when others could crack him up as well. That’s part of the reason Percy was so partial to his younger son. Even as a baby, Jim was funny. Sitting in his high chair, he would contort his face into all sorts of shapes when he didn’t like the food that was put in front of him. The baby’s crazy faces would send Percy into endless bouts of laughter.

As he grew older, Jim continued to make faces. He’d stand in front of the mirror for hours, trying to mimic the facial expressions of his favorite actors.

It would drive my mother crazy, Jim recalls. She used to try to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

In fact, Jim was so happy making faces in the mirror-that the usual childhood punishment of being sent to your room had no meaning for him. I always had too much fun up there, he laughs. To punish me you had to send me out to play with other kids.

According to his biography from the press kit for Jim’s first TV series, The Duck Factory, Jim’s first celebrity impersonation was of the late movie star John Wayne. Jim’s dead-on impression of the man they called the Duke was especially remarkable considering the fact that Jim was only eight years old atthe time. Percy’s pride at his young son’s talent for mimicry was indescribable.

Surprisingly, though, Jim credits his mom, and not his dad, with his ability to make people laugh. Kay spent much of Jim’s childhood in bed, suffering from a series of illnesses. Looking back on it, Jim has told reporters that while some of Kay’s illnesses were genuine, others were psychosomatic. My mother was a professional sick person, he once said. She took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It’s just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember that she’s the daughter of alcoholics who would leave her alone at Christmastime.

Jim spent countless hours trying to cheer up his bedridden mother. He put together whole comedy routines in which he did impressions of actors like John Wayne, Don Adams, and Frank Gorshin, who played the Riddler on TV’s Batman —a sign of things to come! Sometimes, Jim’s little shows went on for almost an hour. Often Percy would join in, adding his unique brand of humor