STOP WATCH LISTEN
The former king of slapstick has grown a beard and begun painting
Who
Jim Carrey AKA The Mask AKA Ace Ventura AKA that guy who made kids’ movies in the ’90s that would now be considered bonejinglingly offensive.
What
His Twitter timeline and burgeoning art career.
Why Care
Because while we weren’t watching, the guy who played a magical green-faced Michael Jackson impersonator turned into an ornery middle-aged satirist.
Where to Find it
Twitter.
Hindsight is a weird thing. Aside from giving us the perfect solutions to longresolved questions, it also gives us a warped sense of perspective about certain people. Take Jim Carrey, for example. If your age means you’ve only ever known Dwayne Johnson as an actor then there is a good chance that the idea of Carrey as a grumpy old societal critic-cum-artist is perfectly bog standard. For people old enough to have watched and enjoyed him as Ace Ventura, however, this new Carrey is amusingly startling. It’s not dissimilar from the idea of your fartjoke-loving elder brother who relentlessly teased scarf wearers disappearing for 10 years, then reappearing wrapped in a snood and quoting Nietzsche.
In case you’re not up to date, after spending time in something of a cocoon, the man who played Lloyd Christmas in two Dumb and Dumber movies has re-emerged into pop culture as some kind of snarky moth with a passion for social commentary. The most fun place to start the story is at last year’s New York Fashion Week when a reporter flagged him down on the red carpet to ask why he had decided to attend (it’s not every day Carrey attends fashion week) and he responded: “I wanted to find the most meaningless thing I could come to and join and here I am.”
The floundering reporter countered that people were there to celebrate “icons” but Carrey, clearly going through some kind of Sartre phase, was not having it.
“Celebrating icons. Boy, that is just the lowest-aiming possibility that we could come up with,” said Carrey.
He went on to question the existence of icons and even the reporter before going into a weird set of impressions and a nonsensical collection of platitudes.
Since then, the former king of slapstick has grown a beard, bought an army of scarves and begun painting. To be fair, the painting has probably been going on for a while but of late it has flooded his Twitter timeline. His favourite subject seems to be Donald Trump and the cumulonimbus of faeces that his administration is raining on the US news cycle.
Every now and then he will take a break and focus on some other newsworthy subject — such as a piece he painted of Bill Cosby just after his rape conviction, which he captioned with the biblical scripture: “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”
When he is not lampooning figures he sees in the news, Carrey’s Twitter feed takes the time to remind us how much disdain he has for all of this social media malarkey. On Mother’s Day he tweeted: “Accidentally said Happy Mother’s Day to my mom in person instead of writing a paragraph on social media.”
Clearly Carrey is fed up with the vacuousness of it all. Like Caliban seeing his face in the mirror, realising that no one cares and being quite peeved by the fact that he spent so much time putting on makeup, Carrey is now lazily flinging poop at the industry that built him. It’s all a bit “poor little rich Jim”, but that doesn’t make it any less amusing to witness.