Comedy in the ’90s, Part 2: The Year Jim Carrey Arrived
In 1994, a comedic actor previously most famous for his performances on ‘In Living Color’ released three iconic films—‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,’ ‘The Mask,’ and ‘Dumb and Dumber’—that changed Hollywood’s approach and pushed a genre to its commercial limitsComedy in the ’90s, Part 2: The Year Jim Carrey Arrived
In 1994, a comedic actor previously most famous for his performances on ‘In Living Color’ released three iconic films—‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,’ ‘The Mask,’ and ‘Dumb and Dumber’—that changed Hollywood’s approach and pushed a genre to its commercial limits
Nearly 30 years ago, a handful of smart people set out with one mission: to make some silly movies. What followed was a true golden age of Hollywood comedy that saw the arrival of megastars still with us today, a commercial explosion, and then, an eventual splintering that changed the genre forever. Welcome to Part 2 of Comedy in the ’90s, our six-part series documenting this decade-defining boom in all of its sophomoric glory.
Pam Veasey thought that something was seriously wrong. It was early 1994, and, in the midst of trying to shepherd In Living Color through its tumultuous final stretch, the sketch show’s executive producer got a phone call. “I need to talk to you,” Jim Carrey said somberly.
By then, Carrey had spent four-plus seasons blowing audiences away with his uncanny celebrity impressions (Robin Williams, Jay Leno, even Cher) and zany original characters (Fire Marshall Bill). But the year before, after objecting to Fox’s meddling, ILC creator Keenen Ivory Wayans had left his own show, leaving it in a state of uncertainty.
Veasey was petrified that Carrey was going to walk into her office that day and tell her that he too was quitting. “I’m thinking, ‘What?’” she recalls; after the Wayans incident, she couldn’t take any more bad news. “And I’m like, ‘Jim, just say it.’” At that point, he stood up and pulled a weathered personal check out of his wallet. Veasey recognized it immediately: years before, Carrey had aspirationally written it out to himself for several million dollars; a sort of visualization, done in the hope that putting a physical manifestation of his dream into the world would make it come true. And now it had.
You had to get used to Jim’s mind moving faster than you as a writer could write. But then once you understood that, it was a blessing. Because he would make the most of everything.Pam Veasey, executive producer of In Living Color
“He set me up!” Veasey says. To be fair, she should’ve known better. Four years into working with him, Veasey had continually borne witness to Carrey’s almost terrifyingly deep commitment to making people laugh. Even when he was meant to be in the background, the camera found him. “You had to get used to Jim’s mind moving faster than you as a writer could write,” she says. “But then once you understood that, it was a blessing. Because he would make the most of everything.”
In the early ’90s, Carrey and writer Steve Oedekerk began revamping the script of what became the former’s first film of the decade. At the time, Veasey was also developing a comedy pilot. During late-night brainstorm sessions, the trio commiserated. “I would be in my office writing and they would be in their office writing,” Veasey says. “And I remember Jim would scream, ‘Junk food time!’ And they’d come in and it was like going to the movie theater. And I vividly remember Jim acting out the scene where he put the plunger on his face. And it’s 1 or 2 in the morning. I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s funny!’”
The movie they were sprucing up was Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Its success quickly turned Carrey into a coveted movie star, and led him to visit Veasey and pull out the check. New Line Cinema had just agreed to shell out $7 million to him to colead a movie. The movie was Dumb and Dumber, a buddy comedy, by first-time directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly.
While he was becoming famous, he often told reporters (and Oprah) about how he once speculatively wrote himself a $10 million check “for acting services rendered.” He shared the story so much that Spy magazine even skewered him for repeating it over and over. The exact details matter less than what the tale symbolized. As Veasey puts it: “He had arrived.”
That day in Veasey’s office, after Carrey explained what was really going on, he started screaming. “Pam, I got it!” Veasey recalls him shouting. “They paid me!” Soon he was jumping up and down. Not knowing how else to react, she started jumping up and down as well; two friends and collaborators, on the brink of a career-altering shift, just jumping and yelling their heads off. “It was very exciting. It was a really great moment,” she says. It was also the moment that completely changed a genre.
In 1994, Jim Carrey took over comedy. Starting that February with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective—a movie that bucked critical revulsion to the tune of $107.2 million against a $15 million budget—and continuing with The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, Carrey set off a chain of events that changed the business of Hollywood. In total, the three movies amassed $706.1 million in worldwide box office receipts. By 1995, his per-picture salary had shot from six figures all the way to eight.
If Wayne’s World started a comedy revolution, then Jim Carrey accelerated it to ludicrous speed. Thanks to him, the genre was, at least for a time, seen as a tentpole, and his personal financial success was in large part responsible for studios beginning to pay comedy stars like action heroes. (Through a representative, Carrey declined to be interviewed for this article.) The actor’s unprecedented 12-month stretch proved that comedy could generate commercial blockbusters. But at the same time, Carrey became a symbol of the genre’s limits. By the mid-’90s, Carrey’s price tag had grown large enough to scare the hell out of the film industry. When he inked a $20 million deal to star in The Cable Guy, one executive said that it set a “perilous and dangerous precedent.” Another whined to the Los Angeles Times that “if Carrey is getting $20 million, then what are Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Hanks worth?”
In reality, Carrey’s arrival was less sudden than it seemed. As a boy growing up in a lower middle-class home in Toronto in the 1960s and ’70s—like Mike Myers, he also lived in Scarborough at one point—Carrey began imitating famous people in front of his family. His musician father, Percy, nurtured that talent, eventually encouraging him to perform at local comedy club Yuk Yuk’s. After bombing at first, the teenaged Carrey honed his impression-filled act and became a fixture as a stand-up comic in his hometown. Eventually, he was making enough money from comedy to help support his parents.
“Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything,” Carrey said in a 2004 60 Minutes segment, “Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.”
Aside from using it as motivation, Carrey made his desperation performative, baking the odd energy into his unique brand of physical comedy. And after becoming a headliner in Canada, the undeniably funny teen moved to Los Angeles. While performing at L.A. clubs, the young stand-up caught the eye of Rodney Dangerfield, who hired Carrey to open for him in Las Vegas. By 1983, when Carrey was only 21, he was doing impressions of Elvis Presley and Jack Nicholson on The Tonight Show. As the decade progressed, he consciously revised his on-stage persona, relying less on mimicking celebs and more on an exaggerated version of himself. “What he does with his face and body—some people are in awe,” Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada once told the L.A. Times. “They ask me: ‘Did he have a plastic face on?’”
In the mid-’80s, Carrey continued to edge closer to stardom. He auditioned for Saturday Night Live on multiple occasions, but never made the cast. He also landed several movie roles, including the lead of teen vampire sex comedy Once Bitten (1985) and parts in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and the campy sci-fi musical Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). Still, none of his early films managed to fully embrace his over-the-top style.
Then in 1990, In Living Color premiered. In a stacked, mostly black cast that featured the Wayans brothers, Tommy Davidson, David Alan Grier, and Jamie Foxx, Carrey was the self-dubbed “token white guy.” Unlike any other movie or show he’d ever appeared in, ILC took advantage of his physical gifts. Whether he was playing a karate instructor or Vanilla Ice, he always seemed to be in a state of controlled recklessness. More than once, he described himself as “Fred Astaire on acid.”
“You were like, ‘Does this guy turn off?’” Veasey remembers. “‘When he goes home, does he do this, too?’ Because the mind, the comedy, and the physicality was always so prevalent.”
Fortunately for Carrey, in the early ’90s Morgan Creek studio chairman James G. Robinson had an idea for the kind of comedy that required an exhaustingly untamed actor. And after Rick Moranis said no to the lead role in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Robinson turned to In Living Color’s rising star. It was a perfect match. “The character had to be rock ’n’ roll,” Carrey told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “He had to be the 007 of pet detectives. I wanted to be unstoppably ridiculous, and they let me go wild.”
I truly thought Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was gonna be the biggest piece of shit ever.Julio Macat, Ace Ventura cinematographer
Helmed by first-time director Tom Shadyac, Ace Ventura didn’t exactly feel like a sure-fire hit. Cinematographer Julio Macat, who got the job on the strength of his work on megahits Home Alone and Home Alone 2, found Carrey to be hilarious. But he wasn’t optimistic about Carrey’s movie. “The stuff he was doing was so over the top,” says Macat, who’s gone on to shoot dozens more comedies, including The Nutty Professor, Wedding Crashers, and Pitch Perfect. “I truly thought this was gonna be the biggest piece of shit ever.”
When filming began in South Florida in the spring of 1993, Macat realized that he was wrong. While shooting the climactic scene where Carrey gets into a boxing match with the Philadelphia Eagles mascot at the Super Bowl, the cinematographer was a firsthand witness to the actor’s magnetism. “We had hired 300 extras and advertised on the radio and a bunch of people in the stadium recognized Jim Carrey and just erupted,” he says. “And that’s when we thought, ‘So people know this guy. He’s so over the top that it could work.’ It was just out there.”
Macat compares him to Jerry Lewis. “He just rejoiced in blowing people away and being outrageous,” says the cinematographer, who used wide-angle lenses on Ace Ventura to play up Carrey’s exaggerated movements. “And he loved that. At times, he would slow down and have a more serious moment and be super cool. Like I remember my mom came to visit and he was so sweet with her, and really kind. And then he’d have to shift gears and just be the entertainer.”
The Hawaiian shirt–wearing, pompadoured, “Alrighty then!” shouting Ace Ventura catches bullets with his teeth, presides over an apartment menagerie, singlehandedly cracks a murder case and vigorously rubs it in the police department’s face, and yes, uses his butt cheeks as a voice-changing microphone. There are small bits of subtle humor, like when he spontaneously warns a rich party host about the modern proliferation of food poisoning claims against wealthy private homeowners, but Carrey mostly spends the movie acting like a real-life cartoon character.
Which brings us to Ace Ventura’s infamous, unequivocally offensive twist. The audience learns late in the movie that antagonist Lois Einhorn, a police lieutenant played by Sean Young, is a transgender woman—formerly a Miami Dolphins placekicker named Ray Finkle—who had a severe mental breakdown after missing what would’ve been a Super Bowl–winning field goal. The revelation causes Ace, who had kissed Einhorn in an earlier scene, to become violently ill. The ugly sequence, a nod to The Crying Game, is followed by an even uglier climactic joke involving the reveal of Einhorn’s genitalia.
While it’s worth noting that it wasn’t until very recently that transphobic jokes even started to be rooted out of movies, the mean-spirited bits of Ace Ventura are a blaring reminder that some of the most memorable comedies of the ’90s could be profoundly unenlightened. (A not-so-fun fact: In 1994, Ace wasn’t the only film to feature such an insensitive twist; at the conclusion of Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, it’s also revealed that Anna Nicole Smith’s villainous bombshell has a penis.)
At the time, Carrey offered a weak defense of the story line, saying that his character’s disgust is actually ridiculing Ace’s own reflexively deep-seated bigotry and not the fact that Einhorn is trans. “I wanted it to be the biggest, most obnoxious, homophobic reaction ever recorded,” he told the L.A. Times in 1994, perhaps before he knew that “transphobic” was the correct term. “It’s so ridiculous it can’t be taken seriously—even though it guarantees that somebody’s going to be offended.” Yet back then, Hollywood seemed less bothered by the truly regressive elements of Ace Ventura than it was by its juvenile rudeness. In truth, the movie was designed to have that effect on adults. “Jim Robinson said, right before we began shooting this film,” Shadyac said in 1994, “‘Make a film that nobody my age gets.’” After the movie opened no. 1 at the box office, Shadyac received a call from an agent who said that he was embarrassed to admit that he cracked up throughout the film.
That response to Carrey was common. He was so funny that even disapproving grown-ups couldn’t help but laugh.
When Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was released, director Chuck Russell was already in post-production on Carrey’s next film, The Mask. “The success of Ace Ventura,” Russell says, “actually helped me get the last budget we needed for the final visual effects.”
Based on a Dark Horse Comics title of the same name, the comedy is an even purer distillation of Carrey’s essence than Ace Ventura. In it, the nebbishy bank clerk Stanley Ipkiss finds a magical neon green mask that turns him into, well, Jim Carrey. When Russell gave the actor the script, Carrey said that he felt like the character was written for him. “I said it was written for you,” Russell says. “And if he didn’t want to do it, it was gonna be tough.”
In hindsight, the concept’s potential feels obvious. But a quarter-century ago, Carrey hadn’t yet broken big. Consider: For Ace Ventura, he reportedly made $350,000. For The Mask, New Line paid him $450,000. “As far as the studio was concerned,” Russell says, “he was still untested.” (New Line Cinema declined to comment for this article.)
New Line approached Russell about the movie, he says, because of his horror chops. He’d already made A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) for the studio, and The Mask’s source material, after all, was far more violent than what would ultimately make it to the big screen. But Russell envisioned it as a comedy. He’d seen Carrey’s stand-up act and In Living Color and was smitten. “I said, ‘Look, you’ve gotta use this guy Jim Carrey,’” Russell says. “‘He’s gonna be huge.’” At first, the studio wasn’t very receptive to the idea. “‘What are you saying about a girl and a dog and a nightclub and Jim Carrey?’” Russell says, repeating the company line. “I said, ‘Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. That’s exactly what I want to do.’”
Eventually, with the director, executive producer Michael De Luca, and Dark Horse Comics founder Mike Richardson leading the way, the original script evolved into a Looney Tunes–like romp. There is indeed a girl (Cameron Diaz in her movie debut), a dog (Milo), and a nightclub (the Coco Bongo). But mostly, The Mask is a blank canvas for the rangy Carrey’s contortionist act. Through elaborate set piece after elaborate set piece, he sings, dances, beats up bad guys, and spouts catchphrases like “Smokin’!” For all 101 minutes, the comedic action hero completely carries the film.
Shot in a month and a half during the summer and fall of 1993, The Mask lacked the computer-generated excesses of a modern comic book movie, but for the era, it was visually cutting-edge. A large chunk of the film’s $23 million budget went to its special effects, for which Industrial Light & Magic was nominated for an Academy Award. CGI elevated Carrey’s naturally hypnotic body language into eye-popping cartoons. “Jim already had the most animated expressions in the business,” Russell says. “I could see that immediately. But I knew I had to create a kind of mask for The Mask. And I wanted that to be flexible, and if anything, exaggerate his features. That was actually something I was very concerned about. If you wrap him up in the latex makeup of the time, it’s limiting. And then it would be very, very counterproductive.” So during filming, makeup artist Greg Cannom painstakingly applied a multi-part mask in such a way that Carrey’s face could retain its astounding pliability.
“Although it was sheer hell putting on the mask every day for four hours,” Carrey told the Baltimore Sun in 1994, “it was so liberating as an actor.” Russell remembers shooting a scene where the mask-powered Ipkiss spins through a series of impressions. He does a matador, a Russian dancer, a cowboy drawing his guns, and Elvis Presley. “Each one of those spins required a different vibe and a wardrobe change,” the director says. “And the reason it sticks out in my mind is we were running out of time. … They were literally gonna turn out the lights on us ’cause they didn’t want us to shoot overtime. And I said to Jim, ‘Well, we can’t do Elvis.’”
Carrey took that as a challenge, saying, “We’re doing Elvis.” Within minutes, Carrey had put on a wig and slipped into a white rhinestone jumpsuit. “The quickest makeup and wardrobe changes I’ve ever seen,” Russell says. As time was running out, he acutely embodied the King, snapping his body to the left and to the right and snarling, “Thank you very much.”
Russell often wondered how Carrey could conjure so many different expressions and movements. One day, he asked the actor about it. “You know, sometimes if I can just imagine it,” Russell remembers Carrey saying, “I can make my body do it.”
Incredibly, the story of the making of Carrey’s third movie of 1994 can’t be told without first revisiting It’s Pat, the unfortunate adaptation of a popular Saturday Night Live skit. In the early ’90s, producer Brad Krevoy had a business relationship with his friend Thomas Gottschalk, a German actor and television host who wanted to appear in American films. At the same time, The Walt Disney Company was opening a new theme park outside Paris. So, Krevoy says, he approached Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner about his pal.
“I said, ‘Look, this guy will promote Euro Disney,’” Krevoy recalls, “‘but he also wants to have acting parts in a Disney movie in America. Let’s do a little trade.’” Eisner agreed to the deal: Gottschalk would publicize the new park by hosting a televised gala and the Disney chair would deliver movie roles. Soon, someone from Eisner’s office called Krevoy to set up a meeting with Charles B. Wessler, who was producing It’s Pat for the Disney affiliate Touchstone Pictures. The meeting, a breakfast in Malibu, didn’t go well.
According to Krevoy, Wessler was upset that he was being told that he needed to cast a complete stranger in his movie. “He was seething at me,” Krevoy says. “He didn’t say it. But you could just see steam coming out of his ears.” Krevoy tried to explain himself. “I said, ‘Look, this is not me. The head of the company wants you to do this.’” By the end of their meal, Wessler agreed to find a part for Gottschalk, but said this: “I let this happen but now you’re gonna do something for me.” After a long walk down the street, Wessler opened the trunk of his car, sorted through the clutter, and eventually handed Krevoy a script.
“It’s in a brown paper bag. It’s wet,” Krevoy says. “I go, ‘Charlie, what? Are you kidding me? Send it to me.’ He goes, ‘Shut up, Brad, just read it.’” Cowritten by Bennett Yellin and brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the script chronicled the adventures of two imbecilic best friends named Harry and Lloyd who embark on a journey to Aspen—“where the beer flows like wine”—to return a lost briefcase to its rightful owner.
When he got home, Krevoy started reading the screenplay. “I couldn’t put it down,” he says. “And at the time I was dating my now wife. And I said, ‘You gotta read this thing.’ She read it and we couldn’t stop laughing.” Soon after he phoned Wessler and asked about connecting with the Farrellys. “Let’s do it. I’m in,” Krevoy told him. “He goes, ‘You’re kidding me?!’” (Just for the record, Wessler didn’t actually put Gottschalk in It’s Pat; instead, he landed a role in Touchstone’s Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit.)
While hanging out with the Farrellys, Krevoy says, “I never laughed so hard in my life.” Up to that point, the Rhode Island–bred brothers had cowritten the Seinfeld episode “The Virgin” but hadn’t yet had one of their screenplays made into a movie. They had been trying to make this particular comedy for years. Its origins could be traced back to an old script, Dust to Dust, about two dense funeral parlor employees. In 1985, Peter’s friend, whose parents lived next door to Eddie Murphy in Alpine, New Jersey, had the screenplay dropped off at the comedy icon’s house. Miraculously, Murphy read it, liked it, and even talked about how much he enjoyed it during an interview on Late Night With David Letterman.
But after Murphy’s production company bought it, the film never got off the ground. The Farrellys and Yellin later reshaped the idea into a screenplay first dubbed Go West, and then A Power Tool Is Not a Toy. “We changed the titles because we couldn’t get agents to deliver a script called Dumb and Dumber to their clients,” Peter said at an event at Loyola Marymount’s School of Film and Television in 2014. By the time Krevoy read the script, dozens of high-profile actors, including Martin Short, Steve Martin, Nicolas Cage, and Gary Oldman, had turned down the lead roles.
“What’s stopped this movie from being made?” Krevoy remembers asking the Farrellys. “And they said, ‘Because we want to direct.’ And I look at them and I said, ‘Well, you guys look like directors to me.’” Working for the extraordinarily influential independent filmmaker Roger Corman, who helped launch the careers of some of the late 20th century’s most successful directors and actors—to name a few: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda—had taught the producer an important lesson. “I just remember Roger saying, ‘A good writer’s gonna know the purpose of a scene and how to get the best performances because they wrote the words,’” Krevoy says. “Especially if you consider comedy, because comedy is about timing and delivery.”
Krevoy knew that the Farrellys, and no one else, should direct Dumb and Dumber. But he also understood why studios didn’t want to take a chance on them. Cautious executives were often afraid to stick their necks out for a comedy that they may not find funny themselves. “I can’t tell you how many times that a broad comedy gets made that kind of defines that moment of that generation or that culture,” Krevoy says, “and nobody wanted to do it.”
In the case of Dumb and Dumber, its gleeful commitment to gross-out gags spooked uptight Hollywood power brokers. “I got calls from executives saying, ‘Why would you send me this shit?’” Wessler, one of the movie’s producers, said on the movie’s DVD commentary. Add in the uncertainty that comes with hiring first-time directors and you had a recipe for a doomed film.
Things began to turn, however, when the Farrellys told Krevoy that they’d found an actor who loved the script. His name was Jim Carrey.
“What Peter and Bobby didn’t know was that I had a very close friend who was an exhibitor in Sweden and he had seen the advanced cut of Ace Ventura,” Krevoy says. “I called him up and said, ‘Hey, have you seen this movie? What do you think?’ He goes, ‘Brad, this movie’s gonna be a big hit. This actor in it, Jim Carrey, is gonna be a star. You’ve gotta find something for him.’”
New Line, which had just hired Carrey to star in The Mask, soon became interested in making Dumb and Dumber. But the studio balked at the up-and-coming star’s asking price, a paltry $400,000.
“Then Ace Ventura came out, which was his first movie and it was no. 1,” Peter Farrelly said in 2014. “So the studio said … ‘OK, we’ll give you the $400.’ He said, ‘No, I want $500.’ And then they said, ‘No, you’re not getting $500.’ And another week passed, Ace was no. 1 again. And they said, ‘We’ll give you $500.’ ‘No, I want $750.’”
Since New Line wouldn’t commit, Krevoy started shopping Dumb and Dumber to other studios. That triggered a bidding war. “As the price elevated for Jim’s salary, that would put more pressure on people to get tougher on Peter and Bobby,” Krevoy says. “Because the stakes were higher.” A studio executive called Krevoy in the midst of bidding and said, “‘Peter and Bobby haven’t directed before, why don’t you swap ’em out, pay ’em big money?’ I said, ‘This is the deal.’”
Looking back, the escalation seems even more stunning considering that New Line could’ve snagged Carrey for only six figures. By the time the studio finally decided to pay up, Carrey’s salary had risen to a previously unthinkable $7 million. The movie’s entire budget was about $16 million. Shot in the spring and early summer of 1994 mostly in Colorado, Utah, and Harry and Lloyd’s hometown of Providence, the movie, Krevoy says, was “as close as anyone could come to Nirvana. It was insane. Everything about it.”
Jim took a beer bottle … hooked the cap over the cap on his tooth, and pulled the cap off of his tooth. Because he thought his character should have the split tooth.J.B. Rogers, first assistant director on Ace Ventura
First assistant director J.B. Rogers, who, like Krevoy, got his start in the movie business working for Corman, remembers Carrey showing up on set the first day of filming with a split front tooth—that was not in the script. “Jim Carrey in real life has a split tooth like that but he’s had a cap for years,” says Rogers, who’s been collaborating with the Farrellys since Dumb and Dumber. “The night before, Jim took a beer bottle … hooked the cap over the cap on his tooth, and pulled the cap off of his tooth. Because he thought his character should have the split tooth. He didn’t think of it until that night. He’s like, ‘Shit, I gotta get this thing off.’”
For Krevoy, simply looking at the goofy bowl haircut Carrey had given himself to portray Lloyd Christmas made him giggle. “It wasn’t written that way!” Krevoy says. “It was a total interpretation. I just could not stop laughing when I saw him. He didn’t even need to say anything.”
Jeff Daniels, whom the Farrelly brothers had adored in Jonathan Demme’s 1986 action comedy Something Wild, was a perfect partner for Carrey. “Jeff was pushing him in places that no other actors were pushing him,” Bobby Farrelly said in 2014. “Jeff’s real. He plays things straight and he reacts to whatever you’re doing. He has no plan.” (Through a representative, Daniels declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Daniels’s Harry Dunne, a dog groomer, and Carrey’s Lloyd Christmas, a limo driver, formed a hysterically undynamic duo. They wear iconically goofy pastel blue and orange tuxedos, squirt ketchup and mustard into their mouths to cool their tongues after eating spicy peppers, and freeze together on a mini bike, their only warm relief coming from Harry peeing his pants. Lloyd even sells their decapitated bird to their young, blind neighbor. The shot of the kid petting the dead parakeet caused critic Roger Ebert to laugh so loudly that he felt embarrassed. “If the whole movie had been as funny as that moment,” he wrote in his review, “I would have required hospitalization.”
Late in the movie, after Lloyd spitefully pours nearly a full bottle of “Turbo Lax” into his friend’s tea, Harry defiles Mary’s bathroom with an extended gastrointestinal drum solo. “I mean, we were clearly pushing the envelope,” Peter Farrelly said in 2014. “That was unprecedented that somebody sat on a toilet and we stuck with it because up to that point in human history, whenever somebody got on a toilet in a movie the door would shut and that’s that. And that was the fun of it, more so then than now, because people are like, ‘What are they doing? No. What?’ You know, they were coming out of their seats shocked.” (Amazingly, even after that scene, Dumb and Dumber managed to avoid an R rating.)
What many adults didn’t seem to understand about Dumb and Dumber was that its sense of humor, while crass, wasn’t stupid. The joke is that Harry and Lloyd are stupid. Once you get past the movie’s title, it’s chock full of sharp allusions to the characters’ idiocy. Lloyd declares that he has “a rapist’s wit,” references “the salmon of Capistrano,” wonders about Lauren Holly’s character, Mary Swanson, inviting him in for “tea and a strumpet,” and looks at a framed newspaper from July 21, 1969, and earnestly says, “No way. That’s crazy,” before shouting, “We landed on the moon!”
There’s also plenty of heart underneath the clever silliness. Early in the movie, there’s a moment in Harry and Lloyd’s apartment when the latter has an existential crisis. “I’m sick and tired of having to eke my way through life,” Lloyd says. “I’m sick and tired of being a nobody. But most of all I’m sick and tired of having nobody.” Rogers remembers there being a debate about keeping the scene: “Let’s just say there are a lot of people that thought that scene should come out. Because it was not a comedy scene.” But the side that did argue for its inclusion—the winning side—noted that such a moment helped ground the movie. “Even though they’re the two dumbest guys in the world they still have this human need to improve or have a better life,” Rogers says.
The most memorable line of Dumb and Dumber comes when Lloyd asks Mary about the odds of him ending up with her. When she gently says “one out of a million,” he looks crushed. Then he slowly smiles and responds, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance. Yeah!” Therein lies the beauty of Dumb and Dumber. Harry and Lloyd are total idiots, but they’re your idiots.
The Mask was released on July 29, 1994, less than a month after the production of Dumb and Dumber wrapped. The comedy made $351.6 million worldwide and ended up as the year’s fourth-highest-grossing movie, behind only True Lies, Forrest Gump, and The Lion King. New Line’s marketing department took advantage of the massive success of Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks’s Oscar-winning blockbuster by making a poster for Dumb and Dumber featuring its leads sitting on a bench similar to Forrest Gump’s. Harry and Lloyd’s bench, of course, had a wet paint sign attached.
By late 1994, the studio began testing Carrey’s third film of the year. An early screening of a rough cut garnered positive audience reactions, but the movie still needed some work. “Some executives from New Line came up to me and said, ‘Brad, you screwed us,’” Krevoy says. “‘This movie, we’re gonna lose our money.’”
The Farrellys maintain that the studio just didn’t get Dumb and Dumber. At the premiere, Peter Farrelly claimed, New Line founder Robert Shaye gave a speech in which he pointed at the screen and said, “By the way, this isn’t why I got into the movie business.”
“It was supposed to be a joke, but nobody laughed,” Peter Farrelly said in 2014. “Particularly, not our father. Yeah, our father who’s now dead. He was like, ‘I’m going to get this motherfucker.’ ... I said, ‘Calm down.’ I said, ‘He’s the only guy that let us make a movie. Would you just appreciate that?’” Soon, New Line began to appreciate Dumb and Dumber. The movie, which came out on December 16 and received mostly positive reviews from critics who seemed surprised by its smarts and warmth, made $247.3 million globally.
Carrey had become his own franchise. By the end of their collective run, Carrey’s three films of 1994 piled up $319.3 million domestically and nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide. In 1995, both Ace Ventura and Dumb and Dumber were spun off into animated series. Batman Forever, featuring Carrey as the Riddler, arrived at multiplexes on June 16 and grossed $336.6 million globally. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, for which Carrey was reportedly paid $10 million, came out on November 10 and pulled in $212.4 million worldwide. The sequel, despite a troubled production marked by a director change, was his fifth straight smash.
Carrey was by then not just on top of the comedy world. He was one of the most expensive, sought-after actors on the planet. Hollywood, it seemed, could now count on funny movies making big money. Carrey took full advantage of his newly elevated status, choosing not to make another broad comedy, but rather, a cutting satire called The Cable Guy.
Written by Lou Holtz Jr. with Saturday Night Live star Chris Farley in mind, the movie was originally far lighter in tone, but the involvement of both Carrey and director Ben Stiller led to a bleaker film. Their take on the TV technician was a lisping stalker: “We loved the idea of somebody who is really smart with technology invading somebody’s life,” producer Judd Apatow, who had cocreated Stiller’s eponymous sketch show, told the L.A. Times in 1996.
Columbia paid Carrey a whopping $20 million to star in The Cable Guy. After news of his windfall broke, one unnamed studio head called it “as seminal and destructive a payment” as when in the late ’80s 20th Century Fox gave a then-unproven Bruce Willis $5 million for Die Hard. “That came out of nowhere,” the executive said, “and set the pace for actors’ salaries.” His deal put Carrey in the same company as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, two of the few actors making eight figures per movie.
Given Carrey’s salary and the hype surrounding the film, it’s unsurprising that there were high expectations for The Cable Guy. But when the dark comedy was released on June 14, 1996, critics savaged it. “Hollywood has already rocked Alcatraz and blown away parts of Oklahoma; space aliens are poised to zap the White House in next month’s Independence Day,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. “But the true disaster movie of the summer may just be The Cable Guy, a grim, sour Jim Carrey comedy that erases the boundary between anarchic humor and sociopathic malice.” Carrey’s trademark physical comedy was there, but the zaniness of Ace Ventura was not. That may have thrown off audiences. “When you watch it for the first time, it looks scary, it has scary music, and Jim’s performance is so intense that you actually think he might kill somebody,” Apatow, who did an uncredited rewrite of the script, told Vulture in 2011. “So when you watch it you’re kind of scared and it’s difficult to laugh for some people. But when you watch it the second time, when you know he actually doesn’t kill anyone, you realize that it’s just wall-to-wall jokes.”
The movie still ended up making $102.8 million against a budget of about $40 million, but the returns underwhelmed compared to expectations. Its middling box office performance showed that Carrey wasn’t, as he appeared to be on screen, invincible. His two-year turn on the throne was historically profitable, but all box office reigns must come to an end. In his wake, comedy stars younger and cheaper than him began to sprout up. As did a series of small but ambitious funny movies that proved that you didn’t need someone as outrageous as Carrey to make a comedy classic.
Carrey did return to top comedic form the next year in Tom Shadyac’s Liar Liar, but then began taking more serious roles. The big performances of Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber gave way to the more focused Carrey of The Truman Show and Man on the Moon. On sets, the goofball gave way to a Method actor. Carrey has returned to the top of the box office on multiple occasions over the past 25 years, but he’s never again reached the dizzying heights of 1994.
After that remarkable stretch, a descent was inevitable. Perhaps no actor’s star has burned brighter than Carrey’s did in those 12 months. And what he left in his wake was a genre that had grown bigger than ever, and an industry that had realized comedy’s commercial power—and at a point, its limits. There was quite a void when Carrey moved on from broad comedies in the mid-’90s, but with the door kicked open, it didn’t last long. And soon, the void would be filled by someone who parents understood even less than Jim Carrey.
