Watch Jim Carrey make his ‘Letterman’ debut in 1984
It must be that Jim Carrey was born with the energy of 16 men. The American actor and comedian didn’t just step onto our screens back in the 1980s; he burst through as though they were made from paper. Indeed, looking back at his Letterman debut in 1984, it’s easy to see why his performances in films like Ace Ventura, The Truman Show, Dumb and Dumber, The Mask and Bruce Almighty have gone down in history.
Born in Newmarket, Ontario, Jim Carrey was the youngest of four siblings. That wouldn’t normally be noteworthy, but one wonders if his larger-than-life personality evolved out of necessity. He began making faces in the mirror when he was eight years old. By the age of ten, he’d made enough classmates bawl with laughter to realise that he had something of a knack for impressions, and so wrote a letter to Carol Burnett of The Carol Burnett Show in which he described himself as a master of the craft.
There’s a sense that Carrey’s desire to work in the entertainment industry was also a desire to escape the precariousness of his early life. “It was a lot more messed up than I thought, according to the team of doctors,” Carrey told Howard Stern back in 2003. His family became homeless when he was still a youngster. For a while, his parents and siblings lived across the road from a tire factory in a Volkswagen van, while Jim and his brother spent months living in a tent. “We had some tough times, sure. When my father lost his job, I was pissed. The thing was, he wasn’t happy. He would come home and say, ‘god damn that guy, man. One of these days I’m gonna…” Carrey recalled while impersonating his father with clenched teeth.
Carrey’s first foray into professional comedy was not as successful as you might expect. A combination of pubescent vocal problems, financial issues and limited gig opportunities made it difficult to envision a life on the circuit. That being said, once his family’s financial situation improved, so too did his act. With relative stability came confidence and ambition, and in 1979 Carrey returned to the stage for his first paid gig at the Hat Loft Club. Having built up a solid reputation in the local comedy scene, he decided to break into sketch comedy and auditioned for the 1980-1981 season of Saturday Night Live.
Though he wasn’t selected, Carrey later appeared on a made-for-TV movie broadcast on CBC in September 1981. Carrey’s first acting role, he played a struggling impressionist called Tony Maroni. When he appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, he exuded Maroni’s same manic awkwardness. The actor’s first national TV appearance in the United States marked the dawn of a truly original career. Three years later, he made his first appearance on Letterman, by which time he was already well on the way to becoming a household name.
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