Calamedy: Jim Carrey’s unique approach to carving out his comic niche
He might have gone from a relative unknown to an A-list superstar in less than 12 months, but Jim Carrey was hardly an overnight sensation who came out of nowhere to seize Hollywood comedy by the scruff of the neck.
The aspiring funnyman had been performing stand-up comedy since the late 1970s, he was rejected as a potential Saturday Night Live cast member on more than one occasion, and he made his feature film debut in 1983’s Copper Mountain, all of which predate his breakthrough by more than a decade.
It was the sketch series In Living Color that gave him his first taste of mainstream success, which he promptly took to another level the same year the show’s final season aired when Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber all took the box office by storm with Carrey’s name above the title in 1994.
From that point on, he was one of the highest-paid, most popular, and eminently bankable names in the business, matters which were helped exponentially by the fact there was nobody else like him. Carrey’s rubber-faced histrionics, rampant scenery-chewing, and slapstick pratfalling were distinctly his own, but it was a niche that was born from difficult times.
Carrey grew up under tough financial circumstances, with his family spending a period of his upbringing living together in a van when they were made homeless. When his father landed a factory job, Carrey and his brother worked as janitors and security guards in exchange for being able to rent a property directly across the street. When he dropped out of school at 16, earning $20million per movie was a fantasy.
The star has also been open about his battles with depression; his former partner Cathriona White died by suicide from a drug overdose in 2015, after which multiple wrongful death lawsuits were brought against him by members of her family. Carrey has faced his fair share of struggles, and he explained to how it informed his signature method of performance.
“Can I coin a phrase? Calamedy,” he said during a Hollywood Reporter roundtable. “That’s what I look at it as. My show is calamedy. It’s about calamity. It’s handled with humour and levity, and that’s pretty much what I do. Every trauma – and I could build a ladder to the stars with all the things that have happened or the things that I’ve had to endure – but they’ve all turned into something really creative.”
Carrey has taken the worst life has thrown at him and tried to turn it into a positive, using his setbacks, hardships, and tragedies as a means to foster his own self-curated creativity. It’s bittersweet, sure, but looking at the career he’s enjoyed at the top level for 30 years, it’s impossible to say that it hasn’t worked.
