When was Jim Carrey on ‘In Living Colour’?
Conventional wisdom dictates that when Jim Carrey exploded onto the Hollywood scene in 1994, he was a nobody – and then the one-two-three punch of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber made him the biggest star in the industry almost overnight.
However, while it is true that Carrey wasn’t a leading man at that point, it would be inaccurate to call him a nobody. After all, he’d been working in movies from the early 1980s, landing a lead role in teen horror comedy Once Bitten and supporting parts in Peggy Sue Got Married and Earth Girls Are Easy. However, it would be during his time on In Living Colour that most audiences first became aware of the cartoonish, wildly over-the-top characters that would become his stock in trade.
In 1988, Keenan Ivory Wayans directed and starred in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, a hit comedy that prompted Fox to offer him the chance to make whatever show he wanted on its network. He pitched a version of the sketch comedy institution Saturday Night Live that would cater more to people of colour and go further with its sketches by taking real chances on risky content. The show ran for five seasons between 1990 and 1994, and Carrey was hired as the sole white member of the main cast.
Getting the In Living Colour job was a big deal for Carrey, who had been turned down three separate times by SNL. This seems like an incredible oversight on SNL’s part in hindsight, but head honcho Lorne Michaels has insisted that things would have been different if Carrey had auditioned for him personally. In Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, he claimed producer Al Franken actually fielded Carrey’s auditions, and any time Michaels runs into Carrey these days, he jokes, “It was Franken. Franken put the kibosh on you.”
So, instead of conquering SNL, Carrey spent much of the ’80s working the stand-up circuit in addition to acting. He was known for his impressions of celebrities like Clint Eastwood and Elvis Presley. One thing Carrey had never done, though, was create characters in a sketch comedy format. In fact, he admitted in Inside Comedy that when he finally got to In Living Colour, “It was a whole new process to me. And those guys – that incredible cast – were on their feet, never doing the same take twice. It was really just like Second City training.”
Ultimately, Carrey created several lasting characters on the show, the most beloved of which was undoubtedly the grotesque and insanely incompetent Fire Marshall Bill. In a Hollywood Reporter oral history of the show, he admitted, “We were warped out of our minds” and revealed that Bill was inadvertently born from a sketch deemed too insane to make it to air.
“We came up with a sketch called ‘Make a Death Wish Foundation’ about a dead kid whose posthumous wish was to go to an amusement park,” a stunned Carrey confessed. That potentially offensive sketch was stopped in its tracks, but Carrey had already experimented with a gruesome face for the kid – which later became Fire Marshall Bill’s face.
Carrey stayed on In Living Colour for the show’s entire run, as he was contracted for five years and was determined to see that contract out. He said the cast had a lot of love for each other in the first few years, but as it wore on, “People start to fear what the next step is, where am I going from here. Things get a little tight.”
It was during the final year of the show that Carrey went stratospheric. During those final days, though, other cast members became aware he was working with writer Steve Oedekerk on the Ace Ventura script in his office. Carrey claimed this led to co-star David Alan Grier sarcastically telling the In Living Colour audience that Carrey was “about to jump off in a movie called Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”
Carrey grumbled, “He meant it facetiously. He was making fun of me for the silly name of my movie.” It’s safe to say, though, that Carrey had the last laugh on that one – and continued to laugh all the way to the bank until he supposedly ‘retired’ in 2022.
What’s going on with Carrey’s ‘retirement’?
In the last nine years, Carrey’s acting career has contracted quite dramatically. Aside from playing the comically villainous Dr Robotnik in three Sonic the Hedgehog movies in 2020, 2022, and 2024, his last big screen appearance was the little-seen 2016 thriller Dark Crimes. He also starred in the two-season Showtime dramedy Kidding between 2018 and 2020 but hasn’t committed to any further TV shows.
In truth, Carrey has been toying with retirement for the last several years and seems more reluctant than ever to act again unless it’s under his specifications. In 2022, he told Access Hollywood that he intended for Sonic 2 to be his final film, saying, “Well, I’m retiring. Yeah, probably. I’m being fairly serious. I really like my quiet life, and I really like putting paint on canvas, and I really love my spiritual life.” The comedy superstar added, with a wry grin, “I feel like – and this is something you might never hear another celebrity say as long as time exists – I have enough. I’ve done enough.”
However, when Carrey decided to return for Sonic 3, the Associated Press brought up how he’d previously said he’d only return to acting if he was sent a “script written in gold ink written by angels.” He couldn’t help but laugh and admitted, “That might’ve been hyperbole, yeah. I came back to this universe because I get to play a genius, which is a bit of a stretch.” Then, to cap things off, he quipped, “And you know, I bought a lot of stuff, and I need the money, frankly.”
