Jim Carrey channeling Ace Ventura when he plays Joe Biden is PERFECT. His critics are wrong.
Why? It’s simple: Laughter is cathartic, and Ventura/Biden taunting a fascist is objectively hilarious.
If you can’t see why, your funny bone is broken. I guarantee I’ll convince you of that if you take five minutes to read this article.
The main criticism of Carrey’s Biden, as made by publications like the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, is that he doesn’t effectively impersonate Biden. Other “Saturday Night Live” actors who played the former vice president, Jason Sudeikis and Woody Harrelson, better reproduced his mannerisms. Carrey by contrast channels the manic energy of his iconic ’90s film characters, particularly Ace Ventura.
Yet why can’t silly mockery be funny without precise physical mimickry? Why can’t zaniness be considered an intelligent form of political commentary on its own? Commenting on politics by simply being weird gives voice to the repressed weirdo in all of us. That weirdo has qualities which can turn into terrible things — malevolence, nihilism, apathy, depression. Yet sometimes it can also do something wonderful: Being silly makes us strong, helps us embrace life and compels us to seek justice. It seems like a paradox but is still true: Enjoying silliness for its own sake, in its own way, is laughing and weeping for the world as we go about our misadventures.
These observations can be politically and socially significant.
When I see Carrey playing Biden, I see Charlie Chaplin playing The Tramp, famous for his tragic poverty, or that character’s analogue in 1940’s “The Great Dictator,” where he plays a Jew who directly stands up to the great fascist of his era (Adolf Hitler). Chaplin didn’t exactly mimic Hitler; he instead made silly jokes to knock him down a peg. The Three Stooges, who like Carrey lean toward the broad and away from realism, took a big risk when they took on fascism with slapstick in their own satire from 1940, the short film “You Nazty Spy!” Again, silliness was used to knock bad people down a peg.
When Carrey plays Biden, I see Dr. Seuss’ famous political cartoons denouncing Hitler, fascism, racism and the “America First” movement during the World War II era. (I can’t recommend “Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorials Cartoons of Theodore Seuss Geisel” highly enough.) Like Carrey, Suess used silliness even when discussing the darkest subjects. That combination of goofy creatures, scathing commentary and silly wordplay worked in his political cartoons and, years later, in children’s books like 1953’s “The Sneetches,” 1954’s “Horton Hears a Who!”, 1958’s “Yertle the Turtle” and 1971’s “The Lorax.” He even wrote a historic poem demanding Richard Nixon resign during the height of the Watergate scandal, adapting his 1972 classic “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!”
With Jim Carrey the mind wanders to his version of The Gritch, which adds new layers to the anti-capitalist subtext in Seuss’ original story: The movie includes commentaries on racism, xenophobia and capitalism. He also included social commentary in comedies ranging from duds like 1996’s “The Cable Guy” to masterpieces like 1998’s “The Truman Show,” 1999’s “Man on the Moon,” 2001’s “The Majestic” and 2005’s “Fun with Dick and Jane.” His more recent anti-fascist paintings — in particular his 2019 piece depicting the righteous mob execution of Benito Mussolini — also deserve more attention.
Carrey’s art, like the others mentioned here, criticizes social conditions that marginalize and oppress, ranging from commercialism and television to McCarthyism and capitalism itself.
With his Biden impressions, Carrey deliberately channeling the Ace Ventura character works for two reasons. First, it is the character in which he best delivers insult comedy: The protagonist of the two classic ’90s comedies, 1994’s “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”and 1995’s “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls,” is funny when Carrey is either mugging (which he only does mildly as Biden), engaging in slapstick (none of that here) or brashly insulting his snooty inferiors.
When he plays Biden, he is the one who insults his inferior — and the inferior of all who voted against him. The most memorable occasion was when he proclaimed Trump as a “looo-hooser” in his Ace Ventura voice after his loss to Biden became official. The joke worked in part because Carrey had already mimicked Ventura’s mannerisms in earlier Biden sketches, so the line didn’t feel out of character. Yet it also worked because it is well known that Trump’s biggest fear is being regarded as a loser. As the first one-term president in 28 years — and a failure at that — he will be remembered as one of history’s great losers.
We needed a manic Ace Ventura to tell us that the Trump story has some karma in it, even if he is dressed as Joe Biden while doing so. It is cathartic and, given that Trump’s underlying motives are so simplistic, can be insightful precisely because it lacks any ambiguity.
My favorite moment, personality, was Carrey’s monologue about Trump being diagnosed COVID-19 after spending months downplaying the disease and refusing to wear a mask:
“I believe in science and karma. Now, just imagine if science and karma could somehow team up and send us all a message about how dangerous this virus can be. I’m not saying I want it to happen. Just imagine if it did.”
This isn’t to say that Carrey’s own oeuvre is spotless. The punchline at the climax of “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” is disgustingly transphobic, and forever mars the legacy of that otherwise near-perfect comedy. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed more at a movie the first time I watched it (granted, I was nine, so there was a forbidden fruit aspect to my enjoyment). Yet the ending of that film ruins it for me when I try to wax nostalgic about it today.
I also, as an autistic person, am deeply uncomfortable with his views on vaccines, as I explained in a 2014 article criticizing his ex Jenny McCarthy.
Then again, Dr. Seuss, Chaplin and The Three Stooges could also be problematic. We are all, it seems, flawed products of our time. Our best hope is to try to learn from our mistakes and grow from them. Laughing at the silliness of life — whether it’s Charlie Chaplin impersonating Adolf Hitler, Dr. Seuss creating monsters in fantasy worlds or Jim Carrey channeling Ace Ventura to taunt Donald Trump — may be the perfect way to do that.
Hence again: Carrey is perfect as Biden. We need a lot more of it.