When Jim Carey was the funniest fucker on the planet

There was a good 18 months in the 1990s when Jim Carrey was definitely the funniest fucker alive. I still have strong memories of my mate falling on the floor of the cinema, unable to stop laughing, at a screening of Dumb and Dumber, just physically unable to deal with that magnificent gurning.

He was always the goofy dork from In Living Color, the geeky white guy in an insanely cool black cast, who leaned into that goofiness to insane degrees, and it was no surprise at all when he started showing up on the big screen, and was just as funny. 

The Ace Ventura films are dopey as hell, and the blatant transphobia really grates in 2024, but Carrey could make a joke out of walking across a room, and then he was going the full Tex Avery in The Mask, and reached some kind of comic perfection with the 'That John Denver is full of shit' line in Dumb and Dumber. He could actually pull off the full body stocking of the Riddler in Batman Forever (unlike big Tommy, I could sanction his buffoonery), and gave the best unhinged speeches at the MTV Movie Awards.

The shine started to come off with The Cable Guy - the jokes were still there, but the speech impediment was just annoying - and there have been diminishing returns. Sometimes there are moments - the Dumb and Dumber sequel was nowhere near as successful as the original, but Carrey still commits to the bit like a the goofy motherfucker he always was. He might not have us literally laughing in the aisles anymore, but nobody ever did it better.