Jim Carrey Bloopers That Make Us Love Him Even More
After a string of small movie and TV appearance in the '80s, Jim Carrey made an impression on comedy fans on Fox's In Living Color with outrageously over-the-top characters like Fire Marshall Bill and Vera De Milo ... and then became one of the biggest movie stars in the world with roles in films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Dumb and Dumber, Bruce Almighty, The Mask, and Liar Liar.
Carrey is an incredibly likeable actor, but also a very loose performer. He clearly riffs and improvises a lot, which, coupled with a manic energy, makes his films more than just a recitation of what's on the script in front of him. All that comedic experimentation and playing around on the set leads to a lot of unexpected moments, which in turn leads to Carrey cracking up his unsuspecting co-stars ... not to mention himself. Here are some behind-the-scenes clips from Carrey movies: bloopers so funny that they could be in a Jim Carrey movie.
Almighty then!
Carrey is so well known for his tendency and ability to go off-script to create funny movie magic that Carrey movie-makers often include the blooper reels in the films themselves. Bruce Almighty, a high-concept blockbuster in which Carrey's TV reporter (Bruce) gets to take a crack at being God, had so much good (but utterly unusable material) that outtakes ran over the end credits, Smokey and the Bandit II-style.
In this featured blooper, an agitated Bruce (Carrey) has to cut off a conversation because he's running very late for work. Now, actors who have to drive in movie scenes generally don't actually drive; the car is placed on some kind of rig so filmmakers can control exactly where it goes. This outtake reveals that particular movie secret, because Carrey fiddles with the car's controls and pretends to zoom out of the neighborhood ... even though the vehicle makes no noise at all and travels so incredibly slow that audiences get to see the guy behind the car helping to push it. The crew laughs uproariously.
Poppin' with the penguins
There's an old adage in Hollywood, usually attributed to W.C. Fields, that advises actors to "never work with children or animals." Why not share the screen with those surefire crowd-pleasers, precocious kids and cute creatures? It's because they have a tendency to upstage the "real" actors, what with their innocence and unpredictability. Nevertheless, Jim Carrey starred in one of the most animal-populated movies of all-time: Mr. Popper's Penguins, a film about a guy who opens up his apartment to dozens of the tuxedo-colored polar birds.
The production used real birds, and they've got real comic chops. In this outtake from the film, Carrey attempts to get a comic rapport going with a prickly penguin, who reluctantly obliges. First, the bird completely ignores Carrey's attempts at friendliness. Then, when Carrey attempts the old "it's for you" bit with a phone, the little critter amusingly snaps its little beak as a clever retort.
Water in the court
A good film actor is always aware of blocking and camera placement, particularly a good comic actor, who can use all of the tools at their disposal to maximize the potential for laughter. Jim Carrey is just that skilled of a performer, because he knows exactly what the shot is going to look like before he goes for this outtake from Liar Liar.
The film's premise concerns a skeezy lawyer (Carrey), who, due to the wish of his disappointed child, is physically unable to tell a lie. Ironically enough, in his blooper, the joke is based on Carrey lying. After an exchange with co-star Jennifer Tilly, Carrey's lawyer character pours himself a glass of water from a pitcher. But Carrey knows that neither the glass nor the pitcher is going to show up on screen ... but that the sound will register. That makes for a perfect opportunity for the silly star to make it seem like he's relieving himself in the courtroom.
A not-present Christmas
It's hard to believe that editors had to actually cut any material out of the Dumb and Dumber movies because it was too chaotic, gleefully silly, or over the top, because that's what those Farrelly Brothers movies are all about. In the long-awaited sequel film, Dumb and Dumber To, best friends Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) and Lloyd Christmas (Carrey) engage in one of their little friend spats. Carrey adds some physically enhanced, highly theatrical laughing. Is it because he can only laugh at his friend's audacity? Not really. "Let me just laugh some more because I can't remember my line!" Carrey yells.
Daniels, to his credit, doesn't break character, but improvises a response to Carrey's roundabout request for a line. "Something about Mary?" Daniels suggests, alluding to either or both Mary Swanson, Lloyd's unattainable dream woman in the original Dumb and Dumber, as well as Dumb and Dumber To directors' Peter and Bobby Farrelly's movie There's Something About Mary.
Yes Man, it wasn't him
Jim Carrey has a friendly and youthful face, and being a clown certainly makes him seem (and maybe even feel) young. But the truth of the matter is that the A-lister is well over 50 years old; after all, In Living Color began almost 30 years ago. He's no whipper-snapper, and so, like many other middle-aged individuals, he has a hard time keeping up with all the cool slang that the kids out there are using.
When forced to recite what's supposed to be tough "street" talk (calling guys his "bri-zays" rather than "brothers," as the case may be), his mild awkwardness is thankfully interrupted. He's sitting in a booth in a restaurant, and when one moves ever so slightly on the surface they use to cover those things, it sounds like flatulence. That's exactly what happens, and Carrey assures his co-stars and crew that it was not him. But hey, this is Jim Carrey, so he rolls with it. Literally. He shifts back and forth on the booth a few more times so as to get the best fart sound possible.
Hello, Clarice
After his rise to stardom with silly comedies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber, Carrey departed from playing likeable idiots for the first time with the title role in Ben Stiller's 1996 dark comedy The Cable Guy. Carrey plays a TV installer who befriends a regular guy (Matthew Broderick), and gets dangerously obsessed, stalking him and trying to ruin his life. The movie is often unsettling if not terrifying, but there's still plenty of room for Carrey to do his usual Jim Carrey schtick.
One of the movie's most famous scenes takes place at Medieval Times, the dinner-and-a-knight show locale beloved by Los Angelenos. Carrey puts a bunch of meat on his face and makes references to a similarly-looking and unluckily deskinned victim of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. It's funny, and was apparently funny to Carrey and Broderick, who have a hard time filming the scene without cracking up.
A truly magical moment
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone was an overlooked box office bomb, despite a promising premise (the inner lives of cheesy, celebity magicians) and a cast of comic heavyweights, including Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, and Jim Carrey. The plot is mainly concerned with a redemptive arc about Burt Wonderstone (Carell), whose life falls apart after his popular duo act with Anton Marvelton (Buscemi) fizzles. Nevertheless, Jim Carrey appears throughout in what's basically a glorified cameo, stealing every scene he's in as Steve Gray, a mysterious and provocative "modern" magician who is most definitely a parody of guys like Criss Angel and David Blaine.
In this scene, Carrey, as the long-and-dyed-haired illusionist, sits among a crowd, entertaining himself by tying to get the extras around him to crack a smile. He employs a variety of goofy strategies, such as making himself go cross-eyed, and spining the propeller on the beanie he's wearing for some reason. He even offers up a bite of the candy bracelet he's wearing as a kooky sartorial choice.
Fun with Jim and props
Whether it's laying prone and twisted after falling onto an airport tarmac in Dumb and Dumber, or turning Dr. Seuss's Grinch into a real-life cartoon in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Jim Carrey knows a thing or two about physical comedy. The guy can use his seemingly rubber body to get all the visual-oriented laughs that he can. This doesn't always mean that he's the most physically coordinated actor, however.
In this goof-filled outtake from Fun with Dick and Jane, Carrey's suburban dad-turned-criminal character is supposed to celebrate a successful telephone call by throwing the phone out of one hand and catching it the other, the way cool guys do. However, Carrey can't seem to pull it off, and he drops the phone and sends it flying. Carrey can't quite believe his ineptitude, so much so that when he actually does manage to catch his own throw, he pauses to savor the moment ... but for so long that the take is unusable.
A series of fortune riffs
A Series of Unfortunate Events is based on the early entries in the bestselling series of faux-gothic children's novels by Lemony Snicket, aka Daniel Handler. But when filmmakers cast Jim Carrey as the movie's villain, an evil actor and master of disguise named Count Olaf, they pretty much had to throw the script out the window. Carrey is so loose and frenetic as the master performer (a role he was born to play), that editors wound up with a slew of unusable material wherein Carrey just goes off on tangents, and from there, even more tangents.
Here he improvises a song about a time machine, which leads to him imitating a clock gone mad, which then leads to Carrey's top-notch impression of a dinosaur, running amok in dinosaur times. Somehow his co-stars continue to pretend to sleep and don't laugh, even as Carrey's aggressive dinosaur runs around and licks somebody's ear ... which sends him back into character as an annoyed, ignored Count Olaf.
What's my name again?
Anchorman 2 did everything the first Anchorman movie did, only much bigger and set in the early '80s instead of the mid-'70s. That includes a re-visitation of the first film's epic, absurd news anchor "battle royale." The first film forced the different local San Diego news teams to fight each other to near-death, while the second brought different national and international news squads together as a comment on the increasingly bloated world of newsmedia.
There were cameos galore: Kanye West shows up as an MTV reporter, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler represent for an Entertainment Tonight-type show, and Jim Carrey and Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard come down from a Canadian TV station to throw down. Carrey represents English-speaking Canada (Cotillard the francophone), but even though he's doing his primary language — albeit with an exaggerated Canadian accent — he still has a hard time getting out his lines. Actually, he has a hard time getting out his own name, which he can't remember and needs an off-camera assist to get down.