jim carrey dumb and dumber — a performance i can recite from memory
jim carrey dumb and dumber — a performance i can recite from memory
jim carrey dumb and dumber is a performance i can recite from memory, including the breathing. mom rang during the weekly call and i recited part of it back to her. dave rang from somewhere outdoors, wondering if i had gone to the post office. i had not. the spare key remains lost.
writing from the desk on a tuesday. carla took her thermos and a folder into the q3 prep on the third floor, which translates to roughly an hour. give or take a danish.
so. jim carrey dumb and dumber. the performance, not the film, although they are difficult to separate, which is part of the point. you can argue about whether dumb is a verdict or a zip code, the larger pillar i drafted at this same desk, and you can argue about whether the 1994 picture is a comedy or a manifesto. what you cannot argue about, on the evidence, is that lloyd christmas — the haircut, the chipped tooth, the breathing pattern — is a piece of acting i have memorized the way other men memorize their wedding vows. mom called on sunday, as she does, and i did the “so you’re telling me there’s a chance” cadence into the receiver before she could finish saying hi. she laughed for nine seconds. i timed it. mothers tolerate more than they admit.
jim carrey dumb and dumber: jim carrey plays lloyd christmas, the limo driver with a bowl cut and a chipped tooth, in a 1994 road comedy he commits to from the inside out. lloyd is dumb without being cruel, hopeful without being smug, and that, frankly, is the engine of the whole picture. the breathing is craft.
SO YOU’RE TELLING ME. THERE’S A CHANCE.
that line lives in my head rent-free. dave knows it. dave has, on three separate occasions, attempted to use it on me as a verbal counter-attack and failed because dave delivers it flat. you cannot deliver lloyd flat. you have to deliver lloyd from somewhere south of your sternum, with hope nobody asked for, with vowels stretched past the point of polite. jim carrey understood the assignment. dave never has. for the broader case on the picture itself, see the manifesto-disguised-as-a-road-movie reading i wrote about dumb and dumber from this very desk; this post is the satellite that just orbits the actor.
jim carrey dumb and dumber, the scenes i quote unprompted
the scenes i can recite are not, plainly, the famously quoted ones. anyone can do “so you’re telling me there’s a chance”. my repertoire is the smaller stuff. the way lloyd says “we landed on the moon” with a kind of fragile pride, as though he himself had been consulted. the way he asks, in the diner, “you wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world”, and then commits to that sound for what feels like nine minutes but is, on rewatch, closer to four seconds. the breathing, between lines, that is louder than the lines. that is the craft. mom does not notice the craft. mom hears me do the moon line over the phone on a sunday morning and says “are you eating”, which is the answer she gives to most of my volunteered information.
jim carrey dumb and dumber works, in the same way most of his early ventures work, because he refuses to play the character ironically. there is no wink. lloyd is not a comment on dumb people. lloyd is a dumb person, all the way down, including the parts of dumb that are, frankly, beautiful. the chipped tooth helps. the bowl cut helps more. the bowl cut, on a man with an otherwise functional face, is an act of courage. i mention this only because the haircut is, by my own count, the most-discussed prop in the picture, and the discussion is, almost always, a misdirection.
jim carrey, on this point, has said in various places — i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, about actors who commit harder when the costume is humiliating — that lloyd was a person he liked. you can hear that in the performance. you cannot fake liking your character. the audience reads it the way dogs read fear. for adjacent jim carrey craft on a different chassis, see the ace ventura: pet detective performance from the same year, also 1994; same instrument, different song. the moon line, the breathing, the tongue, all the same family.
dave called during the third quote, again
dave called sunday afternoon. this was, by my count, the third quote of the day, after the moon line for mom and the “you wanna hear the most annoying sound” experiment i conducted on myself, alone, in the kitchen, while waiting for the kettle. dave’s call came through on the second ring. i picked up because dave is the only person who calls me on sundays who is not mom, and mom had already used her slot.
“are you at the post office”, dave said. no greeting. dave does not greet. dave audits.
i was not at the post office. the post office was, on this sunday, where it always is — about nine minutes’ walk from the apartment and exactly that far from any version of me that is willing to enter it. there is, in the post office, a certified letter waiting that is, as far as i’m concerned, doing fine where it is. i told dave i had been busy. dave asked with what. i said “research”. dave said “you’re watching that movie again.” dave is sometimes correct about me in ways i find rude.
i did the “so you’re telling me there’s a chance” line at him. dave was unmoved. dave is in insurance. insurance, structurally, requires that you be unmoved. dave then said the thing he says, which is “what about the spare key”, and i told dave, again, that the spare key remained lost, and that the post office and the spare key were, on the universe of my unfinished business, two different problems that happened to live on the same street. dave laughed. dave laughed for what i would estimate at thirty-two seconds. dave’s laughs cost me, on average, three hundred dollars over time, but that is a different ledger.
the spare key dave lost, also a quotable artifact
the spare key situation is older than this post. dave borrowed the spare key in october of last year for reasons he described, at the time, as “in case”, and lost it some weeks later in a manner he refuses to explain. the spare key is, by my reckoning, in one of three places: dave’s car, dave’s couch, or a parking lot in a neighborhood neither of us have been to in months. dave maintains that the key has been “more or less located”, a phrase i have asked him to define and which he has, four times, declined to define.
i bring this up because the spare key is, in my own quiet way, my chipped tooth. it is the small visible flaw i carry around that is, in the right light, kind of charming, and in the wrong light, the reason a locksmith costs me one hundred and forty dollars on a tuesday. lloyd had the chipped tooth. i have the missing key. neither of us is going to get them back. both of us, frankly, have made peace with it.
the seventh microwave is not relevant here, except that it is, in the kitchen, beeping at a frequency that suggests it disagrees with the spaghetti i have asked it to consider. the microwave seventh is the only microwave i have not, yet, killed. its number is etched on the box, which is still next to the bin, which is the kind of detail dave would file under evidence.
here is what i’d like clearly noted about jim carrey on this picture, before we move on.
the performance is not, as the algorithm would have you believe, a series of memorable bits. the performance is a long held note. lloyd is the same person in scene one as he is in scene seventy. that is rare. most comic performances drift, by the third act, toward irony. lloyd does not drift. lloyd ends the picture exactly as earnest as he began it, which is the achievement. carrey holds that note for a hundred and seven minutes without breaking. you cannot fake that. you cannot teach that. you can only commit to it, the way lloyd commits to the briefcase, the way harry commits to the van, the way the moon, in lloyd’s worldview, was personally landed upon by him.
i rest my case.
the post office i kept avoiding while reciting
i am, on the matter of the post office, a coward. i will admit that here because here is, structurally, where i admit things. the post office has a certified letter for me. the certified letter has been there for some weeks. the post office hours, by some local arrangement, exclude every hour during which i am, by my own internal scheduling, willing to face envelopes with a name printed on them in serif font. the letter is, almost certainly, fine. the letter is, almost certainly, not fine. the only way to know, on the evidence, is to walk down there and ask, and i have, on every walk i have taken in the last fortnight, found a small reason to walk in the other direction.
this is, i would argue, a lloyd move. lloyd would not go to the post office. lloyd would, on a sunday, recite something from a film at himself in the kitchen and call that the day’s productive activity. that is the gift jim carrey gave us, frankly. permission. permission to be the person who has not opened the unopened mail and who has, instead, spent forty minutes practicing the breathing pattern from the diner scene.
mom, when i told her i had not been to the post office this week either, said “you’re being dumb again, hon”, in the voice she uses on me and on the kettle. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated. she did not press. mom never presses on the post office. mom is, in her own quiet way, an enabler. the airpods (the one i still have, the other lost in a coat pocket sometime last winter) were in my ear during the call. mom does not know about the lost airpod. some things, she does not need.
the cupholder take, briefly, on iconic vehicles
here is a small detour. lloyd and harry, in the picture, drive a van shaped like a dog. that van does not, on inspection, appear to have an excess of cupholders. that is, by my standards, correct. cars should have one cupholder. six is greed. i hold this opinion firmly. i would defend it, on a sunday, in a diner, in a snowstorm.
the van shaped like a dog has, in the picture, the kind of vehicular minimalism i find moving. one driver. one passenger. one road. one objective, even if the objective is, on close reading, a misunderstanding. i would, on this point, like to laminate the dog van as a piece of cinema design and put it next to the laminator i bought in march and used once. that is, by my count, the third laminator joke in the cluster, and i offer no apology.
carla just walked past my desk on her way back from the printer. i minimized this. she did not look in. these small wins are the rest of the morning.
verdict, the performance is the diagnosis
here is where we end up.
jim carrey, on jim carrey dumb and dumber, did the thing very few american comic actors had done before and almost none have done since, which is play a deeply dumb person without contempt. he liked lloyd. you can see it in every frame. he gave lloyd a tooth, a haircut, a breathing pattern, and a hopeful tone, and he committed to those four things for a hundred and seven minutes without flinching. that is the performance. that is, by my standards, the diagnosis. people who can quote the picture from memory — and i count, today, three: me, dave, and mom in a smaller way — are not, in fact, quoting jokes. we are quoting a worldview. the worldview is: be dumb if you must, but be kind always. lloyd is, in that sense, the patron saint of the cluster. the post i wrote about him alongside harry sits a few clicks away. this one is just for the actor, who deserved his own page.
i’m not saying jim carrey single-handedly redeemed the comedy of the 1990s. but i’m not not saying it.
the spare key remains lost. the post office remains unvisited. the seventh microwave is, at this exact second, beeping at the spaghetti in a tone i would describe as impatient. lloyd would, in the right light, find that funny. i find it funny. dave will not find it funny when i tell him, which is also part of why i tell him.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
in-house lloyd christmas reciter, sunday-call division
P.S. the spare key dave lost in october has, since this morning, been declared “more or less located” for a fifth time. i have stopped asking. the post office, also, has stopped asking. we have an understanding.
