Twenty years ago, I dabbled in stand-up comedy with a high school chum named Pat Bullock. As Bullock & Brioux, our fame spread clear across several streets in Etobicoke.
People still stop me on the street and say, "Didn't you used to be somebody really obscure?"
However, back before we were beaten down by the reality of life (or just got jobs), we took our four or five jokes and booked ourselves into a club in Barrie, Ont., called Tickles. That's where I first saw Jim Carrey, who was just 18 at the time.
Even back then, Carrey blew everybody else off the stage. A rubber-limbed, gonzo impressionist, he became both Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond. He followed that up with both Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder singing Ebony And Ivory. In between, he seemed to simply feed off the energy in the room as he vamped through his nearly hour-long act. It was very, very impressive.
In a sense, he really helped me with my career. After seeing his act, I quit comedy forever, as any reader here can attest.
So it never really surprised me that he became such an enormous success in Hollywood. You could tell even then that Carrey was destined for, and aiming himself well beyond, the comedy club circuit.
Tonight's Life & Times Of Jim Carrey: Somebody Stop Me (CBC, 9 p.m.) brought back a lot of those memories.
This is probably the ultimate Canadian rags to riches story. By now, most people are familiar with Carrey's almost Charles Dickens childhood: Quitting school at 15 to support his family, living out of a trailer, scrubbing in a tire-rim factory between gigs.
His first Yuk Yuk's appearance was a disaster. Just 14, he bombed and was yanked off stage with a hook.
Carrey, of course, got the last laugh. After a short-lived NBC comedy series flopped in the mid-'80s, he junked his impressionist act, redefined himself as Captain over-the-top and took off as the wacky white guy on In Living Color.
After a string of madcap comedies, including Ace Ventura, The Mask and Dumb And Dumber, his salary skyrocketed from $350,000 per picture to $20 million.
Life & Times covers all the bases, with Carrey's recent biographer Martin Knelman, Yuk Yuk's impresario Mark Breslin and stand-up contemporary Mike Macdonald moving the story along.
What's missing is Carrey himself, although host Ralph Benmergui, who shared a stage or two with the comedian back in the bad old club days, did manage to score a few minutes of Mr. Big Shot's time for a brief on-air chat.
It might not have helped had Carrey sat for hours. Notoriously press shy, and well defended by one of Hollywood's more formidable publicists, Carrey is not very accessible on the subject of Carrey.
His will be a great story when it is finally fully told, but it might take a Milos Forman film to do it. The problem of course: Who could ever play Carrey?
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