Jim Carrey Needs an Excuse to Explain Away His Latest Box-Office Failure So He Released This Song

My Error: Burt Wonderstone already came out and already tanked. So I guess I should headline this as "Jim Carrey Seeks Distraction from Latest in a Long String of Bombs."

He's got a movie coming out called Burt Wonderstone, where he plays the villain, not the hero, and the commercials look pretty bad. It looks like Blades of Glory with magic, minus laughs.

So I guess he needs to prepare an excuse for the film's likely failure.

The parody song seems sort of funny... if you're in the mind to insult half the country. His act used to be mostly impressions, and he deploys decent impressions of Charlton Heston and Sam Elliot here. The main lyric, that it takes a "cold dead hand" to pull the trigger, is... well, clever-ish for internet baiting.

But that's all it is, isn't it? Baiting? The disconnect here is that Jim Carrey imagines himself as heroically changing the public debate and speaking great truths to power... when in fact he's poisoning the well. He's not shifting the public debate; he's freezing it further.

By choosing a strategy of thoughtless, insulting personalization of the issue, he blows up any path but the one himself chose. That is, does he expect a non-personalized, thoughtful response to his personalized, thoughtless baiting? He simultaneously seems very self-congratulatory about his baiting on Twitter, promoting his Dr. Demento song as if it's going to change the world.

One of the great conceits of liberal psychology is that the liberal espousing the philosophy is rational and not "angry." ("Anger" is one of the few Biblical sins they acknowledge as a genuine sin.) But Carrey is plainly angry, and plainly hateful, and furthermore plainly irrational -- because a reasonable man would realize that persuasion isn't punctuated by a middle finger (as his parody song concludes).

This song isn't championing an issue; it's championing Jim Carrey, and flattering his ego. Were he as rational and intelligent as his self-flattery has it, he'd have realized that.

posted by Ace at 12:42 PM

| Access Comments