But there is something in Carrey that is genuinely anarchic and sometimes dark, something that's never adequately contained in his often humdrum movie vehicles and that yearns to break out. He has referred to his own style as "Fred Astaire on acid," which is certainly a perfect description of his demented performance in "The Mask," for my money the most purely delightful of his roles. A friend of mine once described Carrey as the black, gay comic who isn't black or gay, and this paradoxical statement may capture some of the distinctive edge below his cheerful exterior.

Actually, nobody could be whiter than this goofy, gangly guy from Newmarket, Ontario, and you might argue that Carrey's association with African-American culture is largely accidental. He got to know Damon Wayans when both had small parts in "Earth Girls Are Easy" in 1989 (as Furry Aliens No. 2 and No. 3), and wound up as the only white male in the cast of "In Living Color." On one hand, Carrey's lantern-jawed "Father Knows Best" face was perfect in skits that parodied whiteness; on the other he had the slinky spine, dangerous dance moves and gift for mimicry that allowed him to get down.

Carrey's desire to provoke and exploit sexual discomfort, on the other hand, is an integral part of his comic style. He's been accused of homophobia -- mostly for the hilariously overplayed "Crying Game" parody in "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" -- and become the object of whispers about his own sexuality, which is probably just the combination he's looking for. (For what it's worth, Carrey's extensive trail of ex-wives and ex-lovers in Hollywood suggests that he's an incurable hetero.)

From the ass-ogling Lloyd Christmas of "Dumb & Dumber" to the queeny Riddler of "Batman Forever," Carrey's characters have often been sexually ambiguous, a trend that culminated in his borderline-homoerotic stalker role as Chip Douglas in "The Cable Guy." Although that film has become something of a cult object on video (as well it should), the initial audience antipathy toward Carrey's portrayal of a disturbed and needy loner seems to have scared him off this particular theme. His characters in "Liar Liar" and "The Truman Show" are Pat Boone-straight, and, quite frankly, are weaker as a result. Whatever psychological explanation you want to propose for it, Carrey's best work is lightly dusted with queerness. ("Man on the Moon" is a special case in this regard -- Kaufman's alien weirdness had nothing to do with sexuality.)

In addition to offering him a major career break, Damon Wayans also identified something crucial that lies just below the surface of Carrey's mock-debonair clowning. "Damon came backstage after I did something really weird," Carrey told Playboy in 1994, "and said, 'Hey, man, you are one of the angriest people that I have ever seen.'"

It may be pointless to play amateur shrink with celebrities one has never met, but in Carrey's case it's irresistible. Although he no longer discusses his childhood in interviews, he has said that after dropping out of high school at 15 (to go to work after his father was fired), he briefly became a vandal and a bigot. One of his former teachers told People in 1996 that Carrey was constantly the butt of ridicule because of his family's poverty, adding, "He'd put together these funny routines to make the kids laugh so he'd be accepted."

When he wasn't obsessively rehearsing Jerry Lewis or Dick Van Dyke routines in the mirror, the teenage Carrey worked as a janitor in a tire-rim factory. Some of his now-famous physical impressions, like his impersonations of Flipper or a praying mantis, grew out of entertaining his mother while she was in bed with kidney disease. In the same Playboy interview, one of his most revealing, he admitted, "My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it."

As his career has matured, Carrey has learned to conceal his anger and pain behind the persona of a self-confident doofus who, as Carrey has said of Ace Ventura, "is totally full of shit" but "sexy as hell in his own head." Those who saw Carrey do stand-up in his early years in Toronto and Los Angeles (where he moved at 19) remember a brilliant but undisciplined performer who often refused to let go of a gag. He'd wriggle around on the floor as an armless and legless character called the Worm Boy, for example, long past the point when the audience was tired of it.

On "In Living Color," he began to channel his limitless energy into characters like Fire Marshal Bill, a ghoulishly scarred figure whose household safety tips always led to catastrophe. Bill seems like the abusive dad of Carrey's sweeter but equally clueless later characters, from Ace Ventura to Lloyd Christmas and Stanley Ipkiss in "The Mask." All of Carrey's pre-"Cable Guy" characters, in fact, are lovable losers who survive adversity, probably the most fundamental archetype of American comedy. They're clearly in the same tradition as Chaplin's Little Tramp, Lewis' grown-up 9-year-old and Woody Allen's neurotic schlemiel.

Like any great comedian, Carrey himself is the attraction, not the character he plays. In his early films, he reminds me of the Marx Brothers -- all three or four of them rolled into one (minus Groucho's acerbic sarcasm). Their best movies were nothing more than outlandish premises to get the shtick rolling -- what if Groucho were president of an entire country? -- and exotic settings for them to riff against. No one who watched "Ace Ventura" gave a crap about the missing dolphin; the point of the film is, in director Tom Shadyac's words, to go "way off planet Earth."

When Carrey descends into the empty dolphin tank and throws himself into a rapid-fire series of "Star Trek" impressions, there's absolutely no reason for it, except that the echo sounds really cool. As for the infamous "Can I ass you a few questions?" routine, which Siskel and Ebert felt signaled the death of Western civilization, sure it's moronic. But I defy you not to laugh at the sheer brazen I'm-high-on-life stupid brilliance of it. As Carrey told an Us magazine reporter in 1994, "Until 'Ace Ventura,' no actor had considered talking through his ass."

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