A lot of us had really high hopes for The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, which should have been an opportunity to Jim Carrey to make his big return to broad comedy, all with the help of a more contemporary star like Steve Carell. But as much as Carrey got praise from critics, virtually no one saw Burt Wonderstone. That might be for the best, since Carrey's best and most bizarre comic performance in years is happening on the Internet anyway.
This video debuted at Funny or Die without much explanation, and Carrey's collaborators-- writer/directors Nick Corirossi and Charles Ingram-- aren't nearly as famous, though Corirossi has contributed to a lot of Funny or Die shorts in the past. But what starts as a goofy parody of Charlton Heston and Hee Haw morphs into a really pointed, and really bleak, attack on gun owners, accusing them of owning rifles to make up for small penises and laying out a scenario in which a guy accidentally shoots off his own head, only to have his kids discover him and accidentally shoot themselves too. And then the wife kills herself with a grenade. Yeah, bleak. But also reminiscent of his days on In Living Color, and the impressions might be the best and funniest he's done in, what, a decade?
We'll allow the gun control discussion to happen elsewhere-- or you can follow the Twitter hashtag #colddeadhand to follow it in real time-- but we can all at least be grateful that Carrey is speaking up about an issue that matters, and no longer tackling the long-debunked connection between autism and vaccines like he was just a few years ago. But with Carrey's next movie Kick-Ass 2 featuring a whole lot of gun violence, Carrey has definitely set himself up for pointed questions on his next press tour.
