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This story has become famous, of course, because Carrey's expression of brazen optimism turned out to be conservative. By the time 1995 actually rolled around, his rambunctious goofball roles in "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," "The Mask" and "Dumb & Dumber" had yielded worldwide grosses of $550 million, and the newly minted superstar's asking price was up to $20 million per picture. But by that time, Carrey no longer had the check anyway -- in July 1994, he had slipped it into his father's pocket as Percy Carrey, who had once housed his family in a Volkswagen camper after losing his job as an accountant, lay in his coffin.

Now that Carrey, who will turn 38 next month, has become one of Hollywood's most bankable stars, he faces a predicament something like Truman Burbank's at the end of "The Truman Show." He's free to go anywhere and do anything, but he's also hemmed in by his enormous fame and by the expectations of his producers and his audience.

Some film critics and other middlebrow tastemakers have never forgiven Carrey for drawing huge audiences to watch him talk out of his ass in "Ace Ventura." His uncanny performance as the late guerrilla comedian Andy Kaufman in "Man on the Moon," which opens Dec. 22, may win Carrey the mainstream respect (and the Oscar nomination) he has long coveted. But the real significance of the Kaufman role in Carrey's career is not yet clear.

I see Carrey as the greatest film comic of our generation, and perhaps the finest physical comedian since the silent era of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. (Whether his movies are any good is an entirely different question.) His comedy can be juvenile, but it's almost never cynical or mean-spirited; his sympathy for the geek, the loser, the little guy, is completely unaffected. Rarely have such natural gifts for slapstick, parody and absurdism come together so gracefully in a single performer.

But Carrey's darkest and most adventurous film to date, "The Cable Guy," was widely viewed as a failure, and neither the syrupy "Liar Liar" nor the pedantic "Truman Show" displayed his talents to best advantage. As fine as he is in "Man on the Moon," I don't really want to see Carrey up on that dais in March oozing phony sincerity as he handles that statuette. If that happens, and the inevitable upscale acting roles pour in, he'll be in dire peril of sacrificing his bizarre genius to become Tom Hanks or, even worse, Robin Williams -- a former funnyman who's all grown up, a tender yet mature specimen of American masculinity. As Alfred E. Neuman would say, Yecch! Can Andy Kaufman, from beyond the grave, give Carrey the courage to avoid this fate and chart his own course?

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