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Of all these qualities, only the grand gesture seems to tie Carrey to Kaufman, the inexplicably strange comedy star of the '70s whom Carrey, director Milos Forman and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski capture with eerie, transcendent accuracy in "Man on the Moon." You can certainly imagine Kaufman writing himself -- or maybe his alter ego, the boorish lounge singer Tony Clifton -- a check for some ridiculous amount. But Kaufman/Clifton would have insisted on cashing it. Indeed, forcing Bank of America to go through the sober ritual of bouncing a billion-dollar check drawn on a nonexistent bank in the nonexistent country of Caspiar (homeland of Kaufman's "Foreign Guy" character) would have been the point of the whole exercise. Kaufman wanted to become a star as part of a larger agenda that was somewhere between enormous practical joke and situationist event. Jim Carrey wanted to become a star, period.

But who doesn't? It isn't Carrey's fault that celebrity is the only idea of nirvana that mass culture has to offer. It wouldn't be fair to compare him with Kaufman if Carrey hadn't explicitly invited us to do so. But despite their obvious and sometimes glaring differences -- the rubber-faced physical comedian who seems relentlessly eager to please vs. the cerebral, conceptual performer who refuses to pander -- there are instructive similarities between the two.

Both were cold-weather refugees who hungrily embraced the know-thyself ethos of Southern California: Kaufman was a leading practitioner of transcendental meditation, while Carrey has been in therapy for years and reads every New Age self-help book. Both have employed the stand-up technique known as "disrespecting the room": for Kaufman, this meant forcing audiences to moo and meow along with his children's songs, while for Carrey, it inspired his dismissive catchphrase, "Well, all righty then!"

Most importantly, both are oversized comic geniuses who don't exactly fit the cookie-cutter categories of the American entertainment industry. Kaufman had at least partly succeeded in breaking free of conventional comic vehicles by the time lung cancer got him in 1984, at age 35 (since he didn't smoke, some fans believed for years that his death was a classic Kaufman hoax). Carrey, far wealthier and more famous than Kaufman ever was, seems to be invoking his dead hero as a guiding light, a star to steer by as he sails his own career into an ambiguous future.

As "Man on the Moon" makes clear, Kaufman hated TV sitcoms and only played the lovable-if-eccentric Latka on "Taxi" after he was convinced it would bring him the freedom to do bigger things. As his manager, George Shapiro (played by Danny DeVito), tells him in the film, "You make them love you now, and later on ... you can fuck with their heads all you want."

In fact, Kaufman's biggest fuck-with-their-heads enterprise, his deliberately overextended career as a bigoted, misogynist bad-guy pro wrestler -- documented in the remarkable film "I'm From Hollywood," made by Kaufman's girlfriend Lynne Margulies -- was only possible because of his stardom. As he would sneeringly remind the middle-American throngs who turned out to see him defend his "World Intergender Championship" belt, he was a television star who made more money in a week than most of them did in a year. (I trust no one will be horrified at this late date to learn that the whole business, including the feud with Memphis wrestler Jerry Lawler that supposedly landed Kaufman in the hospital, was, in wrestling parlance, a "work.")

Carrey is by anybody's definition a far more conventional performer. He's an entertainer who seems completely unembarrassed by that fact. (Kaufman sometimes thought of himself that way too, but his schizophrenic relationship to fame and the mass audience was far more complicated.) I said earlier that Carrey's comedy combines slapstick, parody and absurdism; as he would probably admit, he lacks the intellectual heft for satire, the most cerebral of comic forms.

In the 20 or so magazine interviews Carrey has done since 1991, he almost never discusses social or political issues. His frame of reference is mainly his own emotional and family life (he's notoriously confessional) and show-biz history. He isn't much interested in art or classical music or haute cuisine, and his taste in theater runs more toward Rodgers and Hammerstein than Samuel Beckett (though he'd make a great Gogo in "Waiting for Godot"). As he said to an Esquire reporter in 1995, "I don't know about anything. I'm not an expert on anything but laughs. I just know how to make people feel good."

Given all this, it's not surprising that intellectuals have tended to view Carrey as the nadir of pop-culture stupidity. (Early in his career, the enormously popular Charlie Chaplin was often seen in similar terms.) With the ambiguous and tantalizing exception of "The Cable Guy," you won't catch Carrey intentionally alienating most of his audience the way Kaufman did. Like so many comedians, Carrey came from a poor and unhappy family -- Kaufman, in contrast, grew up in middle-class comfort on Long Island -- and for all his millions he still seems to crave the audience's affection.

Next page | Jim Carrey, the gay black comedian who's neither gay nor black