Comedy gold: the best standup on DVDJim Carrey

Comedy gold: Jim Carrey's Unnatural Act

Three years before his breakthrough movie, Jim Carrey was a remarkable standup, displaying his originality – and his brilliance at making a physical spectacle of himself

Title: Unnatural Act

Year: 1991

The set-up: Jim Carrey was only a boy when he got started in the comedy business, doing impressions and physical gags to entertain his constantly ill mother. So good did he become that when he started performing professionally there were almost riots, he says, when he tried to put more of himself into his routine.

And at times you can see it is almost a burden – that talent he has to please a crowd with goofy faces, crazy voices and the impossible movements of his thin, long limbs. In this performance, made three years before his movie breakthrough (and co-produced by one Judd Apatow), there are flickers of reluctance in the gratitude he shows to the adoring crowd. Indeed it's arguable that movies, really, were always where he belonged, because he needs a story to make uncontrived opportunities for his zany skills. "Yeah, I listen to motivational tapes," he says at one stage. "Think I want to get stuck in this dead-end job?" (And as he later revealed, those words weren't empty.)

But what a talent it is. Hard to describe here, although you surely know it well already, he is uniquely brilliant when it comes to making a physical spectacle of such things as Man Struck by Unexpected Orgasm, say, or Man Led Around Bar Literally by His Penis.

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The pose with which he ends the show looks impossible to perform, I would have said, without a dislocated shoulder.

Funny, how? There isn't quite a word for Carrey's style of comedy. Clowning has a tradition, which he does not belong to. Slapstick is about people falling foul of objects, or each other; and he works best alone. What he does is more like animation, or making himself into a cartoon, the way he exaggerates the most distinctive features of a person's mood or character. (Later, he even got the chance to do it literally. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttoC1n8z9h4) That fixed grin he wears the rest of the time also plays a part, as does his garish shirt, by making him seem somehow less human, like an emissary from an absurd world.

There is an unfair tendency to consider Carrey a kind of novelty act, yet it is clear that he was also using this performance to express what mattered to him. He grew up poor in Ontario, and had a hard start to life. We also know that this show is "dedicated to the memory of Kathleen Carrey, aka Mommsie", so when he tells us that he spends his time worrying about little things like "What if my parents went to hell?, we know there may be something in it. We might also take him seriously when he calls that orgasm a "mini-vacation from the pain of life".

And he is original. There's the way he has of greeting the crowd like he's been driven half-mad by reciting the same line; there's his habit of dropping the microphone and yelling (before everyone was doing it); there's his encore, which consists of him just striding onstage, angry and bare-chested, to throw his shirt into the crowd. Clearly standup is in the past for Carrey now, and it isn't what he'll be remembered for, but while he was doing it he was among the best around.

Comic cousins: Steve Martin, Lee Evans, Rowan Atkinson, Jerry Lewis, Michael Richards

Steal this: "My mom would drive the Devil crazy if she went to hell. She'd spend eternity going, [sniffs] 'Something's burning.'"

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