What did you expect? What did you want? Jim Carrey is one of the most gifted impressionists of his generation. (“This joker drops more road apples than a bull eatin’ a bran muffin.”) I keep expecting Carrey to snap his forked tongue across the length of the stage and swallow one of the podiums whole. And even with Alec Baldwin’s deathless Donald Trump trying to suck up all the oxygen as usual, Carrey-as-Biden has bulldozed through it all, doing the most even though IRL Biden is lately the relatively serene candidate doing the least. SNL, back in Studio 8H with live audiences thanks to intense COVID-19 protections, has aired three new episodes thus far, all with nearly 15-minute-long political cold opens covering the first presidential debate, the vice presidential debate, and the dueling presidential town halls, respectively. He is wiry, and scaly, and slithery, and volatile, and overpowering, and weird. Why isn’t this working? If I had to describe Jim Carrey’s Joe Biden impression in one word, I’d go with reptilian. And indeed Jim Carrey would soon be a towering multiplex zillionaire, and then an Oscar-chasing sophisticate, and then much later an unsettling Moses-bearded enigma, and then the guy charged with playing Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live, and ah, shit, this isn’t working at all. He dances poorly with a ballerina’s grace he wields his righteous parodic shiv (Vanilla Ice’s signature song has been renamed “White White Baby”) like a giant cartoon mallet. Carrey, in a 1991 episode of the beloved sketch comedy show, blasts through a full Looney Tunes aerobic workout in two minutes and change, which is maybe exhausting for him but definitely exhausting for you. It’s a wonder Vanilla Ice is still alive to tell the tale. “I’m livin’ large and my bank is stupid / ’Cause I just listen to real rap and dupe it.” Savage.
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