What Do They Want, What Do They Want, What Do They Want?

Kevin Koczwara reminisces on Jim Carrey’s film oeuvre, from “Ace Ventura” and “Man on the Moon” to “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.”

By Kevin KoczwaraJuly 28, 2025

• Film

• Cultural Studies

A FEW DAYS after Christmas, my wife suggested that I take our nine-year-old son to see Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Of course I said yes. I’d watched the previous two Sonic movies with my son and, despite my reflexive distaste for a movie franchise based on a video game from the 1990s, I loved both of them. The time we spent watching was a joyful experience for us, even if our experiences were starkly different.

My son loves Sonic, the blue, preposterously fast hedgehog, voiced in this incarnation by Ben Schwartz. I love the evil villain Dr. Robotnik, played in live-action with a beautiful bald head and an elaborate mustache by the unhinged Jim Carrey. My son loves Sonic’s quick wit and jokes about his human friend Tom, played by James Marsden, whom the hedgehog calls “the Donut Lord.” I find Carrey’s unabashed silliness as Robotnik (referred to by Sonic, derisively, as Eggman) amusing because it reminds me of the actor I grew up loving: the funny man whose face and body could distort in any direction without warning, who wasn’t afraid to make a fool of himself in one scene after another, who embraced every moment as if it meant everything to get his audience to laugh.

In some ways, a role like Robotnik was always Carrey’s destiny. After multiple failed auditions for Saturday Night Live, a first movie flop, and a main role on In Living Color (1990–94), the Canadian actor vaulted into the mainstream—and then to its very apex—thanks to his ability to create comedy out of his body and face, in all their contortions and tics. He became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the span of only a few movies—and then, as he used the 2000s to transpose those talents into more dramatic roles, saw that stature drift away. There were a few successes, more infamous bombs. During the first Trump presidency, he became more well known for his artwork than for his acting. So when Paramount dangled a presumably massive paycheck—alongside the chance to get weird again—it had to happen three times, at a minimum.

At some point in the process, Carrey decided he would not just collect that fat paycheck—which he admits these kinds of movies provide—but also imbue his performances with full 1990s gusto. This isn’t the sad-sack Carrey of the aughts: no, his Robotnik transmits silliness and verve, both qualities enhanced by a beautiful mustache that looks as if two witches’ brooms have been tied together.

¤

The winter sky in New England is nearly indistinguishable from the gray slush on the sides of the roads and piled parking lots. We sat in a nearly empty theater—the beauty of a morning movie. Sonic 3 sets up a plot not unlike that of its two predecessors: a mysterious force emerges and hopes to steal Sonic’s power, thereby eliminating him and all of humanity. Or something like that. What made the third installment different was that, at the end of the second film, it appeared as though Robotnik (and thus Carrey) wouldn’t be part of it because, well, he dies. But now he returns—inevitably, mercifully. He has a belly and a beard. He’s hiding in a giant robot crab. It looks at first like Robotnik and Sonic will get to team up, but there’s a plot twist for the better: we get two versions of Carrey doing Robotnik, as we meet Eggman’s long-lost grandfather, also played by the actor. For once, the studio knows what it has and embraces it. There’s a dance sequence in the final act that made me giggle in my seat sometime around 11:00 a.m.

It’s beautiful. It also made me think of Carrey’s career and how he got here, the arc of history bending back toward fat suits and silly facial hair. It also made me think of the origin story he has told countless times—and how that story was upended in the 2017 Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond.

In the film, which is largely comprised of behind-the-scenes footage from his time playing comedian Andy Kaufman in the 1999 biopic Man on the Moon, Carrey, clad in a beard and leather jacket, stares into the camera and recounts how, after doing stand-up comedy sets filled with impressions—no jokes—and “sweat[ing] in front of the audience,” he would go home and lie in bed, thinking, “What do they want? What do they want? What do they want? What do they want?”

One night, Carrey woke up with the answer—or at least, an answer—to that question. “They want to be free from concern,” he says in the documentary. “And the light bulb went off.”

The next night, he went onstage at the Comedy Store and landed on the catchphrase that launched his career. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “and how are you this evening? Alrighty then.” The crowd roared.  

Up until that point, Carrey hadn’t been able to figure out where he fit in comedy. His close calls and bit parts meant that he stayed adjacent to fame. He had a career, but the picture lacked the color needed to pop. He needed a story to tell. If you’ve seen any late-night talk show from the 1990s, you’ve likely heard Carrey tell one of their hosts about how he’d written himself a check for $10 million one day and the next got offered a job for, well, you get it. He even told Oprah. That’s a nice tale to tell. But it was that night in the bed that freed him.

I first saw Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) when I was seven, and watching him push his body around like that, making those faces and sounds in a movie, was revelatory. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him. Even if I didn’t get the jokes—or the not-so-subtle transphobia—watching Carrey showed me the possibilities of silliness. His body moved like the giant inflatable man outside of a used car dealership: all arms and limbs flailing. His jaw could wiggle back and forth like a broken nutcracker. And his voice, for whatever reason, reached new octaves, booming and never subtle. Who else could make eating sunflower seeds like a bird funny? Who else could jump into an empty pool and wiggle his hips like Carrey, getting a laugh out of a mundane scene necessary for plot and nothing else?  His brand of give-everything comedy—that face melting and contorting, the large chin shaking and rattling, hips wriggling in rhythm with his smile—takes over.

Carrey’s style is reminiscent of another comedian’s: that of Chris Farley, who left SNL in 1995 and made Tommy Boy, followed by Black Sheep a year later. It’s no surprise they broke out at the same time. Their comedy represented a moment when Americans were searching for something absurd to cut through the odd combination of highly publicized violent acts—including the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building, which also contained a childcare center, as well as the O. J. Simpson trial—and broader cultural staleness of the Clinton years.

Today, some of those performances are potently nostalgic; others seem flimsy, or downright offensive. What is constant—in Carrey’s performances from that era and from the more dramatic turns he took later—is his ability to smuggle something sincere, something elemental, inside the absurd. It serves him well in Peter Weir’s eerily prophetic The Truman Show (1998), and as a man searching his deleted memories for his lover in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). The former is particularly instructive: there’s something within Carrey that makes the border represented by the screen seem particularly porous.

¤

When I took my two children to see the first Sonic movie, it was a selfish act on my part. This was one of those humid days where the sky stays gray and feels like a wet wool blanket.

I used the mid-morning screening as an excuse to get out of the heat. Summer break from school had worn me down and I needed those two hours of quiet in the cold dark of the theater while my kids sat still. Plus, this was one of those special screenings at a cheap price—a dollar or so—because, while the movie had been out of theaters for over a year, the struggling cinema business needed anyone it could get into the seats, and Sonic was one way to entice someone like me, with my two kids. If there had been what I deemed a better option, we would have gone to that instead. The enterprise made me feel like a pawn in the nostalgia game that has a habit of using our collective love and memories to sell us cheap or half-hearted spin-offs for a buck, even if it was one literal buck.

And still, my mind drifted. My uncle gifted me my first Sega Genesis. It came with Madden NFL ’96 (1995), Mortal Kombat (1992), and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992)—the iteration that introduced Tails, a fox who somehow flies thanks to his multiple tails, which operate like a helicopter rotor. I had been a Nintendo kid up until then. I had won some money on a scratcher ticket that my dad let me play, and used it to buy Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988)—the one with the raccoon tail that made Mario fly. I was a little kid still when I got to keep my uncle’s old Sega. The system featured many games that were not for little kids. Mortal Kombat’s realistic blood spatter had sent Puritan parents into a frenzy. The violence. I wanted in. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to grow up.

While Mortal Kombat was cool, it was also relatively easy. The arcade game format made it beatable. Anyone could do it by playing as Sub-Zero or Liu Kang. But Sonic? Sonic 2 tested both my patience and my resilience. It broke me. It intrigued me. It wasn’t nearly as good of a side-scroller as any of the Mario games, and specifically Mario 3, which was four years older and is still viewed as one of the greatest video games ever made. Yet Sonic 2 kept my attention, and was the first video game that made me scream in frustration. By the time Sonic the Hedgehog 3 came out in 1994 and introduced Knuckles the Echidna, I was hooked because I still couldn’t beat Sonic 2 (and never would complete the third game, always getting stuck in the same spot and never knowing how to get out).

And then the games disappeared. Years of diminishing quality and finally the death knell came with Sega’s disappointing releases for their 1998 Dreamcast system. It lost the video game console wars to Sony, Nintendo, and eventually Microsoft. Sonic persevered, though. It moved from system to system, selling its IP to new platforms. New characters arrived. New television shows popped up and disappeared. Then streaming arrived, and all those old shows resurfaced for us to relive our childhoods and share with our own kids. Nostalgia in full force. The nineties and early aughts became cool again. And then it happened, because of course it had to happen: Sonic the Hedgehog the movie arrived in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

For years, there were rumors of studios developing a movie based on the video game, but each iteration and story seemed to fade into the distance. The challenge was too great. The storyline never made sense. Even the television shows struggled to make any logic of a blue hedgehog who ran fast and fought an evil genius doctor with an egg-shaped body in a land with rings and no real infrastructure. No princess needed saving, at first. The world never felt realized. The teams behind each attempt could never decide where the story needed to take place—was this the real world or some science fiction place?—and thus never committed. I planned on closing my eyes for a bit. And then: Jim Carrey.

I sat up in my seat when he walked onto the screen dressed in black. Carrey steps out of his giant, decked-out tractor-trailer, his face forcing itself forward, his jaw protruding out from under a mustache, a pair of tiny black glasses on his face. He enters a military base with quick steps and you can see that he’s having fun. He’s playing this part up—no holding back. That same smirk that lit up 1994 slides across his face, and the years wash away. He approaches the officer in charge and begins interrupting, pointing to his assistant’s handheld computer. “[This] says I’m the top banana in a world of hungry little monkeys,” Robnotik declares, and then the full Carrey comes into display, with a movement of his hand, a tilt of his head, and that fast-paced speech that made Ace Ventura so successful. He brings to life lines of dialogue that would otherwise just be jargon and turns them into comedic butter. Carrey doesn’t have to do this. He doesn’t have to give it his all. And yet here he is, playing a character that will soon be known as Eggman. His mustache will grow sillier. His hair will disappear. He will argue with a magical blue hedgehog. Carrey could have sat at home and kept painting; he could have picked a different project. But we’ve both decided on this, and in that moment, we’re both making the best of it and enjoying ourselves.

¤

Jim & Andy seems to leave few secrets untold. Carrey doesn’t look back fondly on his younger self: there’s no palpable animosity, but sadness creeps through when he speaks to the camera. He’s aware of who he was, who he became, and he—like us—can see it happening in the behind-the-scenes footage. He’s fighting something. He can view the change that happened in his career, transforming from the person people wanted to laugh with to the performer who felt like everyone was watching and who needed to be on. Then he begins to reminisce about what it was like to be Jim Carrey, the world’s biggest movie star.

“Truman Show really became a prophecy for me,” he says in the documentary:

It is constantly reaffirming itself as a teaching, almost, as a real representation of what I’ve gone through in my career, and what everybody goes through when they create themselves, you know, to be popular or to be successful. It’s not just show business: it’s Wall Street; it’s anywhere. You go to the office and you put a monkey suit on, and you act a certain way, and you say a certain thing, and you lie through your teeth at times, and you do whatever you need to do to look like a winner, you know.

And then, at some point of your life, you have to go, “I don’t care what it looks like […] I found the hole in the psyche and I’m going through, and I’m going to face the abyss of not knowing whether that’s going to be okay with everybody or not.” […] And at times, just like the movie, they try to drown you in the middle of that abyss. They go, “No, be the other guy. You told us you were this guy. You told us you were Andy. You told us you were Tony Clifton.” You know, no one can live with that forever.

There is no forever. Eventually, Carrey will find his way out of Kaufman’s orbit. He’ll cycle through relationships. He’ll make a few great movies after the turn of the century and drift offstage, out of sight of the spotlight. And then, something will change. He’ll ask himself, What does the audience want? And he will know the answer.