>>>>>I also think Jim Carrey overacts way too often.
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>>>>I agree. It works in movies where his character is supposed to be over the top, like Ace Ventura and Dumb and Dumber, but it gets old fast.
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>>>The 2 that I hate. But he continues to overact, and try to be zany (which he is not!) in real life, e.g. on chat shows. He's embarrassingly cringey to watch.
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>>Which is also true for Robin Williams. I have never seen him in a situation where he does not try to be funny, and he always overacts. I saw him on Letterman a few months ago, and I turned it off.
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>Funny is always in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. In the case of Robin Williams one might easily get a poor impression if you have mostly seen him in movies. (For "Patch Adams" alone he has a lot of explaining to do). Personally I think he is one of the best comedians we have ever had. His showbiz roots were with an improv troupe in San Francisco, and it shows. He is SO fast on his feet. To me that's a lot more interesting than comedians who have a fairly static "act" consisting of a series of jokes they have honed and polished over the years. Not Robin. It isn't all spontaneous but he works without a net, so to speak, to an extent most comedians would never dare try. (I saw a quote from Jerry Seinfeld saying almost exactly that about him). Supposedly the scripts for "Mork and Mindy", the TV show that made him famous, included frequent 30 or 60 second blocks of "Robin being funny."

I'd agree with you on Robin Williams. Not necessarily the funniest ever, but up there. His performance in "Good Morning Vietnam", as the DJ, is exactly as I would expect him to be if he had the job himself. In fact, I'd wager he provided the script for those scenes. What was that film in which he was a survivalist? - His monologues in that were a hoot. I can't say I saw the Parkinson interview to which Tore alludes but I've seen him on chat shows and he's always good value and on form (unlike that other sh*te you mentioned below :-)

You do get these zany performers, who are totally switched off when they haven't got a script learnt
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>He isn't always "on", although he usually is. That annoys me, too, and is one of the things I don't like about Jim Carrey (most of the time). I heard an interview with him on National Public Radio not long ago where he answered almost all of Teri Gross's questions straight -- memories of childhood, breaking into show business, and so on. He still said some things that made me (and Teri) literally laugh out loud. For instance, he had recently been to Iraq and Afghanistan entertaining the troops. He said the Iraqis were working on their Constitution at the time. "Here, take ours, we aren't using it," he said. He also said that on the same trip he had the opportunity to eat an MRE -- "meals ready to excrete."

And he never had THAT one prepared for when he was asked about it. He probably got the expression off a grunt anyway, probably their disparaging TLA for food anyway (and the Army speak almost exclusively in TLAs, more than we do - camouflage, for instance, being DPM: disruptive pattern material)

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>As I said, it's all in the beholder. We don't all have to like the same people and the same things. How interesting would that be?

Just so long as we all agree NOT to like Jim Carey :-)