Jim Carrey guest starred as Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live — approximately 40 years after his failed audition for the iconic NBC sketch comedy series. During the early ’80s, a teenaged Carrey hoped to join SNL for its sixth season, and would’ve appeared alongside new cast member Eddie Murphy had he been successful. As fate would have it, the Canadian comic’s audition tape never made it to series creator Lorne Michaels.
In the present, Carrey is best known for starring in several classic comedies from the ’90s. He delivered a breakout performance in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and headlined both Dumb and Dumber and The Mask in the same year, 1994. As Carrey’s career progressed, he took on more challenging roles in The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and most recently in the Showtime series Kidding. Despite initially being rejected by SNL for the 1980-81 season, Carrey eventually rose to fame as an original cast member on In Living Color approximately a decade later. In between, he developed his craft on the stand-up comedy circuit, and appeared in mainstream films such as Once Bitten and The Dead Pool.
According to Michaels, he wasn’t present for Carrey’s SNL audition and never got to see it because a staffer didn’t think it was a good fit for the NBC show. In 2015, while discussing SNL’s 40th anniversary (via The Hollywood Reporter), Michaels acknowledged that Carrey was one of several prospective cast members who were overlooked. He noted that both Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell were rejected, along with future Friends star Lisa Kudrow; Lorne recalled being completely in the dark about Carrey’s routine, as a staffer apparently said “I don’t think Lorne would like it.” Per Michaels, “They were probably wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Or maybe they were right — who knows? No one gets it all right.” Four decades later, Carrey is a three-time SNL host and now appears to have a steady guest star gig as Biden for SNL season 46.
Based on the available footage for Carrey’s original SNL audition, he didn’t quite have the necessary comedic polish and originality. For example, the late Andy Kaufman was known for his unique SNL performances during the mid to late ’70s, along with his Elvis Presley impersonation. At only 18 years old, Carrey auditioned for SNL with a “post-nuclear Elvis” impersonation that essentially involved a t-shirt gag that made him appear to have tiny arms. Rather than following up the Elvis performance with another familiar celebrity impression, Carrey instead imitated Henry Fonda’s strawberry-picking scene from the film On Golden Pond (which suggests that Carrey actually auditioned for the 1981-82 season of SNL given that Mark Rydell’s film released in December 1981).
In 2018, Carrey revealed (via Vulture) that he experienced a bad omen prior to his SNL audition, stating “I got out of the car in the parking lot, and there was a person trying to work up the guts to commit suicide on the building on NBC in Burbank, and I walked into the building not knowing whether he did it.” Carrey reportedly (via UPROXX) auditioned for SNL two more times for both the 1985-1986 and 1986-1987 seasons, but once again didn’t received the opportunity to perform for the big boss. In the book Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Michaels provides more clarity about Carrey’s early SNL experiences, suggesting it was perhaps poor luck that Lorne never met him personally:
“Jim Carrey never auditioned for me personally. There is an audition tape which we almost played on the twenty-fifth-anniversary show — if he had come that night, we would have. We have all the audition tapes. Carrey, I think, auditioned for Al Franken the year I was executive producer and Tom Davis and Al were the producers along with Jim Downey. In ’85 when Brandon got me to come back, his whole argument was I had to learn how to delegate. Dick had run it successfully that way, and so Tom, Al, and Jim did their stuff and I sort of approved things. But later that season, when Brandon was again thinking about cancelling the show, he told me, ‘You have to completely take charge of everything again.'”
