COMMENTARY : Silliness Is No Joke : Jim Carrey’s film success reveals an audience hungry for over-the-top gags delivered bycomic actors of the past.

Much of what’s missing from the movies these days can be found in the first few minutes of W.C. Fields’ 1940 classic “The Bank Dick.”

Two matrons walk down a Lompoc street, remarking on the unusual name of the Fields character, Egbert Souse--accent over the “e,” as he’ll frequently remind people throughout the movie.

Inside the Souse home, his crude, belligerent family is sitting down to a noisy breakfast. His wife and mother-in-law are yakking about his sorry habits, which include “smoking in his room,” “drinking liquor” and “raiding a child’s piggy bank and leaving IOUs.” (Mind you, we haven’t even seen Fields yet and we’re tickled in anticipation of his entrance.)

Fields-as-Souse comes to the dining room, swallowing a burning cigarette so as not to arouse his mother-in-law’s ire. He snatches his little girl’s pulp magazine. She kicks his shins. He swats her forehead. She bounces a ketchup bottle on his head. He gets ready to heave a huge flower pot in retaliation. “Don’t you dare strike that child!” his wife shrieks. Only the introduction of his older daughter’s fiance stops Souse from pitching the pot.

What makes this stuff so artfully funny is that the laughs Fields gets have nothing to do with anything he says. And the funny stuff doesn’t come in spurts. It builds, flows, delivers the goods. Try to think of any American film in the last decade that opens with such ramshackle panache.

Its closest contemporary equivalent may well be the opening credits sequence of last year’s “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” Jim Carrey is dressed in the uniform of a parcel delivery man, blithely bouncing, jostling and smashing the glassy guts of a box marked “Fragile.” We have no idea why he’s doing this. But the maniacal gleam in his eyes, juxtaposed with his merry whistling and jaunty gait, puts us on his side from then on.

You also sense why Carrey has become the Monster That’s Devouring Hollywood. Purely as screen personalities, jerks with bravado have always been irresistible, whether they’re playing for laughs or not. And Carrey’s so thoroughly in his own zone of goofiness that his hair-trigger, in-your-face nerviness can induce giggles. He’s not subtle, but neither is anything else mass culture values lately.

And right now, this minute, Carrey is locked in mass culture’s firm embrace. His latest movie, “Dumb and Dumber,” has been riding the top of the box-office rankings since it opened in mid-December and is sure to earn $100 million--just like his other two films.

Given “D&D;’s” unabashed wallow in lowbrow humor, it’s been easy for some cultural commentators to regard its success--and, by implication, Carrey’s--as just another manifestation of an American mind so anxiety-ridden about what the future holds at century’s end that it grabs at things that are simple-minded and mediocre.

Carrey’s probably many things, but he’s neither simple nor mediocre. Anyone who watched his work on “In Living Color” could have told you this well before “Ace’s” release last year. Yet silliness-for-its-own-sake has never been easily understood by sober-minded reviewers who prefer to have a theme or a moral attached to their stories. The public is another matter. They’ll take funny stuff wherever they can get it.

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But “funny stuff” has a funny way of changing with the times. These days, copping an attitude is more important than detonating a double-take.

Consider today’s king of comedy, David Letterman. He’s all irony and attitude. Funny? You bet. But too many others think that’s where the craft of being funny begins and ends. Apart from his patented “dumb-guy” look, Letterman doesn’t have the kind of well-timed, nonverbal reaction Johnny Carson appropriated so well from Jack Benny.

In this prevailing cultural atmosphere, why should movies bother to emulate the artistry of Benny and Fields? Or, for that matter, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton?

Back in the heyday of those grand masters of the silent film, American movies lived and died by the well-built gag. Consider classics like Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” (1925) with its two starving prospectors dining elegantly on boiled shoe. Or Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.” (1924), which proves to this day that no one, least of all Arnold Schwarzenegger, should have tried to top that film’s masterly walking-from-the-audience-into-the-movie bit. In many of these films, one finds that gags built gags, each delivering payoffs that never get in the way of each other.

The advent of sound in the late 1920s caused some to believe that movie comedy would crash with the stock market. But Fields, the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy became comic icons during the following decade, mixing visual and verbal gags with ease.

Meanwhile, the screwball comedies of the 1930s, popping and zipping with wisecracks, were memorable for the funny things you saw as much as the funny things you heard. If you need just one example, “Bringing Up Baby” (1938) with Cary Grant’s querulous pratfalls and Katharine Hepburn’s divine dottiness is one of the very best.

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For much of the century’s first half, gag-craft was American comedy. It pervaded every level of movie humor whether it was the short subjects of Robert Benchley or the Three Stooges, the cartoons of Walt Disney or Tex Avery, the features of directors Preston Sturges or Frank Tashlin, comics Danny Kaye or Abbott and Costello. Even Bob Hope, the century’s supreme quipmeister, had to trip his way through gags in films like “The Paleface” (1948).

Once TV took hold in America’s living rooms, it became the major job site for gag-builders who helped make performers like Lucille Ball, Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason small-screen icons.

Though television made Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis superstars by the early 1950s, it was in the movies that the team became, in author Nick Tosches’ phrase, “jester kings in a land where even laughter, freeze-dried and hollow, would soon be canned.”

After the team split up in mid-decade, Lewis made his goony-bird persona the focus of movies with titles like “The Patsy,” “Cinderfella,” “The Big Mouth” and “The Nutty Professor.” For many, Lewis’ unfettered bombast is, at best, an acquired taste. (With me, it’s hit-and-miss. But “The Bellboy” makes me laugh now as much as it did when I was 10. Really.) However you feel about Lewis, you can’t deny that with TV gobbling up much of American comedy talent and momentum, he was almost alone in exploring the boundaries of movie gag-craft.

Now, the dynamic energy that used to go into building the perfect gag is more likely channeled into orchestrating hair-raising chase sequences and special effects for action films. These days, a director weaned on the works of Keaton, Lewis or animator Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner cartoons, would probably find his or her imagination fulfilled by something like “Speed,” “True Lies” or even “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

I distinctly heard someone out there shout, “Naked Gun”! Well, OK, all three of the films in that series had funny sight gags in the same fashion as Mel Brooks’ parodic pastiches. The thing with sight gags, however, is that they don’t build into or flow upon each other. They’re like the visual equivalent of the one-liner. They pop into your head and disappear before another one pops in.

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Even the best practitioners of physical-visual comedy seem to try to distance themselves from that kind of comedy. Shortly after the 1987 release of “Roxanne,” which many consider Steve Martin’s best film, Martin told critic Jack Mathews he didn’t think of himself as a physical actor, but “as an actor working within comedy.”

Martin, along with Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor, is among the finest comedians of his generation and, arguably, the one who made the best use of his physical grace on the big screen. It’s mildly depressing, therefore, to think he may be placing such a relatively low value on such prodigious gifts, especially when you consider the only thing critics liked about his most recent film, “Mixed Nuts,” was his mad and merry dance with a transvestite.

At least Martin’s still in the game. Illness has sidelined Pryor, whose records, many of which have just been re-released, have been credited with/blamed for inspiring the ongoing wave of foul-mouthed comedians-with-attitude. People forget that listening to Pryor, however jolting and riotous, wasn’t enough. You had to watch his wild, anxious gaze, his toothpaste-tube body going through changes in order to absorb the full impact of his artistry.

Pryor had the kind of genius that could have yielded film work on a par with Chaplin’s or Peter Sellers’. Yet only his filmed routines, like 1979’s “Richard Pryor Live in Concert” or 1982’s “Live on the Sunset Strip,” can claim such a powerful legacy. For bravura performance art, it’s hard imagining anything better than Pryor’s re-enactment, on “Live in Concert,” of his near-fatal heart attack, in which he plays both himself and his vindictive heart. (“You heard me! Don’t no more!”)

As for Robin Williams . . . well he’s still a grand special effect with hair--as his spectacular success in 1993 with “Mrs. Doubtfire” proved. But Williams’ ultimate ambitions, like Martin’s, seem for the moment to be aimed beyond the scope of old-fashioned physical comedy. He’s capable of realizing such heights as an actor. But it’d be nice to see him get pointlessly silly once in a while.

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Anyone else? Well, the “Wayne’s World” movies had some of the same kind of shambling goofiness as “The Bank Dick.” But neither Mike Myers nor Dana Carvey has had much luck away from the formula. Of all the “Saturday Night Live” alumni, Bill Murray remains the only unqualified big-screen success, fashioning a limber, compelling comic persona from a seamless blend of cool-hand mannerisms.

With so many outlets for comic talent to develop, whether on or off cable TV, you’d think there would be a surplus of comedians who could develop into major talents. But Steve Allen, perhaps the only professional funny person who’s as good at analyzing comedy as at performing it, believes the sheer proliferation of comedians, comedy clubs and comedy TV may be part of the problem.

“Forty years ago, there were maybe 50 comedians at a given time who could do whatever it was they did,” Allen says. “Whether it was Hope, Benny, Groucho or the young Turks like Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce, there was more space to be original. Now the number’s more like 5,000 and it’s awfully hard for a younger person to define himself or herself as being truly original enough to break away from the pack.”

Which only deepens the mystery of Jim Carrey’s spectacular run. “That’s the precise word,” Allen says. “Mystery. It’s easy to describe somebody as funny. It’s the why that’s difficult and, perhaps, impossible.”

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Whatever the reason for Carrey’s leaping to the post position among young film comics, better get used to him. Exemplars of Classic American Stupid have a way of hanging around well beyond their eras. Probably the best thing Carrey could do right now is take an example from Ace Ventura and remain completely oblivious to what the swells and stuffy-heads around him think of his particular kind of insanity.

Who knows? Over time, his big numbers might convince others to be as crazy as he is. And that could mean a lot of movies, even his own, could become as evergreen as “The Bank Dick,” Buster Keaton’s “The General” and Jerry Lewis’ “The Nutty Professor.”

Don’t laugh. It could happen.