A family of four in a camper

Jim Carrey's early years are most directly described in his own words, in a 1984 interview with Interview magazine. At the time he was 22, had starred in the NBC sitcom The Duck Factory and had been living in Los Angeles for about fifteen months. Asked about his background, he spoke openly about a period when money was a serious problem for his family.

Carrey recalled that the four members of his family lived together in a Volkswagen camper for six months. The interview does not say where the camper was parked or exactly when this took place, so those details remain unknown. What he does say is that the family's financial difficulties meant he could not simply be a student. In his words, the family was having financial problems then, so he had to work.

He left school in the middle of tenth grade in order to work. Comedy was already what he wanted to do, and he turned to it full time, beginning to perform professionally at age 17. The interviewer notes that he started headlining clubs in Canada while still a teenager. Carrey also mentioned a hardship his father faced: his father, a saxophone player, had to sell his saxophone to pay for his sister to leave the hospital.

By the time of the interview he had moved on from those years, with a network television role behind him and a career in front of him. He became one of Hollywood's best-known comic actors. Carrey says that he thinks back on those memories when he works on personal material.