Jim Carrey attempts political satire with the new single "Cold Dead Hand," but he's about as subtle as an AR-15, and tells jokes as old as muskets.
You might think the song would get dismissed out of cold-dead-hand by America's gun lovers. But nope: Many of them aren't any better than the song is when it comes to subtlety and nuance, and so Carrey's harmlessly dumb song now has him locked in a duel with people who should have let it go. (The Drudge Report linked to this roundup of needless reactions to the song and Carrey's tweets mocking gun owners.)
The situation nicely parallels the state of the gun debate in America: Many gun-haters want them all banned, which will never happen, for reasons Constitiutional and logistical. Many gun-lovers, meanwhile, want no restrictions at all.
So there's little room for common-sense laws that could reduce some gun violence without infringing on anyone's rights, like, say, limiting gun sales to one per person per month, or reducing the size of clips so mass killers would need to stop more often to reload.
No one respects nuance anymore, and in the gun debate, that may actually be getting people killed.
The Funny or Die video for Carrey's tune finds him playing a country singer, long-dead NRA spokesman Charlton Heston, and Sam Elliott, who explains that the whole thing is "biting social satire."
That's maybe a meta way for Carrey to admit that he knows how unsubtle the social commentary is. Or maybe he thinks we're really dopey, I don't know.
Either way, he's a decade late in taking on Heston, and also, come on, the guy is dead. And the many small penis jokes about gun owners — including a diagram, as if any of these jokes need diagramming — can't be anything they haven't heard before.
Maybe Carrey wants us to respect that a Canadian is taking on one of the most contentious issues in America. But we don't need his help: We're having a perfectly dumb debate on our own.
Watch the video:
