Last week, my ex-wife texted me. She usually does that when my son falls off his skateboard or learns a new expletive to say on the playground. This time was different. “Have you seen Jim Carrey?” she asked, apropos of nothing we had discussed previously. It was as if she was asking me if I’d seen her misplaced keys.

“No, I have not seen Jim Carrey. Have you looked under the couch?” I replied.

“Seriously, Google him,” she said.

And so, dear reader, I did. What I found has haunted me all week. Not because I find Jim Carrey’s new face in any way disturbing, but because it seems that millions of other people who have never met Jim Carrey do.

Almost immediately after Carrey appeared at the César awards in Paris to accept a lifetime achievement award, the internet lit up with the preposterous, but tantalizing theory that the actor who first came to prominence for talking out of his own butt in a movie had been replaced by a clone who had never once talked out of his own butt, because he was just hatched a few days ago.

Why did people decide that they’d put their own reputations as sane individuals on the line to declare a hoax perpetrated by the star of Mr Popper’s Penguins? Because Jim Carrey’s face looked a little different. His cheeks were fuller. His eyelids pulled up. Worse yet for the Carrey truthers, he wasn’t grinning like a buffoon the entire time or farting La Marseillaise on command. Surely, Jim Carrey, a 64-year-old adult man, couldn’t be expected to accept an award with grace and........

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