Don't Ask Jim Carrey For A Selfie

Say hello, introduce yourself or even tell him about your day -- but don't ask Jim Carrey for a selfie.

During The Hollywood Reporter Comedy Actor Roundtable, the actor admitted he hated posing for pictures with people.

"I dropped the whole trying to be something for somebody a long time ago. I don't feel there is a pressing responsibility to please everyone," he said, discussing fame.

"I'm not unkind to people, but I would much prefer saying hello and who are you and what are you doing today to giving a selfie. Because selfies stop life. You go 'Eeehh,' he said, contorting his face, And then it's going on Instagram to give people a false sense of relevance."

"Everybody was so gaga about Steve Jobs, but I picture him in hell running from demons who want a selfie."

The 57-year-old admitted he wasn't always in such demand; he recalled a time from before he was famous when he had people snapping, rather than snapping pictures.

"Comedy is dangerous. There were many nights at The Comedy Store where I ended up on someone's table with a broken beer bottle," he said. "There was one night where I stayed up for two hours because the audience hated me. It was an exercise in self-punishment and punishment for them."

"One night I stayed up so long that chairs were flying through the air. It was a Saturday night in the main room at The Comedy Store, 250 people paying top dollar, and it became a war."

He said he finally got a huge applause when he agreed to leave the stage... after which he crawled on his hands and knees through the audience and popped back up again behind the piano.

"I... started banging on the keys, singing, 'I hate you all, you gave me cancer.' It was an entirely improvised song, blaming them for the cancer cells that were being formed."

He said the entire audience eventually left except for five people, who stood around the piano when he was done and said "This is the greatest thing we have ever seen in our lives."

"Then I got in the car and I cried all the way home," he said. "Because I don't want to make people unhappy."

Critics hated him too: He said that three days before "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" was released, his manager sat him down and told him the legendary critics Siskel & Ebert had "killed" him.

"'The worst movie ever made, the worst actor ever'," he recalled.

"It was so scathing. And what happened, to my absolute delight, was that by the time I had done Truman Show, Siskel and Ebert did an entire episode just about me and called it, 'Jim Carrey, Clown With Class.' I get emotional thinking about it. It was incredible. They said, 'We were wrong, we didn't know what we were seeing.' I'd never seen a critic say that."

Even some of Carrey's fellow roundtable guests admitted they were unsure of his style of comedy when he first burst onto the scene, including Ted Danson.

"[It] was so unique that when I first saw it, I went, 'Oh, no, no, no, no, turn it off'," he remembered. "And then I came back and went, 'Turn it on again.' It literally took me a while to go, 'Oh, f--k, look at this.'"

Discussing the first time they knew they'd "made it" in Hollywood, Sacha Baron Cohen revealed it was when he was invited to Carrey's house by his manager, after being told Carrey was a fan of his.

"I had two choices with you: admiration or jealousy. And I chose admiration," Carrey admitted. "When a new voice comes along and you've been the voice, there's a part of you that goes, 'Wow, have you lost your place?'"

"But I've always tried to make the choice of [trying to figure out] what this person is doing that's making me feel uncomfortable and laugh my ass off. It's admiration. That's the only way to go."