Beware of Creepy Older Guys

Jim Carrey’s weird Emma Stone video is disturbing, but at least it’s a joke. There’s nothing funny about the 51-year-old actor who married the teenager.

We’re not sure what – other than a supposed desire to make “chubby little freckle-faced kids” – inspired Jim Carrey’s recent unsettling web video mash note to the much-younger Emma Stone.

While Carrey’s subsequent tweets suggest the short was intended as a joke, we’re still having trouble finding much humor in the 49-year-old actor’s almost stalker-like profession of love and lust for an actress 27 years his junior, even if he poked fun at his advancing age in the process (“I have lines on my face, sometimes a little gray in my beard, and it takes me a lot longer to pee than it used to”).

Maybe we’re particularly turned off by the film comedian’s online come-on amid the deeply disturbing ongoing spectacle featuring a 51-year-old character actor whose career-revival plan apparently included marrying a 16-year-old wannabe singer in May.

We prefer not to aid their publicity grab by repeating the names of the couple, who claim they’re being courted for a Reality TV show. If that’s true, shame on anyone who would give the duo a program: a “Lolita”-style reality show would mark a new low point, even for an often down-and-dirty genre.

Whether it’s Carrey’s oddly comic frothing over Stone or the media chronicling the most age-inappropriate public mismatch since Jerry Lee Lewis wed his 13-year-old cousin, there’s nothing entertaining about creepy older guys (sorry, Mr. Nabokov).

Perhaps Hugh Hefner shoulders some of the blame, even if it’s hard to make anything stick to his velvet smoking jacket. The 85-year-old Playboy founder’s Reality TV show, "The Girls Next Door," about his harem of young beauties, comes across as a sitcom where just about everyone is in on the joke (although Hefner professed to be genuinely surprised when his six-decades-younger fiancée jilted him in June).

Meanwhile, the young bride of the middle-aged actor reportedly is set to turn 17 next week – and hopes to go to Disneyland, which might cut into her prodigious output of lewd tweets.

The girl in question looks older than her years, leading us to hope she’s actually at least in her 20s (though E! reports that her birth certificate confirms her tender age), and that the marriage some kind of elaborate performance-art joke.

Either way, we’re not laughing.
 

Hester is founding director of the award-winning, multi-media NYCity News Service at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is the former City Editor of the New York Daily News, where he started as a reporter in 1992.

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