Carrey: 'I threw myself down the stairs'

Jim Carrey has revealed that he used to throw himself down the stairs at Christmas time.

The Truman Show star, who is dating model Jenny McCarthy, said that he would do anything to make his audience laugh as a child to prove he was a great comedy performer.

"Christmas was really where I started coming into my own as a performer because I did all this stuff on my own, all this performing on my own," Bang Showbiz quotes him as saying.

"When other kids were outside playing, I was in my room conjuring characters and impressions and things like that. It came to fruition, it all came together on the Christmas holidays when everybody would come over to our house.

"All the relatives and neighbours and everybody would storm our house because it was the Jim Carrey show. I was a little kid but I would throw myself down stairways and do all kinds of characters.

"That's how I first got popular within my family. It's funny, I needed to get popular within my family. That's really the test. But that was important to me."