When I first saw Ace Ventura: Pet Detective at the cinema, it was like a comedy lightning strike. It was not a film I had been tracking or was even aware of its existence. There was a television advertisement late at night, claiming the 1994 film was opening in Australian cinemas the very next day, and the advertisement looked pretty funny. The next day I would stunned by star Jim Carrey’s funny, hugely energetic performance. I was already aware of him, having seen him in TV sketch comedy In Living Color. His performance as Ace Ventura seemed worlds funnier than his work there. By the end of the following year he was arguably wildly over-exposed, having starred in The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Batman Forever, and an ill-advised Ace Ventura sequel. The first time around, he seemed revelatory.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is not the sort of film that critics embrace or enthuse about. It is a full-blooded comedy, with an aim to amuse at its simple, no-nonsense core. It is almost onanistically focused on its titular protagonist. Every other character is defined by their relationship to him: they are amused by him, or impressed, or love him, or despise him. Jokes come thick and fast, in the form of snappy dialogue, eccentric behaviour, weird line deliveries, and a near-perpetual stream of film and pop culture references.

The references pin the movie in time, of course. Just as the characters seemed defined by their proximity to Ventura, the film itself seems defined by its mid-1990s setting. One of those references, an extended plot twist designed to parody Neil Jordan’s 1992 thriller The Crying Game, has dated the film terribly and attracted very justified accusations of transphobia. It is the fate of most film comedies to grow unacceptable over time. Navigating Ace Ventura now means either viewing it with a historical context in mind, or simply leaving it in the past in which it was made. I tend to lean towards the former, but would never criticise viewers that take the latter option.

The supporting cast is an unexpected one. Despite the terribly underdeveloped characters, the film still attracted the likes of Sean Young, Udo Keir, Courteney Cox, Mark Margolis, and others. Rap performer Tone Loc does a reasonable job in a fairly major role. Sports personality Dan Marino, who plays himself in an extended cameo, is certainly a better footballer than actor. We can’t have everything.

The jokes are still, for the most part, tremendously funny. They can be childish at times, or obvious, and occasionally scatological, but they hit more often than they miss, and they are fired at the audience with the tat-a-tat pace of machine gun fire. Director Tom Shadyac made his feature debut here; he later followed it with Carrey features Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty – two of the actors best comedies.

Hollywood struggles to make comedies like this any more, where the focus is on making the audience laugh over any other priority or concern. Sure the film is flawed, but these kinds of scattershot comedies almost always are. There are people who don’t find Carrey or his films amusing at all, and they’re not wrong. Neither are those of us that still revisit films like Ace Ventura from time to time, because they still make us laugh like drains. Comedy is like that.