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I don't know what it's like to struggle for years honing my craft in front of bitchy or indifferent or defiant audiences, sacrificing sleep and time with loved ones and my youth, and then to get cast on Saturday Night Live -- still, despite spotty seasons and the inevitable slightly too long, really quite long, and oh my god way too long skits that appear in every episode, the biggest and generally most well-received mainstream showcases for sketch comedy. It must be pretty thrilling to know that even though you're going to have to act in a few pretty crappy skits every week, you're going to have a regular paycheque for at least a while, and that the odds are you'll be able to spend your summers playing middle-sized roles in big-screen comedies. Sure, those comedies generally range from horrible up to...well, average, usually. Still, it's work. If I were a sketch comic who'd managed to get cast on SNL, I'd probably stare down that contract hoping to be the next Gilda Radner, realistically settling for being the next Jan Hooks, and praying not to be the next Gail Matthius. (Who? Exactly.)
Most SNL cast members find themselves in that comfortable lump in the middle of the Bell Curve -- which is fine. Tim Meadows is the perfect embodiment of that lump: he's a perfectly serviceable comic actor you can slot into pretty much any old skit, and he'll do a job that's...you know, fine. Generally unremarkable. Neither offensive nor uproarious; neither a Jim Breuer nor a Mike Myers. Tim Meadows -- no dummy -- stayed in the warm, forgiving bosom of SNL for nine years. He appeared in four feature-length films, all of which were based on SNL characters. He left in 2000 to star in a sitcom. That sitcom was The Michael Richards Show. We will never, never see Tim Meadows again, but wherever he is now, he probably feels like he had a fair run of it. He did a lot with what he had, and it's not his fault he's not Chris Rock, or Adam Sandler, or Will Ferrell.
Will Ferrell joined the cast of SNL at a pivotal time. Those cast members who had ascended to movie stardom in the early '90s -- the aforementioned Rock, Sandler, and Myers, as well as Chris Farley and Rob Schneider, among others -- were starting to straggle off the show. Even Kevin Nealon had decided to pack it in, for Christ's sake. To make up for all the splitters, the 1994-1995 season saw the addition of a whole raft of new cast members, many of whom weren't the usual total unknowns Lorne Michaels casts, and had already proven themselves elsewhere, like Janeane Garofalo (late of The Ben Stiller Show and at that time fresh off Reality Bites), Chris Elliott (who'd been writing and doing bits on Letterman forever), and Michael McKean (Lenny! David St. Hubbins!). I can only guess that Michaels figured it was a rebuilding year, and thought he'd try something new. It was a failed experiment, and (as I recall it) a very crappy season despite the pedigreed performers, most of whom left at the end of the season.
Which meant that the 1995-1996 season was the real rebuilding year. Enter most of the cast members we now know and love so well: Cheri Oteri, Darrell Hammond, Molly Shannon, and Will Ferrell. (The rest of the current core cast members -- Ana Gasteyer, Tracy Morgan, and Chris Kattan -- showed up the next year.) Coming so close on the heels of one of the worst seasons since the Gary Kroeger era, Ferrell and his fellows had a lot to prove, and they were equal to the challenge. I can barely remember what the show was like without them, now, because they are so good. Even recent quitter Molly Shannon, who can certainly be annoying (can you tell the difference between her "I'm fifty!" character and her "joyologist" character? Really? Shut up, you cannot), was funnier and more versatile on her worst day than Melanie "Jan Brady" Hutsell ever was.
Certainly one might make the case for Darrell Hammond as Most Valuable Player, what with his note-perfect impressions of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, Ted Koppel, Phil Donahue, Dick Cheney, Richard Dreyfuss, and (my personal favourite) Sean Connery. He is a gifted mimic, to be sure. But the market for a comic actor who can do impressions -- albeit very good ones -- is quite small, and the comparatively small number of non-SNL credits on Hammond's CV suggests his limited post-SNL prospects. It's fitting that, in a 1996 episode just before the presidential election, Hammond played the contemporary Clinton to guest host Dana Carvey's college-aged Clinton; Carvey is also a good mimic (though not nearly as talented as Hammond), and his career after SNL has also been...well, since the poor man has recently undergone heart surgery, we'll be kind and just call it slight.
At the core of the core cast members, one man stands alone, and that man (as you might have probably guessed by now) is Will Ferrell. If Darrell Hammond is a latter-day Dana Carvey, Will Ferrell is the closest our generation will ever get to Phil Hartman. Like Hartman, Ferrell does impressions that rely less on reproducing the subject's exact voice and more on conveying the entirety of the subject's demeanour and mannerism. Consider Hartman's Frank Sinatra and Ferrell's Alex Trebek. Or Hartman's James Stockdale and Ferrell's Janet Reno. Hartman's Bill Clinton was masterful and hilarious even if he didn't really sound all that much like Clinton, just as Ferrell's George W. Bush (I almost want to write "R.I.P." here since heaven only knows when we'll get to see it again) hinges on the squinting and snickering to create a general portrait reminiscent of Bush's essence.
Like Hartman, Ferrell not so much an impressionist as he is a comic actor, and as such has a much bigger range than, say, a Darrell Hammond. Running over Ferrell's recent repertoire, it seems like each one of his recurring characters -- high-school music teacher Marty Culp, Morning Latte doofus Tom Wilkins, the ultra-hip manager of the snotty menswear store, and even blessed though overused Craig of the Spartan cheerleaders -- is...you know, brilliant. Like Hartman, the unadorned Ferrell is a relatively unremarkable physical presence -- which is not to say that he's ugly, just that he's sort of neutral, the better to provide a blank slate for his comic characters. Like Hartman (and unlike, for instance, a Dana Carvey, who must be the focal point of attention every second he's sharing the county with a video camera), Ferrell is also a generous performer, able to be the straight man when such is required, and still able to get laughs without overblown Carrey-esque physical comedy, nor Bobcat Goldthwait-ian yelling. That, of course, is not to say that he's too pretentious to humiliate himself for the sake of a joke. Many's the time I've seen him on Conan, doing his entirely non-verbal impression of a squirrel. (Hard to describe in print, but trust me...it's funny.) And I hope that everyone in our readership has had the pleasure of watching the Cowbell/"Don't Fear the Reaper" skit because, if you haven't, I can't describe it to you, and if you have, you're probably picturing Ferrell's just-slightly-too-tight vintage brown knit top riding up over his kind of doughy, kind of hairy gut as he whales the fuck out of that cowbell, and if you are human, you are at least smiling at the memory.
Finally, like Hartman, Ferrell is enjoying a healthy film career. Sure, he's done time in his share of feature-length SNL spinoffs, but he's sufficiently proven his acting skills that he's also graced both Austin Powers movies, Dick (and I am here to tell you Dick is a criminally underrated gem), the recent Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and this week's highly anticipated (possibly only by me) Zoolander. In the last of these, Ferrell plays the fashion designer/criminal mastermind Jacobim Mugatu, the svengali behind the title character's transformation from vain, stupid, yet benign supermodel to cold-blooded assassin; he also demonstrates his willingness to appear in a curly platinum wig.
Because Will Ferrell -- like the late Phil Hartman -- is so consistently great without necessarily evincing his greatness in showy, spectacular comic roles (like, say, Little Nicky or The Grinch), it's easy to underestimate the scope of his talent. At the same time, I wouldn't want him to be any more famous; it would be a waste of his unique gifts as a comic actor if he started turning up as the lead in cookie-cutter romantic comedies like There's Something About Mary, or at the centre of an ill-conceived and hence ill-fated sitcom like Cursed. Will Ferrell is a character comedian -- possibly the best we have since the loss of the late and still lamented Phil Hartman -- and I submit that we need him to stay exactly where he is.
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