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It takes a very special and utterly unique kind of talent for a performer in a sketch-comedy show to distinguish oneself sufficiently from one's castmates and have a thriving career after the run of the series. As any American schoolchild can tell you, for every Adam Sandler or Mike Myers, there are scores of Charles Rockets, Tim Kazurinskys, Robin Dukes, and Danitra Vances. Certainly, a few who are successful in their post-sketch-comedy careers are not as talented as a few who are less successful; Dana Carvey springs to mind, here, as someone whose post-SNL notoriety is excessive in relation to his abilities. But generally, the cream rises to the top.
We think Orlando Jones is the cream.
We admit that we didn't really think Orlando Jones was anything special until we started finding ourselves snickering at his "Make 7 UP Yours" ads. It was also upon his example in that series of ads that we started calling a person's ass "the back yard." Considering the banality of most soft-drink ads, only a very gifted comedian could breathe so much life into such a campaign. Could one-time Diet Coke spokesperson Michael J. Fox have imbued so much meaning and pathos into the line, "Look like a couple of Christmas hams"? No, he could not. Orlando Jones might not have converted anyone to drinking 7 UP who didn't before, but he sold a lot of t-shirts bearing the slogan, and doesn't increasing brand identity count for something?
The ubiquity of the ad campaign may be part of the reason that we get the impression that Orlando Jones has done more than he actually has. In fact, he's only had a major role in the cast of MadTV, and what amount to memorable cameos in some movies we've enjoyed. Well, okay -- there was The Replacements, which isn't a movie we really enjoyed all that much, except when he was on screen. Playing Clifford Franklin, the motormouthed sprinter with the infamously bad hands, Jones even managed to display aplomb and comic timing while leading his team in an astonishingly clichéd performance of "I Will Survive" while they all shared a jail cell.
In Magnolia...okay, he didn't have any lines. We think he played a role that was, in some way, pivotal, but to be completely honest, that was one strand of the plot that we didn't really understand. But he, along with every other actor in creation, was there. And we liked that movie.
Even in cult hit Office Space -- a movie we didn't like so much the first time we saw it, but which is funnier to us upon each successive viewing -- Orlando Jones was able to take his tiny role and make it memorable. You know him. He was the crack-addict-cum-unemployed-software-engineer who came to Peter's door flogging magazine subscriptions with a put-on accent, only to crack (as it were) and tell his real story when the movie's heroes wouldn't stop begging him to tell them how to launder money; he then sells them forty subscriptions to Vibe.
Trust us. He's funny.
But why should you have to rack your brains trying to remember him? Why isn't his face given any play in the trailer for Bedazzled? Why isn't he headlining these crappy movies -- or, better yet, starring in actually good ones?
Sadly, the reason we suspect he is not more famous is the same we suspected of Giancarlo Esposito and Delroy Lindo: Hollywood, being somewhat limited in its capacity to cast non-white actors, can't conceive of there being more than one non-white actor to fill a given slot. The sad fact is that there are already several funny black actors vying for the same small pool of roles, and Orlando Jones has yet to land his Rush Hour or Blue Streak, and until he does, he'll have to play third-tier supporting roles in the likes of Woo and Liberty Heights. Which is sad, because if he'd starred in Big Momma's House, we probably would have seen it.
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