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Would someone please find something for Fred Willard to do? We mean, besides sticking him in American Wedding to play Befuddled Parent #3?
You want laughs? We say: Fred Willard. You want reliability? We say again: Fred Willard. You want to know who played the President in the 1999 made-for-TV movie The Pooch and the Pauper? We say, with a slight note of sadness and even dismay: Fred Willard. Fred Willard, that's who.
We don't blame Fred Willard. Of course we don't. We love Fred Willard. Frankly, we're just confused by the whole situation.
Because it is not easy to appear in a Christopher Guest ensemble mockumentary and shine as the funniest person onscreen, and yet Fred Willard's done that three times running. Well, okay, maybe he wasn't the absolute, runaway, hands-down funniest in Waiting for Guffman, but that's only because Christopher Guest and Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy are all pretty damned funny. There is no shame in not outshining that group. There is also, apparently, no glory in outshining them either, because Willard was the absolute, runaway, hands-down funniest person in both Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, and yet no one in Hollywood who's not named Christopher Guest seems to have any clue what to do with him.
Didn't you sit up a little straighter in your seat every time Willard appeared during the almost, sort of, okay-a-little-disappointing A Mighty Wind? Wasn't Willard's hilarious parody of a catchphrase -- "Wha' happened?" -- the only joke from the film that was still making you laugh three days after you saw it?
And so, in surveying the part of Fred Willard's current career that doesn't involve Christopher Guest, we must, inevitably, say: "Wha' happened?"
There is no shame in The Pooch and the Pauper, or Chump Change, or Dropping Out, or something on TV called Teamo Supremo. And, yes, we know that Willard starred with Martin Mull in the seminal parody talk show Fernwood 2Nite, which was a little before our time but which we're sure was every bit as funny as everyone says. We understand that he's an elder statesman, a pioneer of the old school.
But we also understand that Fred Willard is funny now. He's really, really funny right now.
Is Ashton Kutcher funny right now? No, he is not. Is Adam Sandler funny, right this minute? Not reliably. Yes, these people are above-the-title young and Fred Willard is character-actor old. But he's funny. For all we know, he's doing something funny at this very moment. We would very much like to see him doing that funny thing on a movie or TV screen.
We'd sit and watch two hours of just his dog-show commentator. We laughed so hard during his scenes in A Mighty Wind that they actually helped shape and tone our abs. Most importantly, we don't want to have to go see dreck like American Wedding or The Wedding Planner or How High in order to get a ten-minute Willard fix.
Please, somebody, hear our plea: Put Willard on TV. Make a whole Willard channel. Or run him on a loop at the movie theatre on Saturday afternoons, like they used to do with the matinee serials. That way, we can pop in for an hour and laugh and laugh, and when our gut hurts too much, we'll leave back out into the world, squinting against the sun and finally, finally feeling like we got as much Willard as we wanted.
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