Thinking of a couple of outstanding comedians today. Michael McKean, currently plugging the 2025 Spinal Tap movie along with Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest and Rob Reiner, celebrates his 78th birthday today.
First and foremost, there's something about the very earnest cover of the Rolling Stones' Start Me Up by The Folksmen that cracks me up.
The blog shall toast Michael and the superb comedy he has helped bring to a weary and stressed-out world over many decades, and also toast another outstanding comic born on this date in Quebec City, Norm MacDonald.
Here's a terrific interview and overview of Mr. McKean's lengthy showbiz career. Thanks a million for this, SAG AFTRA!
Michael McKean's episode of Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast is a must-listen.
In the "I did not know that" department, the IMDB entry for Michael McKean notes: In early 1967, he was briefly a member of the New York City "baroque pop" band The Left Banke and played on the "Ivy, Ivy" single.
First heard about Michael McKean via the early 1970's improv group The Credibility Gap, which also featured David L. Lander and Harry Shearer.
The erudite and talented San Francisco deejay John Gilliland hosted a Sunday night comedy show on what was back then a top AM radio station and did us listeners the favor of playing very funny sketches by The Credibility Gap. Did not know until decades later than John was, at KRLA, an early member of the improv troupe in the late 1960's.
Michael and David L. Lander found their way from The Credibility Gap to the Garry Marshall sitcom LaVerne & Shirley as goofballs Lenny & Squiggy. Their best bits were the songs of Lenny & The Squigtones, although the then-prominent laugh track often drowns them out.
Was never crazy about Laverne & Shirley, even as a fan of previous Garry Marshall series (The Odd Couple), since by that time Monty Python's Flying Circus reruns, Saturday Night Live and SCTV were on the air. Still kept an eye out for Mr. McKean's appearances on Saturday Night Live a few years later, when Dick Ebersol produced the show.
The following sketches featuring The Folksmen and Spinal Tap is from the 10th season of SNL, the last produced by Ebersol. Ever so briefly, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest were SNL cast members.
Love those clips of Spinal Tap's early years!
There's so much to draw from that we shall very likely be making additions and edits to this post all weekend. The Return Of Spinal Tap is required viewing.
And then there are the Christopher Guest feature films, in which Michael McKean is among a super-talented stock company, along with Catherine O' Hara, Eugene Levy, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Michael Hitchcock and John Michael Higgins.
To make the segue from Michael McKean to Norm MacDonald, here is Adam Sandler's song from the SNL 50 extravaganza. In the Sandman's nicely done hat tip to Saturday Night Live's casts and production crew which starts at 3:45, Michael and Norm are duly noted!
Devoted a lengthy post to Norm MacDonald, born October 17, 1959 at some length at the time of his untimely passing in 2021. Were there any clips not included in that post? Yes - this one.
If that isn't sufficient Norm, watch the following!
Been hitting the comedy hard during these horrid and heartbreaking times, so today's post pays tribute to a guy who consistently got big laughs over six decades: the late, great character actor and comic Fred Willard, who passed on May 16.
Big laughs were Fred Willard's specialty. Here he is on Late Night With David Letterman.
First recall seeing Fred on TV as part of The Ace Trucking Company, an improv group which appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
In the following sketch, after a bit of slapstick, Fred plays straight man to the one, the only Billy "you can call me Ray" Seluga.
A few years later, Fred co-starred with Martin Mull in the satiric, outrageous and wonderfully silly Fernwood 2 Night.
Complete episodes of the series can be found on playlists on YouTube and Daily Motion.
Originated as a summer replacement for the hit series Mary Hartman Mary Hartman and set in the same small midwestern town, Fernwood 2 Night was an inspired sendup of talk shows and local TV productions.
Fred portrayed the astonishingly clueless and moronic, yet rather likable announcer Jerry Hubbard.
Did Fernwood 2 Night skewer small-town America and the cheesier aspects of 1970's show business clichés, television and Americana in no uncertain terms - and traverse boundaries of good taste in the process? Yes - with panache.
The individual favorite episode of Fernwood 2 Night/America 2 Night at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, hands-down, is the one in which Tom Waits ended up performing on the show because his tour van broke down in Fernwood.
In this and the 1978 followup series, America 2-Night, the always upbeat Jerry Hubbard, the dumbest talk show sidekick ever, not even equalled by John Candy's William B. Williams on SCTV, gets many of the biggest laughs.
Fred Willard and Martin Mull returned to television a few years later to satirize 1950's style suburbia hilariously and mercilessly in the comedy specials The History Of White People In America.
Fred would periodically appear in feature films had a short but extremely funny bit in a film loved by both the gang here and none other than the late, great TCM host Robert Osborne. . . This Is Spinal Tap.
Speaking of SCTV, Fred Willard was the guest star on a memorable episode of the comedy series.
Along with SCTV cast members and writers Catherine O' Hara and Eugene Levy, Fred Willard would be among the recurring actors in a quartet of splendid comedy features: Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. These movies represent a silver screen comedy gold standard for the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century.
Improvisations based on the essential characters are the modus operandi of these films. Not surprisingly, most of the cast members started with Second City troupes or originated improv groups of their own.
Among the usual suspects on these four hilarious feature films, along with Fred Willard and the aforementioned SCTV alumni: director/writer Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer (from This Is Spinal Tap and The Folksmen), Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, Bob Balaban and John Michael Higgins.
This post will finish with some recent Fred Willard appearances. Fred continued working constantly through his late seventies and eighties on such TV series as Everybody Loves Raymond and Modern Family, as well as Adam McCay's Anchorman movies. Comedian and late night host Jimmy Kimmel, who featured Fred frequently on Jimmy Kimmel Live, paid tribute.
Fred Willard was a guest on the talk show hosted by one of the funniest and most original of those current standup comedians who got their start in the late unlamented 20th century (along with Chris Rock and Gilbert Gottfried), Norm MacDonald.
The "coup de gracie" today is the following very funny SF Sketchfest tribute to Fred.
With a Max Linder top hat tip to those super talented individuals who made us laugh, it is not lost on us here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog that the comedy greats we write about are, for the most part, in the past tense (the Netflix show Schitt's Creek and the aforementioned standup philosophers notwithstanding).
