Doing an impression on SNL was a little like painting a picture while dodging bullets. Sometimes the paint gets smeared, sometimes the strokes are too broad, sometimes you don’t even have time to put the brush to canvas.
I’d stand over whichever writer was conceiving my bit, doing the voice as he typed so he could hear it play. That goes on until all hours, and is why it is so unnerving to have someone say, “Okay, you’re out of time. It’s eleven o’clock, you gotta go.” I always needed another hour, another week, another year. I never felt prepared.
If you look at the great broadcasters in history, these guys would not have gotten an A in the formalities taught in an oral interpretation class, but they’re some of the greatest communicators of our time. From Walter Cronkite to Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, and Howard Cosell, each had a unique way of speaking that resonated with the audience. “Idiosyncrasy” is the operative word, and it made each one memorable in his or her own way.
My challenge was learning to break each set of idiosyncrasies down: Where’s the guy from? How old is he? Does he have a dialect? Is his voice high or low? Where does it originate in the throat, the back or the front? Phil Donahue and Ted Koppel are the same voice, but Phil’s is a little bit more up front, and Koppel is in the back of the throat. Hopefully the subject has speech irregularities, something unusual about the way he forms words, the way his teeth and tongue work. Some people lose their accents over time, or they’ve corrected a speech problem, which doesn’t really help because the world doesn’t know that. I’d break it down into four or five factors, and I’d pick out a couple of hand gestures. I had to find a way to compress an entire person into a handful of tics and gestures.
Most of the people I did were in the news, so there was usually tape I could study. That wasn’t the case when I did Clark Gable in a sketch called “Vincent Price’s Thanksgiving Special 1958” alongside host Eva Longoria as Lucille Ball, Fred Armisen as Desi Arnaz, Horatio Sanz as Alfred Hitchcock, Kristen Wiig as Judy Garland, and Bill Hader playing Vincent Price. I’d never done Gable. Who the fuck was Clark Gable? I’d seen a couple of his movies, but there was no reason for me to have learned Clark Gable in my whole life.
In the history of the show, Gable had been done only once before, by Dan Aykroyd in 1978. Somehow I had to find a way to Gable-ize the dialogue. I came up with a version that went pretty well in dress rehearsal, but the writers changed the sketch at the last second, and when I stepped onto the stage, my entrance was accompanied by a blast of loud violin music I wasn’t expecting, and that threw me. I got the lines out, but I was disappointed with how it came out.
When I was lucky, I would get a new assignment that was similar to one I’d done in the past, which I could simply adapt. That cuts a lot of the time out of the process. I once tried to do Robin Williams, but I didn’t want to portray him the way other people had in the past. The piece involved some dancing, which I hadn’t done since the days of the B52s on those Disney ships. Stupidly, I spent hours trying to learn the dance moves instead of working on the voice. The impression was a total failure. Fortunately, the effort never saw air.
When I did Regis, I did him a little differently than Dana Carvey had. When I did Phil Donahue, I did him a little differently than Phil Hartman had. There was one sketch after Will Ferrell had left the show when I played George W. Bush, and there was a lot of pressure on me to mimic the way Will did him. But it wasn’t possible; we’re not wired the same. We went through that a lot over the years, where someone might say, “C’mon, just watch so-and-so do it.” I never felt good about that, and I didn’t do it.
Thank God I had the benefit of Karen Giordano’s help in preparing to do Bill Clinton. She’s a fantastic actress who also works as acting consultant. She’s coached some of the biggest stars in the universe—she worked with Mariah Carey on her role as a social worker who uncovers the abuse inflicted on the pregnant teenage girl at the center of Precious—so I’m doubly lucky that she agreed to take me on. And Karen had me do the impression so that I was really doing Clinton. We gave Clinton a whole biography. I wanted to be funny, but I wanted to be as real as could be. Usually, the point was to do an exaggeration, but with Karen’s help, I was going to do it as true to the man as I could. In actor-speak, most of my impressions represented the person, but my Clinton simply presented the person.
I worked hard to get Clinton right. I studied tape after tape of him. The average speaker has maybe five consistent hand gestures—Clinton had thirty-seven. My Clinton tapes were labeled “morning,” “noon,” and “night,” because his voice changed toward the end of the day. Clinton loved being Clinton, he loved being president, every day was a huge event for him, and he got tired, which you could hear in his voice as the day went on and he grew raspier and raspier. Lots of people model themselves after other people: politicians do it, athletes do it, comedians do it, I do it. I noticed that Clinton seemed to be emulating John F. Kennedy’s cadence, using commas in illogical places. The way I learned him, the way he finally came to me so that I could feel him, was doing Kennedy’s inaugural address in a southern accent. Suddenly it all made sense to me.
Then when I got to meet him that first time in the Oval Office, there was his big red face, eyes a color blue that exists nowhere else in nature, and that little crackle in his voice. I call that the bedside vigil voice, the kind of gentleness that you would show to a dying family member. Clinton makes people feel good. He has a way of looking at you as if you were one of the most important persons who had ever stood before him. He did that for everybody in the room, in different rooms in different parts of the world for eight years. All these people walking away thinking, Wow, what the fuck was that all about? Who is that fucking guy? One reporter told me that in Washington they called it The Thing (He Does).
A few years ago, I was doing a show at a college. Afterward, when I was walking across campus, a coed approached me and said she’d flash me if I did Clinton for her.
“That is so sick,” I said. In Clinton’s drawl.
I thought, God, that was cheap. Did I just do that?
She was true to her word. Not bad. (I wish I were a better person, but apparently I’m not.)
One time I accidentally set my Hell’s Kitchen apartment on fire. Note to self: lit cigarette in an ashtray on the bed plus oscillating fan and a quick trip to the deli leaving the aforementioned unattended equals bad idea. When I returned to the building, it was surrounded by fire trucks. I stood on the sidewalk and watched as my apartment was trashed first by flame, then by water.
One of the firemen noticed me lurking and came over.
“Sorry about your place, man. At least nobody was hurt.”
“Thanks.”
I was still looking at the wreck in front of me, wondering where I’d stay that night. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the fireman was kind of staring at me.
“Hey, are you the guy that does Clinton on TV?”
“Uh, yeah.” Shit, really?
“Would you do a little Bill for us?”
Of course I did. The truth is, I was pretty flattered.
In 1999, as a new presidential race began, I started working on Al Gore, since he was Clinton’s heir apparent for the Democratic nomination.
Gore was confounding because he spoke in three different ways. This wasn’t like Clinton’s morning-noon-night voices; these were three completely distinct ways of talking. How was I going to present that shit? I labeled my Gore tapes 1, 2, or 3, for each of the debates Gore had against senator and former NBA star Bill Bradley for the Democratic nomination. A fourth tape I used was of Gore at a backyard barbeque talking about how to cook meat in a safe way to avoid airborne viruses. I watched those tapes over and over.
When I was watching Gore, I knew he was not being himself. You couldn’t argue that his style had evolved naturally, as the debates occurred pretty close together: the first in New Hampshire in January just before the primary there; the second in late February at th
e Apollo Theater in Harlem; and the third barely a week later, on March 1, in Los Angeles. The only theory I could come up with was that he had three different vocal coaches, which I guess you could say left him overcoached.
The rule in comedy is what’s most personal is most general. You’re more interesting if you’re authentic or appear to be authentic. Gore said great words, but a lot more people would have gone for him if they’d seen something different, if they’d seen the real man. I saw a photo of him, sweat on his brow, tie loosened, a Heineken in his hand after dancing with his wife, and I thought, If that Gore had campaigned, wow, what would that have been like? In person, he was engaging and funny, but that wasn’t what the public was seeing.
When Gore won the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his work on climate change, he struck me as a real phoenix rising from the ashes. Notably, he didn’t speak in that awkward, overcoached way anymore. He was the guy whom I had seen privately. He was utterly himself. When we did a sketch about his winning, I wanted to play him like that, but theatrically there was a concern that the audience would be expecting to see the old Gore. I asked Lorne what he thought. He said, “If you think you can split the difference between the new Gore and the old three Gores, do it.”
I went out there and tried to do the four voices at once. It was 50 percent of the real guy, and 50 percent of the guy from before. We were prepared to sacrifice accuracy if we thought we could get a laugh, and we did—the sketch garnered three applause breaks—but it wasn’t pleasing to me or to anyone else to play this new fellow, and we never did it again.
Given the nature of my craft, I study people even when I have no expectation of ever doing them. I learned a lot about the world leaders just by watching them. For instance, it was clear to me that George W. Bush couldn’t act and didn’t want to. I think there was nervous anxiety about being in the presidential spotlight, and sometimes he’d say things the media would make fun of. He gets tripped up on shit that doesn’t interest him. He’s not good talking about wetlands because wetlands are not his thing. However, he was good when he talked about the war on terror. The point is, Bush in person is exactly what you see on TV; he’s the same guy. Clinton too, same guy. McCain, same guy. Sarah Palin, same woman.
And then there was Ronald Reagan. He understood language better than any creature that I’ve ever seen. There was a brilliant sketch with Phil Hartman doing Reagan at a press conference. When the media left the room, Reagan became this brilliant, articulate guy. That sketch resonated with the entire world, because on some level people understood exactly what Reagan was doing. His understanding of the spoken word was astonishing. He could manipulate a press conference or a hostile press corps better than anybody. Reagan understood that the evening news could only put on a ten-second sound bite.
Also, Reagan lived and breathed the things he said. When Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,” it came from his balls. You could hear his balls go clank.
I did him in my stand-up act, but when I was on the show Reagan wasn’t much in the news, aside from dying from Alzheimer’s, so there was never a call to do him on air.
There’s a benchmark that you go for at SNL: Is the impression good enough to be funny? If you’re getting laughs in dress rehearsal, it’s going to be on air. Lorne put me up as Gore maybe two or three times in 1999, but the sketch didn’t get picked because it wasn’t funny. Nobody believed me when I said, “Trust me. This is how the guy talks.” So I studied and studied and studied. I still have photos of the very peculiar ways in which his mouth would form consonants and vowels. I finally did him on air in late ’99 and early ’00, but it still wasn’t clicking. He just seemed like a big guy with a southern accent. I tried out different versions at the Cellar for about a year before I found one that resonated with the audience.
I added in that when he turned left or right, it was as if his upper body were on an axis because the neck wouldn’t turn by itself. The shoulders had to turn when the head turned. I also noticed that he occasionally employed, as countless politicians have, a slight Reaganesque head wag, so I used that too. I picked a couple of different laughs. Everyone laughs without really realizing it, and they do it in four or five different ways, but for an impression it’s best to stick with one or two.
It wasn’t until the debate sketch in the cold open of the season premiere in October 2000, a month before the election, that my Gore, an amalgam of all three of his voices, really hit (even though I was far too out of it at the time to notice right away).
Usually, I didn’t have the luxury of that much intense study time. Even if a writer brings you a voice on Wednesday, you don’t have forty-eight hours to master it, because you’re prepping other things simultaneously. I’d be lucky to get in five or six hours to work on it. It’s also really hard to absorb more than an hour or two a day of a person. I would frequently study someone intensely for a couple of hours, and then try not to think about them for the rest of the day. I’d go back to it the next day and see if some particle of them had imprinted on me.
I was starting to perfect that technique in my first year on the show in a sketch with Norm Macdonald’s wildly popular Bob Dole where I played Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. From a technical perspective, Gingrich’s voice was high-pitched but very resonant, and he had a very interesting dialect, but Gingrich was known more for what he said than how he said it, so I raised the voice just a little bit, tucked it a little bit in the back of the throat. I didn’t want to go too far back, or it would have been Kermit the Frog. Then I tried to find a vowel substitution. I think his “eh” sound became an “uh” sound. I posted that vowel substitution in my bathroom and in my kitchen. Unfortunately, the resulting impression wasn’t anything to write home about, and I never did it again.
Half the time I left 30 Rock on Saturday night thinking I had disgraced myself. I hated that we were always on the clock. As Lorne says, the show goes on because it’s eleven thirty, not because it’s ready. Everyone is held to such an incredibly high standard by the media, but they don’t realize we’re putting those things together in hours. Hours. I would be so tired and so confused from having tried to master God knows how many voices in one week. The clock is ticking, and you’re constantly trying to work with new material and then look back at your tapes to see if there’s something you’re missing.
A couple of times while I was there the writers presented me with an altogether different challenge: talking to myself playing another character. In one sketch, I was live as Ted Koppel interviewing myself on tape as Clinton. The only problem with that is, I couldn’t tell how long to hold for laughs after a joke line. I’d be in the middle of a paragraph, say a funny line, and the laugh would cover up the next two lines.
And once, the voice I was doing got screwed up in a completely new way. When Queen Latifah was hosting, we did a Regis Philbin sketch. I always played him a little over the top, but this was different. I’d taken steroids earlier in the day because I was having trouble sleeping and I was exhausted. Two little pills, and for sixteen hours I was so finely tuned and so springy, I was like a shiny new toy. My whole being felt stronger. But my brain and mouth had trouble coordinating all this new energy, and my speech seemed to take on a life of its own. When I got to his trademark “Am I right, Gelman?” part of the sketch, I said it so manically that it was as though Regis had turned into Porky Pig.
I felt like the work, with the exception of Clinton, was always incomplete. It always amounted to a last-minute distillation of age, dialect, speech impediment, and, if I was lucky, a couple of gestures.
With Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, I started with Tom Joad. That is, Henry Fonda as he played Tom Joad in the 1940 film of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It struck me that the two men had similar accents and tones. So I started with Fonda, and then made him older. The physical part was pretty easy to master because Rumsfeld held himself in such a particularly taut way. And his attitude with the press was distinctive; the way he
held his head up and squinted, as though literally looking down his nose at the mere mortals assembled before him. Those were easy gestures to imitate. We introduced him on SNL in November 2001, in the wake of 9/11 when he was frequently in the public eye. In a sketch mimicking Rumsfeld’s notoriously testy press conferences, I said, “I’d like to give you a better answer to that question, but I fell asleep during the first part of it.”
So there you have it: the man who so frightened the press that they started to call him Dr. Strangelove was based on a mild-mannered Dust Bowl Okie, and a fictional one at that. I heard later that the secretary of defense liked my impression of him, although when asked about it by a journalist during a press conference, he snapped, “If I want to talk about Saturday Night Live, I’ll bring it up.” It was a great line, and, as I recall, it got a nice laugh.
Near the end of my first season on the show, the Daily News called me “the best impressionist anywhere, at any time.” The following week, the same paper gave me a shitty review about a bad impression I did of Tom Brokaw. I ran into the reviewer at a coffee shop a month later and told him he was right, and he was. I never did Brokaw again, happily handing those reins to Chris Parnell, who did extremely well with it for ten years, right up to the second presidential debate sketch we did in the autumn of 2008 when I played John McCain against Fred Armisen’s Barack Obama, and Parnell, who’d left the show two years earlier, came back to play Brokaw as the moderator.
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 13