FUNNY FOR 50 YEARS
He was an underrated star who really was Best In Show. As Fred Willard dies at 86, a tribute to a unique talent...
OVER in that parallel universe without Covid19, the 73rd Cannes Film Festival would be drawing to a close this weekend and I would be making my way home, square-eyed but happy, after seeing two, three, sometimes four films a day, for ten days.
Instead, I’m locked down, trying to keep you informed of the best new releases on streaming platforms. As it happens, there are rich pickings coming soon. June is bursting out all over with original offerings. But since this is a lacklustre week, I thought I would instead review a trio of classics by way of tribute to Fred Willard, the big friendly giant of American comedy, who died last week, aged 86.
In the UK, Willard wasn’t a household name. But if you’ve seen the Anchorman movies, or Rob Reiner’s masterly 1984 parody of rock documentaries, This Is Spinal Tap, then you will have known his face and laughed at his deadpan oneliners. He was also a fixture on American TV, in hit shows such as Everybody Loves Raymond and Modern Family.
Above all, Willard was an improvisational genius, never more hilarious than in a series of largely-improvised ‘mockumentaries’ made by Christopher Guest.
Each one is a true feast of comic observation and cherishable silliness, and this week, my family and I have been cheerfully gorging on them.
If you’re able to access Amazon Prime, then you can, too. In the absence of an actual antidote to the coronavirus, I can’t recommend a better tonic.
Best In Show (2000) is incomparably funny. It’s a glorious spoof of dog shows and the kind of owners who treat them as more important than life itself, while attending to their pets’ needs like the anxious servants of a demanding monarch.
For example, Parker Posey plays the barkingly highly-strung Meg, who becomes hysterical when her pug’s favourite cuddly toy, Busy Bee, goes missing. While knowing that sort of thing would yield plenty of comedic material, Guest, in planning the movie, was unsure how the third act, the Crufts-type show itself, would unfold. It had to look credibly real, but how could they make that as funny as everything else?
The answer was to let Willard off the leash as TV co-commentator Buck Laughlin, an affably stupid tuxedo-wearing sports anchor, out of his comfort zone and making ever-more inappropriate suggestions to the resident dog- show expert played by an admirably po-faced Jim Piddock.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea, he says, to dress up the contestants? Wouldn’t the bloodhound benefit from a Sherlock Holmes twinset of deerstalker and pipe?
Willard always played the same kind of character in those Guest films: genial, gauche, occasionally lewd, always unutterably crass.
He is peroxided music producer
Mike LaFontaine in the equally brilliant A Mighty Wind (2003), a kind of folk-music version of Spinal Tap, in which three semi-successful 1960s folk acts re- form to celebrate the life of their late manager, Irving Steinbloom.
LaFontaine interrupts a rehearsal to suggest to The New Main Street Singers that their wholesome sea shanty could do with some literary gravitas, inspired by the ‘pirate captain’ Moby Dick who ‘ chased a big whale’, then proposes that they might all be drenched with water mid-song.
‘Even the ladies,’ he adds, cue a suggestive whisper into the ear of the group’s leader (John Michael Higgins). It is all the funnier for being entirely improvised.
THE same comic actors — Willard, Higgins, Posey, Piddock, Harry Shearer, Bob Balaban and Eugene Levy among them, as well as Guest himself — pop up repeatedly in these mock documentaries, which is part of the fun of watching them in close proximity.
In Waiting For Guffman (1996), Willard plays one of the residents of Blaine, a small Missouri town known as ‘the stool capital of the world’, who are staging a musical to mark the sesquicentenary (the 150th anniversary, as if you didn’t know) of Blaine’s foundation by the eponymous Blaine Fabin (who smelled salt in the air and thought he’d reached the Pacific).
Guffman is the Broadway producer they invite along to consider a New york transfer, their dearth of talent notwithstanding. The film is marginally less hilarious than the other two, but still a joy. Whether you’ve heard of Willard or not, you won’t regret a triple-header this weekend.