San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Improv ace best known for pizza ads
Improv artist Bill Bonham had a stage presence that stood out for the very reason that he did not stand out.
Softfaced, balding and paunchy, Bonham was also sneaky funny. He took this combination to the stage as an unglued Chicago Cubs fan in the play “Bleacher Bums” and took it to the small screen as pitchman for Round Table Pizza, founded by Bay Area native William R. Larson. Bonham made the pizza commercials into goofy skits and gained broad exposure during the 1985 Super Bowl when the San Francisco 49ers defeated the Miami Dolphins.
He also had bit parts in movies, published a memoir, had a longstanding satirical column as a restaurant reviewer and produced a CD as a singersongwriter. But whatever he did and wherever he went, everyone, including the stranger who would become his wife, would say the same thing: “You’re the Round Table Pizza guy.”
Bonham died April 8 of a heart attack at his home in the Richmond District, said his wife, Louise Fong. He was 71.
“Good old Billy Bonham, who we called Bucky and I don’t know why,’’ said improviser Debi Durst, recalling the days she performed with Bonham in National Theatre of the Deranged and the Dinosaurs of Improv. “Bucky was so unassuming and ordinary looking that you would never assume that he could be as funny as he was.”
Up until the COVID19 lockdown, Bonham was performing at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley. Audiences never tired of his creations: the Rev. Lionel Train, an evangelical preacher who could coax the audience into whistling “whoo whoo” at his command; Roaring Buck McCoy, who ran a cattle ranch on Divisadero Street; and Oren Feldmiller, a nerdy 8yearold in a beanie with a chinstrap trying to keep an embarrassing chronic condition from the kids at school.
“Improv, you never know what is going to happen, but it felt safe to be onstage with Bucky,” Durst said. “You could throw almost anything at him and he would come back at you with something as good or better. The three main rules in improvisation are trust, support and cooperation, and he gave all three.” When the comedy scene was booming in the 1980s and ’90s, all the major comedy clubs had improv nights — the Open Theatre and the Holy City Zoo both on Clement Street, the Other Cafe in Cole Valley, Lipps in the basement of the Hotel Phillips, South of Market, the Punch Line downtown, the Improv near Union Square. Each club had its own house improv band too, with names such as Spaghetti Jam, the Committee and National Theatre of the Deranged. Bonham worked with all of them.
“Of all the people in the Deranged, Bill was probably
the most fun for the audience to watch,” said founding member Geoff Bolt. “He absolutely became his characters. There was no Bill Bonham onstage.”
William Arthur Bonham was born June 3, 1949, in Renton, Wash., near Seattle. His dad was a cabdriver who came home with folkisms that Bill later turned into oneliners delivered by his characters.
Young Bonham also gained material from a string of jobs starting at age 10. He picked blackberries and was a paperboy, a farmhand and a short order cook, a job he took in lieu of college after he graduated from Renton High School in 1967.
This experience landed him a job running the kitchen at Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge Valley. He lasted only about a year, but that kind of job leaves an impact. In 2015, Bonham won a national memoir contest sponsored by Simon & Schuster, AARP and the Huffington Post. Out of a few thousand entries, his was selected for publication as an ebook, titled “Prisoner in the Kitchen: The Car Thief, the Murderer, and the Man Hired to Feed Them,” released in 2016.
Bonham went on to train as a classical French chef in Seattle, but was better at joking and cooking. In the late ’70s, with his marriage to Jeanne Storez falling apart, he moved to San Francisco.
His break came in the early 1980s when he was cast as one of the leads in “Bleacher Bums,” a play set in the outfield stands during an afternoon game at Wrigley Field. Bonham’s character was a bigmouthed, hefty Chicago Cubs cheerleader with a mirror to try to blind the opposing pitcher. He became progressively deranged as the game and the play reached its inevitable conclusion of a Cubs defeat.
Directed by the famed Lee Sankowich, the “nineinning play,” as it was labeled, opened in a tiny converted space off Market Street in 1980. It later got legs and moved to the Little Box Theatre in North Beach.
“I was very fortunate to have found him for the part,” said Sankowich, who cast Bonham as a warmup act in the 1982 musical “Durante” at the Zephyr Theatre in Los Angeles. “Once again he was a critic’s favorite with his humor and ability to connect with an audience.” Bonham’s “Bleacher Bums” performance led to a TV ad campaign, in character, as an Oakland A’s fan.
Bonham later played a drunk at a high school reunion in “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986), and a garage owner in “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” (1988), both directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
“Bill could steal a scene without saying a word,” Bolt said.
One night in the early ’90s, Bonham and another improv player, Jack Boulware, were driving back from a gig on the Peninsula when they created a persona of a leathery Marine tough guy who was also a chef, based on Bonham’s prison experience.
This became Earl C. Woodruff, USMC retired, reviewing the restaurant and cocktail scene, for the Nose, a satirical bimonthly edited by Boulware. The column ran for five years and was just real enough that readers sent in products for review and Woodruff was invited to attend the James Beard Awards in New York City. (He declined, but it would have been interesting if he’d accepted.)
“Bill could get a laugh just by standing on the stage with his legs spread apart and his hands on his hips like a superhero,” said Boulware, cofounder and executive director of Litquake, San Francisco’s annual literary festival. “The audience just loved him.”
In 1990, Bonham met his future wife, Louise Fong, at an audition. Her opening line was one Bonham had heard before. “I asked him if he was the Round Table Pizza guy,” she recalled. When he confirmed it, she couldn’t resist wrapping a hug around him. They were married within a year and bought a house in the Richmond District, where they raised a son, Christopher Bonham, now 27.
At home, Bonham played guitar and sang in a soulful folk style, Fong said. He played a few coffeehouse gigs and put together a set of musicians under bandleader Dick Bright to record “Turtle Boy,” an album released in 1996.
“Bill had so many different sides to him. He had this blustery side, and he had this very sensitive side,” Fong said. “He had these onstage characters that were very outgoing, but what was most personal to him was writing the lyrics to his songs.”
Survivors include his wife, Louise Fong of San Francisco; son Christopher of Chicago; and brother Dave Bonham and sister Candy Bonham, both of Seattle.
A memorial service is pending. Donations in his name may be made to the Motion Picture and Television Fund, 23388 Mulholland Drive, Woodland Hills, CA 91364.