I can’t really imagine the last 30 years of American comedy—particularly TV comedy but also very much movies—without Willard’s gallery of yokels. I didn’t really grow up on Guest’s cult-favorite mockumentaries; with the exception of Best in Show—but it seems completely just that these are the Willard roles returned to. Guest’s movies repertory company is undeniably strong—Parker Posey; Catherine O’Hara; if I start listing them out, I won’t be able to stop—but his long-running collaborations with Willard were special.
Their relationship began on the set of the play Little Murders, in New York. “I knew something was off,” Guest once told Charlie Rose, “when Fred actually started doing lines that weren’t in the play. To me.”
Cut to Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind—a string of improvisational mockumentaries that are a trove of Willard’s best scenes. My favorites are from Best in Show, in which Willard plays the completely oblivious color commentator Buck Laughlin (perfect name) in scenes better clicked and seen for themselves than described.
I’ll instead say this: Plenty of comic actors can give life to a joke that wonders whether dogs from different countries speak the same “language,” or why it is that dogs in dog shows can’t wear costumes. But as a friend pointed out to me this weekend, it takes a comic of rare caliber and candor to make you, the smarmy viewer who thinks this man is a complete goof, think: Wait, why can’t the dogs wear costumes? Committing to the bit is one thing. Willard became inseparable from his.
Willard is gone, but revisiting his clips and incredible archive of interviews and late-night appearances this weekend has been a complete joy. He was also as magnanimous onscreen as off of it, it seems, and full of wisdom. Take, for example, his perspective on the craft of movie improvisation. “It’s different from stage improv,” he told the Television Academy, “where the idea is to get up and someone throws you a subject and, oh!—you riff on it. It can be very funny, but in a movie you might be very funny but you don’t move the script along. In [Guest’s] movies you’ve got to know your character, you’ve got to know what they’re doing, what their background is, what they’re trying to accomplish.”
“I hate to sound like one of these serious actors,” he added with a smile. “But when you’re improvising, you can’t just suddenly say—pull something out of left field. It’s got to be in character. And also, it’s preparation.”
You can almost sum the actor up in these lines. Serious, but not self-serious. Knowledgeable, prepared—but, in the moment, in the scenes he’s been celebrated and will be long remembered for, a complete natural. He will be missed.
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