The Angst and the Ecstasy of Catherine O’Hara

Life, as we know, is not always fair. Right now, when the world seems to be becoming a more and more daunting place, it doesn’t seem fair that we’ve just lost a lady so funny that she helps us forget our angst. In a way, angst is one of Catherine O’Hara’s personal specialties. She agonizes so hilariously over life’s vicissitudes that—momentarily, at least—we forget our own. It doesn’t seem right, frankly, that we had to lose her this past January, at age 71.

 O’Hara, Canada-born, was among the zanies at SCTV from 1976 to 1984. In Hollywood she played a number of memorable though subordinate film roles. I remember her fondly in After Hours, Beetlejuice, and as Kevin’s thoroughly rattled mother in Home Alone. Her longest lasting project was surely Schitt’s Creek,  an outrageous TV comedy (2015-2020) about an L.A. show-biz family forced to relocate, because of financial reverses, to a  Canadian town full of heart and not much else. O’Hara played opposite her good friend (and series co-creator) Eugene Levy, as Moira Rose, the snooty, multi-wigged mom who was once a soap opera star, and now can’t easily accept her much-diminished smalltown life. She seemed destined for an equally long run on Seth Rogen’s hit show, set behind the scenes in Hollywood, when death overtook her. Rogen's sweet tribute to her at the recent SAG awards ceremony is worth savoring.  

But I mostly think of O’Hara in conjunction with a trio of films directed and co-written by the remarkable Christopher Guest. Guest, an actual member of British nobility, had played rocker Nigel Tufnel in Rob Reiner’s deathless 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap. The experience led him (along with co-conspirator Eugene Levy and a company of gifted comic actors) to launch three largely improvised indies of his own. The first, Waiting for Guffman (1996) is an affectionate spoof of small-town amateur theatricals. It covers the torturous process of staging a pageant to honor Blaine, Missouri’s 150^th anniversary. (Any connection with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not accidental.) O’Hara and Guest regular Fred Willard play Sheila and Ron Woodard, a perky pair of travel agents who have dreams of musical-theatre stardom. Sheila is prone to drinking a wee bit too much on occasion, which leads her to put her husband in an embarrassing situation indeed.

 By general consensus, the funniest of Guest’s mockumentaries is 2000’s Best in Show, a spoof of dog shows and of the humans who dote on their pedigreed fur babies. O’Hara and Levy are featured as Cookie and Gerry Fleck, a Florida couple who idolize their Norwich terrier and enjoy recording novelty songs in Winky’s honor. Gerry is faced with the challenge of having two left feet (literally), and Cookie—who seems to have enjoyed an exuberant sex life before her marriage—keeps running into former beaus eager to resume the relationship.

 Less well known is A Mighty Wind (2003), which mocks the era when folk music ruled the airwaves. Various Guest regulars (including Parker Posey, Michael McKean, Jane Lynch, and a host of other wacky singing actors) play musicians who amusingly resemble once-legendary groups likes The New Christy Minstrels and The Kingston Trio. The premise is that these groups reunite, decades after their celebrity has faded, for a reunion concert. The stand-outs (as always) are Levy and O’Hara. They play former sweethearts Mitch and Mickey, he now something of a nut case and she a sweet soul with an autoharp and a memory of the kiss at the end of the rainbow. Hilarity of course ensues. 

                    

Shedding a Tear for Those Who made Us Laugh

Alas, no Fred Willard on this poster

Yesterday was Memorial Day, a traditional time for Americans to remember those who lost their lives on the field of battle for the sake of our democracy. Sometimes I observe the day with posts about films like Glory, Dunkirk, and Apocalypse Now, movies that celebrate great hard-fought victories or explore those conflicts in which American lives were sacrificed in vain. This year, given the challenges we’re all facing, I’m going another route. One day after Memorial Day, I’m paying tribute to men and women who are no longer around to amuse us, to lift our spirits in dark times. Yes, I mean entertainers.

Some will associate Jerry Stiller with Seinfeld, or The King of Queens. And of course it’s well known he was Ben’s dad. But oldster that I am, I associate him with his wife and comedy partner Anne Meara, and their very funny radio spots plugging Blue Nun wine. The wine itself was mediocre, but the popular ads—in which he offers her “a little Blue Nun,” and she assumes he means a Catholic sister (see below for an audio clip), helped the distributors sell more than a million cases.

We’re also saying farewell to Fred Willard, the lovable master of mediocrity. (The New York Times described his specialty as playing men “gloriously out of their depth.”) He earned four Emmy nominations on behalf of his roles on Modern Family and Everybody Loves Raymond. But he’d spent 30 years in the entertainment industry before he leaped into the public consciousness through Christopher Guest’s semi-improvised comedies, including Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind. Everyone’s favorite Fred Willard portrayal is doubtless that of the clueless TV commentator in Guest’s 2000 hit, Best in Show. Offering color commentary at a prestigious (read: snooty) dog competition, Willard cheerfully reminded viewers that in some nations dogs get eaten.

And then we lost a blast from the distant past. When I was little, Leave it to Beaver was essential TV viewing.  It was the usual family sitcom. Among the younger generation living in the Cleaver household, there was little Theodore (nicknamed The Beaver), and his teenaged brother Wally. And, of course, there was Wally’s smarmy pal, Eddie Haskell, he who was always kissing up to the adults, while also secretly plotting mischief. Eddie was played by Ken Osmond, who died this past week at age 76. Once Beaver went off the air, Ormond found himself typecast, and he eventually quit show biz. Unlikely as it seems, he ended up as an LAPD motorcycle cop. No, not – despite rumors to the contrary – a porn star.

I also salute two actors not specifically known for comedy. Shirley Knight is most associated with stage work, but accrued two Oscar nominations while still in her twenties for roles in screen adaptations of challenging works by Tennessee Williams and William Inge. I’ll never forget her in Dutchman (1966), a terrifying indie based on a rawly racial play by Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones) A sexy white woman meets a buttoned-down black man (Al Freeman Jr.) on a steamy subway train: fireworks ensue.

On the international front, we’ve also lost the great Indian actor, Irrfan Khan, dead at 53. Most of Khan’s hundreds of credits are in Indian films, but he also appeared in such American movies as Life of Pi, Jurassic World, and—poignantly—opposite Kelly Macdonald in 2018’s Puzzle. But I’ll always love the dignity he brought to The Lunchbox, the tender Mumbai-set story of an unhappy wife whose lovingly packed lunch gets delivered to a lonely widower .instead of to her ungrateful husband.

Hail and farewell.