It’s pleasing to learn that the Better Call Saul star is as grounded as you’d guess.
It’s pleasing to learn that the Better Call Saul star is as grounded as you’d guess.
W hen, last July, Bob Odenkirk had a heart attack on the Better Call Saul set in New Mexico at age 58, social media responded with a roar of affection. Oh no, not Bob! After recovering, he reflected in an interview with Variety that the message was received. “The idea of being constantly driven is sort of just an accepted game plan for every day of your f***ing life,” he said. “The people we celebrate are people who wake up at 4 a.m. and work out for an hour and eat kale and do yoga and then try to own the world. That’s super cool in some ways, and in some ways, it’s kind of gross and sick and misses the point.”
It’s pleasing to learn that Odenkirk is as grounded as you’d guess, and he has only burnished his regular-guy credentials with his endearing memoir Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama. A Catholic Boy Scout with six siblings, the young Odenkirk was scarred by an uneasy relationship with his rageful, booze-constructed dad, Wally, who was constantly saying things like, “Boys, we’re about to run out of money,” promising that everyone would soon be “out in the street.” Bob was about five when Dad started talking this way: “These little doom-laden rambles were striking, frightening, and irregular enough to have maximum impact.” The Odenkirk inner conflict was already being strongly developed. Bob started dealing with events by turning them into creative fodder, thinking of the Old Man as a fictional entity — a Dickens character. “I would overhear the latest tattle of pathetic behavior and just append it to the sorry tale I was ‘reading.’” Handy tool for an actor-to-be.
Odenkirk’s comedy theories provide the background music of the book: “To me, the best comedy has a touch of anger in it, and I still don’t like comedy that lacks a touch of that anger. It’s like ‘smooth jazz’ — a waste of jazz.” He credits Monty Python’s Flying Circus with illuminating the path he would take. “The firmament cracked wide open,” he says of the moment when Python began airing on the Chicago PBS station on Sunday nights at 11.
Was Python angry, though? Certainly, the Pythons enjoyed giving a tweak to British convention — the bankers with their airtight sphincters and the dementedly chatty housewives — but it’s hard to detect much anger there, though John Cleese’s characters frequently seemed like balloons that were about to burst. Odenkirk has a broader view, positing that the surrealistic silliness was a general rejection of reality. “These smart Brits were whispering to us, in our sad living rooms on Sunday nights right before another dark week began, ‘Yes, you’re right; it’s all a big, dumb lie, and you don’t have to respect these people, you can laugh at them.’” I’d say you don’t have to be mad at the System to find a twit-of-the-year contest funny.
Not only would Python’s style of loosely connected sketches later provide the model for Odenkirk and David Cross’s Ph.D.-level comedy, Mr. Show, which defined cult television during its 1995–98 run, but the young Odenkirk was already disgusted with pandering, phony, Vegas comedy. (See any Sammy Davis Jr. “roast.”) Odenkirk was instead drawn to early examples of meta-comedy, such as Steve Martin’s late-Seventies standup act, which amounted to a parody of a standup act. Odenkirk also grooved to a comedy troupe called the Credibility Gap, one of whose stars was Michael McKean, who would later play Odenkirk’s brother on Better Call Saul. “An insane, improbable phenomenon,” Odenkirk writes.
After college(s) — there were four of them — Odenkirk gained the mentorship of Del Close, whom he met in a bookstore. Close was a sort of comedy sculptor who helped make improv comics out of raw comedy clay, and Odenkirk reveres his memory. “It was time to drive to Chicago, have my car break down, live in a basement apartment with a mentally fragile communist, and perform for no one in the big city. And, possibly, get mugged a few times. Let’s do this!”
Working the scene in City No. 2, Odenkirk eventually got a job with the Second City troupe, where he’d do an act with Chris Farley, later a collaborator at Saturday Night Live, where Farley would make much of Odenkirk’s motivational-speaker-in-a-van-down-by-the-river sketch. Farley lived his act: “Wherever you were, whatever you were talking about, he’d interrupt it with put-downs of himself. He’d say, ‘I’m a retard’ or ‘Fatty fall down,’ and then he’d fall down, wherever he happened to be . . . even if he landed in a dirty, wet puddle and had to spend the rest of the day in wet pants. Anything for a laugh. ANYTHING.” Farley’s 1997 demise “drove me nuts,” writes Odenkirk, because of “the inevitability of the whole damn thing. . . . Even back at Second City, I’d watch Chris stumble off into the night after killing it onstage and my mind would write, ‘taken from us too soon!’” Farley was the kind of guy who would show up for work with two bottles of wine in his jacket pockets, finish both quickly, then start throwing furniture around. “I couldn’t tell if he was angry or just being funny,” Odenkirk’s girlfriend remarked. Both, of course. “Odie,” Farley asked in a moment of earnestness, “do you think [John] Belushi’s in heaven?” The two men would die at the same age, 33.
The final encounter between Bob and Chris was in an alley in Aspen, where Farley’s limo was parked “with a neon sign on the hood that was flashing LAST CHANCE TO SAY GOODBYE,” Odenkirk writes. Farley looked like a sweaty tomato. His limo contained four sketchy visitors from Planet Drugs. “I watched the limo pull away,” Odenkirk writes, “and a few weeks later we all had a funeral.”
After four frustrating years writing for SNL, Odenkirk moved to Los Angeles to seek out the comedy frontier, which he found with the bizarre, hilarious Chris Elliott show Get a Life, which was so strange it could only have aired on Fox: “America’s fourth network! It would never work — who needs FOUR options of television programming — it’s too much! The best thing about Fox at the time was that they had no idea what they were doing.” Odenkirk credits Janeane Garofalo, whom he describes as the era’s primary connector for alternative comedy, for his gig writing for what turned out to be an important, if short-lived, sketch program, The Ben Stiller Show. Bringing together Apatow, David Cross, Patton Oswalt, and other fresh talents, Garofalo led the way to what Odenkirk labels as comedy that was “off-the-cuff, ‘real,’ impromptu, personal, disarming, sloppy, meandering, intimate — everything that we now prize in a good podcast. She did it first. She made it cool.”
Mr. Show was not a ratings success for HBO, but it defined the cult show, and Odenkirk’s descriptions of his favorite sketches will make you want to go back and gobble up the whole 15 hours of it. “Keep in mind, NO ONE wanted a sketch show!” he writes. “Sketch shows are full of ideas! Yech! People don’t watch television for ideas; they watch for commercials.” All credit to Chris Albrecht of HBO for letting Odenkirk and Cross get away with it, on the novel programming strategy that “It doesn’t matter if people actually watch the show, just so long as they think they should watch it.”
After Mr. Curtain fell on Mr. Show, Odenkirk worked incessantly . . . on a bunch of stuff you’ve never seen, or that never got made in the first place. He did a guest shot on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He did commercials. Failure followed failure. He came in second when it was time to cast the lead role in The Office. He and his wife, Naomi Yomtov, raised two great kids, but Odenkirk looked like he would never be more than a footnote to the history of 21st-century showbiz. Bankruptcy loomed.
Hence that attractive underdog quality in Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman. “If I’ve become a more rounded person — and how could I not, I was as shallow as a communion wafer for most of my life — it’s due to Naomi and her example.” They met at a comedy club after a show where, spotting her in the crowd, the comic yelled out, “Who you? Give me number!” Today she is his manager, succeeding the departed Bernie Brillstein. Their conversations tend to frankness: “Honey, nobody likes my script.” “Well, neither do I.” Odenkirk writes, “I believe William Goldman nailed it with ‘Nobody knows anything.’ Let me add to that ‘Nobody learns much, either.’” Fortunately for Odenkirk, a Mr. Show fan was out there looking for someone to play a key supporting part in the greatest TV show of all time. But I’ll get to that in my next column.