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Thanks to the wonders of Facebook and the Intertubes, this evening I discovered the audition tape that the late, great Phil Hartman did for Saturday Night Live:
Along with Robin Williams, this was another great comedic genius silenced far too soon.
And while others will disagree, this will always be my favorite Phil Hartman SNL skit:
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I do disagree that is his best (although it’s definitely in the top 5). I’ll always love his Ronald Reagan sketch the best. It perfectly captures how both sides felt about Reagan–that he was a bumbling idiot, or a foreign policy mastermind, controlling the world like a puppeteer.
https://screen.yahoo.com/president-reagan-mastermind-000000075.html
I suspect that most folks don’t know that before Hartman was a famous comedian, he was a fine graphic artist who designed many covers for albums (when such covers were understood as art). He designed the cover for Steely Dan’s album Aja, which I’ve seen referred to as the gold standard for cover art. You can see some his stuff here. He dropped the last N from his name when he changed careers.
My favorite characters of his weren’t on SNL: Bill McNeil from NewsRadio, and Lionel Hutz & Troy McClure from The Simpsons.
I remember when he passed away, Jay Leno did a little tribute to him with clips from his various appearances on The Tonight Show. In one of the clips, he was dressed as a skunk and smoking a cigar with a poop-eating grin on his face. It got a laugh from the audience. I thought that was a great tribute to a comedian, that he could get a laugh from a 2-second visual gag during a memorial segment.
