For the past couple months I have been sprinting through the seasons of Schitt's Creek in order to catch up with my wife, who has only not seen the most recent sixth season, just released to Netflix. I like it so much that I almost devoted a post to it on this blog, even though it is not a movie.What's so great about it? Well, in addition to reviving Chris Elliott and introducing me to two dynamite young comic actors in Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy, it has given me another healthy dose of beloved comedy veterans and regular collaborators Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara in peak form.
This past weekend they lost one of their other long-time collaborators.
When I heard Fred Willard had died -- not long after I heard that Lynn Shelton had died (see yesterday's remembrance) -- my first reaction ... well, my first reaction was a pang of sorrow. But my second reaction, the one I want to talk about right now, was that I could not believe he was 86 years old. I always thought of him as a contemporary of Levy and O'Hara, who are 73 and 66, respectively. Since they are so young and virile in Schitt's Creek -- though I should say, I'm still in season 3 -- it felt strange to me that Willard was closer to 90 than 80.
The mockumentaries they made together, under the variable stewardship of Christopher Guest, are now mostly 15 to 25 years old. I guess it isn't particularly strange that Willard was in his late 60s or early 70s then, now that I think about it. But he obviously hadn't lost a step then, and I'd guess he still hadn't lost those steps now. He hadn't appeared in a film in two years -- that was 2018's The Bobby Roberts Project, which I haven't even heard of -- but he has a recurring role in the upcoming Netflix TV series Space Force, which comes out late next week.
The reason I'm so fixated on Willard's age is that there was a timeless quality to him, something that belies the aging process. His core comic personality, at least when I was introduced to him, was a relic from another age. With a dopey but sweet grin constantly affixed to his face, he excelled in roles of the clueless announcer on some kind of low-level and square competitive TV show, like the dog shows in Best in Show. He was clueless not because he lacked intelligence or because he spun these folksy aphorisms, but because he would go on lengthy tangents about things that the viewer could not possibly care about, and frequently, that ended up being not quite appropriate for television.
The weird thing about Fred Willard being actually old was that he was always old, in a way. He was the consummate sweet wool-gatherer, a guy telling you a story that went nowhere, allowed to continue doing what he was doing because he lives in a forgiving society that sometimes respects its elders rather than putting them out to pasture. There was something optimistic about his distinct brand of comedy, then.
Willard's comedy grew out of a gentler time, and gradually came to lampoon that time. But Willard himself had the kind of love and respect for that gentler mode that kept him from ever really playing against type. He was never the type of comic performer who was interested in testing his range, and for us, that was a good thing. I didn't need to see a Willard performance where he dropped f-bombs and hurt people. In every Fred Willard performance, I wanted Fred Willard to be Fred Willard.
And that's what I got, for a long and generous amount of time, dating as far back as This Is Spinal Tap -- a top ten film for me -- in my personal awareness of his work. At some point it had to stop, and that moment came this past weekend.
Rest in peace.
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