What about when he was younger,
just a bad little kid?
His mama noticed funny things he did
Like shooting puppies with a B.B. gun
He’d poison guppies and when he was done
He’d find a pussycat and bash in its head
That’s when his mama said
She said, “My boy, I think someday
You’ll find a way to make your natural tendencies pay”
Something something…Dentist
Reeves was good in My Own Private Idaho, A Walk In The Clouds, Parenthood, other non-action non-surfer-dude-comedy stuff.
In Parenthood he’s not that far from a surfer dude (a race car dude as I recall)
But Parenthood overall is not the same style of comedy as Bill&Ted, nor is his role all “Woah!”
True.
Michael Richards got out of his lane when he tried stand-up comedy. He nearly destroyed his career when he went on a racist rant against a heckler.
To be entirely fair, it looks like he had been doing stand-up in the '70s and '80s (as well as acting), prior to Seinfeld, then went back to it after that show ended.
It was leaving stand-up to be a sitcom actor that did him in. After his single acting success on Seinfeld he couldn’t get any more acting gigs due to the lack of middle-aged hipster doofus roles being written. I think he was angry about having to return to stand-up to get an audience, and the indignity of being heckled pushed him over the edge.
Nearly?
Very true; I think that he was typecast by playing Kramer. I also have no idea how much of it was that he was a good actor, and wasn’t given other sorts of roles due to the typecasting, or if Kramer just happened to be the one sort of character he was really good at portraying.
He did play an early version of Kramer known as Stanley Spudowski in the pre-Seinfeld movie UHF.
He got a second chance of sorts when he appeared as himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm:
Wiki says he turned down MONK, which I simultaneously can and can’t see.
He was quite good in the Whoops Apocalypse film too. And Young Doctors in Love before that, in a more basic slapstick role.
Let’s not forget his role in Airheads. That movie was a guilty pleasure for a little while, but I haven’t seen it in years now.
I love that film, my college roommate and I would quote it everyday. But I’d say he played ‘Kramer’ in it as well.
Michael Richards also did a sitcom after Seinfeld called The Michael Richards Show, playing a character pretty similar to Cosmo Kramer. I remember watching a few episodes and it was pretty bad.
Richards was Andy Kaufman’s accomplice on that infamous Fridays sketch. He really got burned on that one so he found a character and kind of stuck with it. When forced to go back to throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks post-Kramer, he just didn’t have the thick skin or confidence necessary for that approach.
Was it lack of confidence, or just plain lack of talent? I remember The Michael Richards Show, at least one episode (probably the pilot) where the gag was he worked out in a gym too hard for the first time, and his muscles were sore. So he became a human pratfall machine, sliding off chairs and tumbling over things, and that was his entire shtick. It was painful to watch.
I think of Richards as another McLean Stevenson-- a marginally talented performer who lucked out, found a niche, and became a one-hit wonder on a hit show.
Speaking of McLean Stevenson, did anybody mention him in this thread yet? I think I remember hearing somewhere while he was on MASH he had sycophants and handlers telling him he was too big for MASH, he needed his own show to showcase his huge talent! Unfortunately for McLean, he listened to them.
I wasn’t familiar with the sketch so I looked it up online. Oof. I do have to hand it to Richards, when Kaufman went off the rails and he went off camera, grabbed the cue cards and slapped them on the table in front of Kaufman, that was actually pretty funny improvising (unless it was planned to go off the rails- with Kaufman involved it was always hard to tell).
In a sense, David Caruso. Became a TV star with NYPD Blue, and quit to become a movie star. Failed in the movies and eventually returned to TV, where he became a star again.
TV stardom and movie stardom are two different skills. Jimmy Stewart, for instance, couldn’t translate to TV.