50: The Man Who Could Have Been Norville

Depending on what time zone you were in, on either the late hours of February 25 or the very early morning of February 26 of 1995, a comedic masterpiece aired on NBC.  It was a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Judging by how strange it is, it likely aired towards the tail end of the program, as Lorne Michaels notoriously refuses to let anything but celebrity impressions and fart jokes on the show while most humans are still awake. The sketch is funny, but it is not merely funny, it perfectly encapsulated what would become the comedic career of an actor that no one at the time knew was hilarious. It was a voice crying in the wilderness that an unexpected person was secretly hilarious. The sketch’s title is “Tales of Fraud and Malfeasance in Railroad Hiring Practices”. It starred regular cast member and former Kids In The Hall star Mark McKinney and that week’s host: George Clooney.

I beg of you, if you have three minutes, take them and watch this sketch.

“Tales of Fraud and Malfeasance in Railroad Hiring Practices” could have been one of those sketches that the audience is clearly white-knuckling through as three minutes of painfully unfunny dialog is suffered through, as it’s effectively one big long joke that becomes obvious in the first ten seconds.  George Clooney’s character is interviewing Mark McKinney’s character for a job with the railroads, and he wishes to gauge how many immoral, illegal, and nonsensical activities McKinney’s character is willing to perform to get the gig, and the apparently desperate McKinney is basically willing to do all of it, all the way up to renouncing Jesus Christ and letting ants bite him. The thing that takes this one-gag sketch and turns it into a comedic masterpiece is Clooney’s performance. He takes a patently absurd line such as  “After you stop the train would you be willing to tell people you took the train without asking anyone’s permission?” and delivers it completely straight faced with a charming smile.  He takes the most ridiculous and stupid premise and sells it like he’s one car away from making the quota at the dealership. He deeply commits to the reality of the sketch as a smooth talking huckster genuinely curious if his prospective hire could “drive a train over a cliff and live”. It is this exact comedic commitment that Clooney subsequently brought to his roles in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), and The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), and of course his comedic roles with the Coens: O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), Intolerable Cruelty (2003), Burn After Reading (2008), and Hail, Caesar! (2016). 

In the 1990s (outside of this one moment) Clooney was not known as a comedic actor.  He had two one-season TV runs as policemen in the failed procedural Body of Evidence and the family dramedy Sisters. He had a run of film performances in the decade as dashing rakes in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Out of Sight (1998) and Three Kings (1999).  He donned the infamous bat-suit with nipples in Batman & Robin (1997), but of course his most famous role of the decade (and possibly his career) is as Dr. Doug Ross from the medical drama ER.  None of these roles are without any humor, but they’re substantially more about being cool and handsome and charming than they are about being funny. George Clooney’s star was rising on the strength of his dramatic and action performances. 

a serious actor for serious roles

On a certain level though, this is a tragedy, because George Clooney is hilarious. He got to start flexing his comedic muscles in the 21st century when he took what might be the only role that can compete with Dr. Doug Ross: the gentleman bandit Danny Ocean in the rebooted Ocean's Eleven and its subsequent sequels, a role in which he is not merely handsome, rakish, and charming, but is also genuinely hilarious.  Danny Ocean isn’t funny in and of himself however.  It’s much more apt to say that Danny Ocean is yet another Cloonian handsome charming rake, but unlike some of his other characters, he’s one who knows how to tell a joke.  The ultimate example of the Clooney character whose very existence inspires laughter was his first with the Coens: Ulysses Everett McGill in 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou. Everett at his core is a buffoon.  He stumbles and bumbles his way through improbable situations, and would likely bring everyone in his life to ruin to ruin but for the fact that he accidentally turns himself and some of his friends into a pop music sensation by getting them to sing into a tin can with him for a quick dollar.  Few of Everett’s lines are funny in and of themselves.  Devoid of context “I’m the damn pater familiaris!” or “I don’t want ‘Fop’ god damn it I’m a Dapper Dan man!” do not inspire laughter, but Clooney’s performance makes them ridiculous and thus worthy of laughter.  The thing that truly makes Everett funny is the fact that Clooney commits to the fact that Everett doesn’t find any of what’s happening to him funny.  Everett is genuinely mad that he can’t get his preferred hair treatment.  He is genuinely perplexed that his wife has informed their children that he’d been hit by a train. He is genuinely taken in by the one-eyed bible salesman who ends up robbing them at clubpoint.  Clooney goes all in on the performance, never once letting the mask slip that he’s performing comedy. Once again consider Tim Blake Nelson speaking about his own acting training that led to his success in the comedy of the Coens:

[I] went to a drama school and studied Shakespeare and Shaw and restoration comedy. ... What that trains you to do, is to pick up a script… internalize the terms of its reality, and play them without any, um—without any sense of irony, or seeming over intentionality, or histrionics. You simply accept that that’s the truth. It’s a heightened world. And you become a part of it. And engage with it on its terms. You lift yourself up to its terms.

Clooney likewise engages with the part of Everett without any sense of irony, over intentionality or histrionics. He simply commits wholeheartedly to the reality of the part, and in wholeheartedly pursuing the reality of this ridiculous man, he creates a masterful comedic performance.

comedy

COMEDY

Ulysses Everett McGill is a charming bumpkin with big ideas and schemes who creates for himself a wholly unlikely success, all the while doing and saying ridiculous things.  Norville Barnes is largely the same character.  Indulge me for a moment and imagine what Hudsucker might have been had Clooney been playing its lead.  Imagine the smile on his face as he proudly holds aloft an unlabeled drawing of a circle and announces that it’s “y’know, for kids!” Imagine him scooting across the floor desperately trying to maintain his composure as he informs Paul Newman “Sir, my leg is on fire”.  Think of him flashing that winning smile at Jennifer Jason Leigh and asking her “Say, how about you and I grab a little dinner and a show after work? I was thinking maybe The King and I…” and as she slaps him the grin doesn’t fade as he continues “How about Oklahoma?” Clooney’s ability to take a ridiculous script and play the part as serious as cancer would have completed an acting powerhouse trio of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Paul Newman doing the same thing marvelously.  

Unfortunately while I might be able to say this as a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking, in reality this casting never could have happened.  In order to appease Joel Silver and his money, the Coens needed to cast someone in the lead with star power, and while Clooney unmistakably had a magnificent bit of star power shortly after starting his run on ER, he didn’t really have it before.  Principal photography on The Hudsucker Proxy started in 1992.  The first episode of ER aired in the fall of 1994.  Who knows! Maybe Joel & Ethan knew that the guy they’d seen guest on a few episodes of Roseanne in the 80s would be perfect as their Norville Barnes but got shot down by the production company saying they needed to hire someone who had a recognizable draw.  No matter what, as the film entered production George Clooney was a talented and promising actor.  He was not yet a movie star.  Despite the fact that he would have been a perfect choice for the part, an accident of what came out when by a couple of years prevented it from happening.  A pity, I would have loved to have heard him say that he “didn’t expect all this hoopla”.