They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. In comedy, sometimes you can get a lot about a character just by the way they introduce themselves.
In Veep, a show filled with horrible introductions, (politicians are always meeting so many strangers), one by executive assistant Richard Splett (Sam Richardson) really left me rolling.
“Richard T. Splett,” he says as he shakes the hand of super-charismatic Sen. Tom James. Then, barely finishing that sentence, he follows with, “Don’t know why I said ‘T’; my middle name is John.”
Veep has become one of my favorite TV shows, and Splett, the ridiculously optimistic and inept bozo, is my second favorite character on it. (Ben Caffrey, the world-weary, occasionally terror-inducing White House chief of staff played with bleary-eyed intensity by Kevin Dunn, is my top pick.)
In all his cheeriness, Splett stands apart from the rest of the show’s super-cynical Washington insiders.
I am really into a character like Richard Splett, who always chooses the exact opposite of anything correct, yet keeps his poise by bumbling into the next disaster.
And each flameout sees him failing ever upward.
Richardson is doing his silly magic on a murderer’s row cast. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, legendary. Gary Cole, necessary. Matt Walsh, a king of I-know-that-guys. Tony Hale, taking his Buster Bluth-iness to new heights. And now, this season, we get Hugh Laurie THE GAWD?
Among these heavy hitters, Richardson holds his own.
First, there’s that perpetually open, smiley face, sporting eyeglasses that somehow make him look even dumber. Then he speaks with a tone of voice so doltish it could come only from someone with lots of education. (One of Veep’s great points is how this room full of heavily educated, well-pedigreed people keeps screwing up royally, any chance they get.)
For me, there’s the added bonus of seeing Richardson play the kind of role that many black actors, or other actors of color, often don’t get.
More often than not, comic acting with black faces is broad humor only. The bulging eyes, the mugging faces, the contorted voices. In American comedy, this goes all the way back to the days of minstrel shows, reflecting and refracting cultural notions of black inferiority and white supremacy.
That’s the Amos ‘N’ Andy model, from when it was white actors in blackface, to black actors in short films of which my father had a stack of videotapes when I was a kid.
It doesn’t stay there, though. Americans love their broad humor, regardless of who’s delivering it.
We’ve had the continuum in black comic acting of Flip Wilson to Redd Foxx (Sanford and Son) and Sherman Hemsley (The Jeffersons) to the Wayans family (In Living Color, The Wayans Brothers) to Martin Lawrence (Martin, Big Momma’s House) to later-career Eddie Murphy (The Nutty Professor, Norbit) to Tyler Perry (Madea movies, Meet the Browns, House of Payne) and Kenan Thompson (all 12 years of his SNL tenure, which will enter year 13 this fall).
Even smart guys such as Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele use those associations against themselves. Nearly half of Key & Peele’s sketches involve some meditation on a racial stereotype.
Most blatant is when Key plays Luther the Obama Anger Translator. Peele’s impression of a cool, collected President Obama is conflated with Key playing a comically stereotypical angry black man, from the high-pitched voice mixed with barking, to the multitude of rings on his fingers.
But with people of color, there has been less leeway to do stuff other than broad, almost as if wit and dry humor belong to the white guys.
I thought that 10 years ago when when Mos Def, still my favorite actor/rapper (sorry, Ice Cube and Donald Glover), played Ford Prefect in the Hollywood film adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Mos nailed the cadence and bearing of the character, who is so undeniably English, but all with his American voice. No accent required. It’s a remarkable thing to see, an American actor behave like an Englishman while staying American.
Speaking of Glover, we’ll always have Community for Troy and Abed (Danny Pudi) as nerds of color, the layered Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) and even some stuff with Professor Chang (Ken Jeong) before he went totally off the mugging-a-minute rails.
Chris Rock, in his many comments on Hollywood while promoting Top Five, noted that cinematically he has arthouse tastes, but he doesn’t get cast in Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson’s films. Perhaps Top Five, Rock’s best movie by far including his artsy fare such as I Think I Love My Wife and 2 Days in New York, will change that a bit.
We do have awesome folks like Wyatt Cenac and Issa Rae doing their own dry humor deal. I just want more, and I want bigger.
I also want to see more of Richardson, who has an improv background with Second City. I want to see what other absurdity he cooks up.
So far he’s been in a movie I haven’t seen yet, Horrible Bosses 2, and a movie I have no intention of seeing, We’re The Millers. (Funny, both films feature Jennifer Aniston in her MILF-tastic, laugh-and-lust-at-me phase.)
But I likely will see Richardson again outside Veep by going to see Spy, the latest Melissa McCarthy-Paul Feig teamup (Bridesmaids, The Heat). Despite my dislike of The Heat because of its jokey-racist first scene related to police brutality, I do like when McCarthy and Feig get together, so I’m all in on Spy.
If Feig continues his Mel Brooks-level generosity with laughs, I’m sure Richardson snags a few of his own.
