He additionally remembers the primary “SNL” sketch he wrote by himself, a university parody for host Ralph Nader that went so badly — then, as now, writers are chargeable for each side of their sketches, from costumes to cameras— Lorne Michaels turned to Downey and stated: “Well, it struck a blow for surrealism.” Downey skipped the afterparty: “I wandered onto Sixth Avenue and threw up in a trashcan and went home.” He describes bombing as leaping right into a pool solely to note: No water. But he additionally got here to simply accept that a number of the writing he was proudest of would normally play to relative silences. Certainly, sketches he nonetheless loves — Bob Newhart as a Civil Struggle officer who retains forgetting to jot down the mother and father of a useless soldier, John Malkovich promoting the federal government on a scorching nineteenth century innovation referred to as canals — watch them on-line and he’s proper: Crickets. Nonetheless, there’s a humbleness that shouts Midwestern. As Mulaney, a Chicagoan, says: “It’s the comedy of someone completely unreasonable patiently explaining why they are reasonable.”
Pat McGuire, a retired Illinois state senator and outdated pal of Downey’s from Joliet, stated the author as soon as informed him that East Coast humor was about Henry Kissinger however Midwestern humor was simply your mom reminding you to put on clear underwear.
Downey’s childhood was a mannequin of postwar placidity. He was the youngest of three kids, solidly center class. Joliet didn’t look like a Chicago exurb but. Its metal mills had simply begun drying up. “I remember feeling like we had the run of the place,” Downey stated. Downtown was vibrant then: James Bond on the Rialto, department shops, bookstores. Downey steeped in a lifetime of references, Edward Gorey, Zap Comix, “The Twilight Zone.” He remembers a few college students at college who staged an elaborate wrestling match with do-it-yourself costumes; it perpetually reminds him of the worth of overcommitting to even the dumbest of concepts. He turned fixated on rigorous, fussily crafted provocations. He excelled at languages and went to Harvard, the place, to his mother and father’ consternation, he turned to the impractical: Russian folklore and Harvard Lampoon, the famed campus journal, which had launched a derivative, Nationwide Lampoon.
“Jim was a good boy when we met,” stated Ian Frazier, the now-longtime New Yorker author, who turned near Downey whereas they had been at Harvard Lampoon. “Apple-cheeked, blonde curly hair, sunny — like a happy boy in a commercial. We were simpatico at the Lampoon. I’m from Ohio, he’s Illinois, and so much of the student body felt sophisticated East Coast, I was basically a hick. But Jim knew a plethora of funny nouns, knew every dinosaur name and, like me, was good in Latin.”
