A life, in comedic terms
In a mid ’70s comedy and TV landscape forever changed by Saturday Night Live, the Not Ready for Prime Time players seemed to effortlessly grow from goofy kids to global celebrities. The names read now like a Founding Fathers of Comedy: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Jane Curtin. Lost in that heady group was Gilda Radner, who initially struggled to be one of the boys, then found her footing with a number of memorable recurring characters.
The new film Love, Gilda clumsily attempts to make a number of points about comedy, stardom, women in show business, and the corrosive effect of being compared to her castmates. It misses a chance to help us understand Radner not as a pioneer, but as a flawed woman who for some years found comfort in her comedic talents.
Radner grew up comfortable in Detroit, the daughter of a hotel businessman. As with many of the stories of successful comics, Radner’s story is one of a chubby girl who vied for her father’s intermittent attention with jokes and skits. Her father’s early death thrust her into mode of forever looking for male attention and acceptance, which would cause a number of problems later on.
As she came of high school and college age, she became aware of, and more confident in, her theatrical and comedic talents, and gravitated toward drama departments and the then nascent world of improv comedy. In Toronto in 1972 after dropping out of college, Radner became involved with a number of Canadian comedians, including Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Martin Short, and Paul Shaffer. Not long after she joined Toronto’s Second City comedy troupe, then on to the nationally syndicated National Lampoon Radio Hour with John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Richard Belzer, Bill Murray, and Brian Doyle-Murray. She was the first cast member hired by Lorne Michaels for Saturday Night Live, and performed in the ‘75 -’79 seasons. After her SNL career, she bounced around with a Broadway show and a book, then bottomed out with a number of very poorly reviewed films, then recovered a bit in the late ‘80s before her death in 1989 from ovarian cancer.
It’s a fairly well-worn biographical path, and one that the film seems unwilling to stray very far from. We learn that she had many lovers in her years in Toronto and with National Lampoon, but we’re meant to believe that this was nothing more than pursuing that big one love of her life, when it seems obvious that she was desperate for male attention. We’re also told, during her years with SNL, in which she had a prolonged and troubled relationship with Bill Murray, that once again she was just innocently looking for something stable and long term.
Director Lisa D’Apolito tries to use snippets of Radner’s diaries and cassette recordings to counterbalance her public and private lives. But what comes across, and what is perplexing, is the banality and sentimentality of her private thoughts.
Clearly, Radner was extremely influential to a number of younger comics, especially women. Emily Litella, Baba Wawa, and especially Roseanne Rosanadana were groundbreaking, and endure. The film trots out a number of current stars to tell of their worship of Radner. Fair enough, but what’s missing is anything approaching an analysis or even a speculation of her craft — of why she was funny.
By contrast, the Robin Williams documentary Come Inside My Mind gives us a biography, but also does a decent job of placing Williams in the larger context of the comedy landscape, and offers a number of insights as to just how that guy was so freakishly funny.
What Love, Gilda does accomplish, though, is to send us back to the source: those early SNL episodes, and that Beatles-esque ensemble of characters. Looking now at those episodes clearly illustrates just how new was the very concept of sketch comedy on a national network. Those early sketches run very, very long. They have time to breathe and to develop slowly, and there are many echos of the cast’s other projects throughout. Radner’s comic timing, especially with Roseanne Rosanadana, is razor sharp, and she’s clearly channeling Lucille Ball. She seems to realize her role as a support to the boys with the brains and the egos, but gets her shots in where she can, just trying to make it from one week to the next.
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Love, Gilda opens today in select Bay Area theaters.
