With Catherine O’Hara’s successes and accolades within the pop cultural mainstream—including three radically different yet equally iconic characterizations of motherhood in Beetlejuice, Home Alone, and Schitt’s Creek—it’s often overlooked how she changed the face and frame of improvisational sketch comedy as she moved from the live stage onto screens both small and big. Before improvisational sketch comedy became a 21st century universe of chain-store laughline graduate institutions with The Second City, UCB, ComedySportz, and other impromptu comedic ideals usually ending in “Z,” it was a gangly thing, an awkward live space where runaway actors, renegade comedians, and searching stage- and screenwriters met, drank, smoked, and intermingled on stage without boundaries.
Starting with the risky erudition and over-the-stop immersive characterizations of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, improvisational sketch comedy became magic. And yet, for all of its basis in study, craft, and intellectual process, what made improv-based sketch comedy purr was raw intuition and the absolute willingness to let one’s self go, to be unconcerned with attractive looks and good or bad manners. Toronto’s Second City troupe—a red-headed stepchild to its Chicago parent—felt like the rowdiest of comic crews, despite Canada’s well-mannered tastefulness. And as soon as earliest alumni such as Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd split for Saturday Night Live in 1974, the spotlight fell bright on Eugene Levy, John Candy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas, and O’Hara, who, from 1976 through 1984, took their stage show to syndicated television with the late-night SCTV.
What made O’Hara the toast of the tiny, fictional Canadian town of Melonville, its ramshackle TV station, and its array of damaged-goods greats? You can look first at the basic tenets of improvisation, which means always saying “yes” to every request. From that affirmation, O’Hara’s most intensely odd, dangerous, and enigmatic characterizations—whether uncomfortably spot-on impersonations of Elizabeth Taylor and Katherine Hepburn or not-too-fictional lounge singers, bombshells, and outre eccentrics—were preposterous but personable, irritable but intelligent, derisory but endearing, and doomed but never down—not by a long shot. O’Hara’s so-called veteran showbiz has-beens on SCTV (some unaware they were past due, others ready for their comeback that wasn’t coming, most more surreal than Norma Desmond) were ripe with cliché and clownish mannerism, but never without a machete-like sharpness that could cut deep with their barely disguised madness. She was having fun within the stereotype, but you never got the feeling that she was poking fun.
Instead, O’Hara found the emotional core of her disgruntled yet weirdly cheerful marrieds, her fevered flatland homebodies, her flamboyant vixens, and her head-flinging sexpots (her Lola Heatherton makes your neck hurt just watching her flailing and twitching next to Levy’s Bobby Bittman) by playing up their heartache and exploding their absurdity. If you compacted David Lynch’s homespun hell of Blue Velvet into one character, it would be the old woman in the long-distance call sketch. If you need someone to channel the splashy, manic celebration of starshine and sculptured eyebrows á la Brooke Shields, Joan Crawford, or her self-made Dusty Towne character, it’s O’Hara’s to lose. And along with physicalizing these women with a wild abandon (especially Lola), remember, too, that O’Hara was a writer at SCTV and an architect of everything that the Toronto Second City troupe committed to the stage. “I love playing people who have no real sense of the impression they’re making on anyone else,” she’s quoted as saying to Vulture.
It was her determined, lived-in earnestness that also made O’Hara the centerpiece of director/writer Christopher Guest’s cinematic world of well-devised mockumentaries with more heart and smarts than snark—comedy at its most golden, reality-bashing, and moving. And that’s O’Hara’s sweet spot. While you can look to the stardom-seeking marrieds of “Blaine, Missouri” and “Home for Purim” that fill Guffman and Consideration, respectively, and the eternally horny dog lover of Best in Show, it’s O’Hara’s work in A Mighty Wind with Levy—later her scene husband in Schitt’s Creek—that will break your heart while busting a gut. As the estranged-lover 1960s’ folk duo Mitch & Mickey who ended each performance with “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” and a smooch, reconnecting for a reunion performance at The Town Hall in New York brings about drama for all, especially as the poetic Mitch had a nervous breakdown after the pair’s break-up. Playing to Mitch’s vulnerabilities makes Mickey twice as vulnerable, and their kiss at the end of their reunion set is breathlessly cathartic.
If you’re looking to connect the tenderness and torrid oddity of her work with Eugene Levy from one point to another, start re-watching Schitt’s Creek tonight. Moira Rose’s every conceited move with her nervously doting husband along for the ride is more extreme, but the spirited goofy passion of Mitch & Mickey carries throughout. No other sketch artist or improvisational great could make you feel like O’Hara does. Along with her mainstream classic moments such as shouting “Kevin,” that’s what we’ll miss without Catherine O’Hara. FL
