Thursday, 5/8/97 Meyers finds pain, mortality are necessary,
natural parts of comedy After devastating loss of two role models,
one-year hiatus, comedian gets back to work with latest movie
‘Austin Powers’
By Emily Forster Daily Bruin Senior Staff Comedians are not
necessarily happy. They may bring cheer to the masses with their
stand-up routines or character sketches, but comedians like Mike
Meyers have found that pain is an integral part of their humor. "I
don’t know what comedy is, but I have a pseudo-intellectual
answer," Meyers says. "We’re all subject to the laws of entropy and
gravity. So the juxtaposition of man’s God-like status and the
realization that we also rot is where we have mortality and we
laugh. For example, if you see a man walking along the street and
he slips on a banana peel he is subject to zero friction and
gravity like a rock is. He is mortal, and in response to that
mortality, we laugh." It is odd to hear these words uttered by the
comedian best known for his character, Wayne, from sketches on
"Saturday Night Live" and the two hit "Wayne’s World" films. But
the Canadian comic starring in the spy spoof "Austin Powers" has a
deep side that goes back to his Toronto childhood where no one
thought Michael Meyers was even remotely funny. "I wasn’t the
funniest of my brothers," Meyers admits. "My two brothers were much
funnier than I was, to the point where my mum would say to me ‘Oh,
Mike, don’t try and be funny. You’re not funny, Peter is. It’s a
bit sad, really. Peter comes by it naturally. With you it’s very
forced.’ "She’s my biggest critic. She’s never thought that I was
as good as Dana Carvey or Phil Hartman. Seriously. I said, ‘Mum,
you gotta think that I was good in ‘Wayne’s World.’ You must.
You’re my mother – it’s the law.’ And she’s just goin’, ‘Dana’s
better.’" Meyers thinks that his mother has a point. At least in
his childhood, he admits that he was more hyper than humorous. And
even now, Meyers feels that he does not necessarily have a funny
personality. "I was hyperactive and hypoglycemic, so if I had a lot
of sugar in me I was funny," Meyers says. "I’m an intermittent
extrovert. Apparently I’m very hard to read. I have times when I’m
extremely extroverted and times when I’m quite quiet. When I was a
child, I got in trouble a lot for talking. It was always like ‘Mike
is a good student, except he talks too much.’" The talkative Meyers
wanted to be as funny as his brothers, and he was bent on becoming
an actor. In fact, Meyers was so motivated that he began getting
roles by the time he turned 8. "I wanted to be an actor since I was
4 years old," Meyers says. "I started doing commercials when I was
8 years old. Gilda Radner played my mum in a TV commercial when I
was 10. It was a four-day shoot in Toronto. I fell in love with
her, I cried on the last day. My brothers taunted me mercilessly,
called me a sucky baby. "So I was sucky baby for a year. And then
my brother said, ‘Hey, sucky baby, your girlfriend’s on a TV show
on Saturday.’ And it was ‘Saturday Night Live.’ We watched it and
our minds were blown – it was such a great comedy show. I turned to
everybody and said, ‘I’m gonna be on this show.’ And my brother’s
like, ‘Ya, get a load of sucky baby.’" Despite his family’s doubts
of his comedic talents, Meyers got on "Saturday Night Live,"
marking the first major step in his path to success. But his joy
was partly shadowed by the tragedy of his role model’s death.
"Gilda Radner was always the one that I identified with most on
‘Saturday Night Live,’" Meyers says. "The irony is on the last
Saturday of my first season, I was walking into work and somebody
says to me, ‘How do you respond to the news of Gilda Radner’s
death?’ And I was devastated." But this devastation was nothing
compared to the loss Meyers felt after his father passed away. When
asked to describe his most painful experience, Meyers answers
without a beat. "My father’s death in 1991," Meyers says. "My dad
was absolutely hilarious, a very, very funny man. And very silly.
You’d be talking to a policeman or something and he’d be kicking
your ass. My friends would come over and they’d say ‘What do you do
for a living?’ And he’d say ‘I play the bongo drums on the ‘Mission
Impossible’ theme,’ and just crazy things like that. Just weird
stuff, all the time. Always made cups of tea, all the time. Loved
comedy, loved to laugh. In my career, it wasn’t really real until I
told my dad about it. It’s like in Vegas, when you win chips, you
don’t really feel like you won money until they go and pay you
money." Meyers’ eccentric father was always an inspiration for him.
So when Meyers’ father began to get ill, he found his growing
career of little importance. "My dad got Alzheimer’s in 1987, and
right around that time my career started to take off," Meyers says.
"And then I’m on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and they say to me ‘Do you
want to do a movie?’ And so we did ‘Wayne’s World’ while he just
got progressively worse. "He died eight weeks before the opening of
the movie. On the Thursday before the movie opened, I was just a
regular guy on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ just one of eight guys. And
then after the movie opened, everything Dana and I did was under
intense scrutiny. And I was an unhappy guy. It just didn’t seem
real to me because I couldn’t tell my dad about it." Meyers found
it difficult to enjoy his fame. He was the star of a movie that was
extremely lucrative in the United States and throughout the world,
but as the offers came pouring in, he found little interest in
them. It was ex-"Saturday Night Live" star Bill Murray who gave
Meyers an invaluable piece of advice. Instead of struggling to find
projects that meant something to him, Murray suggested that Meyers
simply take a break. "He told me to take time off," Meyers says.
"Murray took time off and went to study at the Sorbonne, and he
said it was a wonderful experience. So I took time off and nested
with my wife. We bought a house, we got some dogs and went and
visited my aunt in Liverpool. I took a year off and it was the
greatest thing I ever did. I took power skating lessons – that was
my Sorbonne. "So I was busy improving my hockey game and reading a
lot of scripts. But my heart was broken and there was nobody to do
these movies for. And then one day I’m driving to hockey practice
and I hear the song ‘The Look of Love’ and I thought, ‘I wanna be
in a movie with this song, and everything that it implies.’ All the
’60s swinger, sexual revolution stuff. We live in such an uptight
politically correct time. It makes me laugh to think that at that
time, people were just unabashedly, publically horny, which nobody
is now. People used to be like ‘I was on the prowl,’ and I thought
it was hilarious. So I wrote it and they made it." As of now,
Meyers has no plans. Trying to get back on his feet has been hard
enough, and he wants to enjoy the people left in his life. But he
ponders that losing his two greatest role models has served as a
lesson in comedy. "Comedy is pain plus time. We constantly see
these two elements in things that are humorous. They force us to
look at our mortality, and in it we find ourselves laughing."
Related Links: Austin Powers site