Harry Shearer might best be known by today’s generation as
the voice of Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders and God, among others, on
“The Simpsons.” But he’s done far more than that,
traversing genres, professions and audiences with the greatest
ease.
“I’ve been acting since I was 7 years old,”
Shearer said. “The dirty little secret is that acting is a
snap compared to writing or directing.”
His actor side will make its appearance tonight at the Royce
Hall Edgar Allan Poe show as Shearer projects his voice to spook
his audience with tales by Edgar Allen Poe. But this won’t be
Shearer’s first arrival to the UCLA campus; he first visited
as a high school senior and as an undergraduate student he earned a
political science degree and worked for every section in the Daily
Bruin except Sports.
“I have a million memories of the paper, including the
very climactic student council meeting where they voted against me
for the editorship because they decided I was anti-Greek,”
Shearer said. “But I lived most of my life at UCLA at that
paper, so it was a pretty amazing time. It was really the center of
my life when I was there.”
Shearer has since continued with journalism, albeit to a much
lesser extent. Odd jobs like writing for Slate magazine have come
between his other activities, which range from directing
feature-length films (such as the satirical “Teddy
Bears’ Picnic” released earlier this year) and hosting
“Le Show,” an NPR radio program currently in its 19th
year.
“It doesn’t get disorienting, it relieves the
boredom,” Shearer said of his helter-skelter job
description.
Shearer also spent some time writing and acting on Saturday
Night Live, which was where he met Hal Wilner, the show’s
music director and mastermind behind “Never Bet the Devil
Your Head.”
“We’ve known each other for quite a while; I guess
almost 20 years,” he said. “When Hal first called me
about it I (already) was a Poe fan, I like the floridity of his
prose. It’s stuff that’s much more fun to read aloud
than to read silently. It’s sort of designed for actors who
like to hear their voices.”
Contributing to a night of dark and morbid moods, Shearer will
be reading the “Pit and the Pendulum” tonight. He calls
it a wonderful story, but his biggest hope was to read something
they’re not performing this year, a rewrite of “The
Raven” by comedian Lord Buckley who reinvented the story by
converting it to “hipster prose.”
“I was bugging them to let me do that, but I’ll
probably have to wait another year,” Shearer said.
The twisted version that Shearer lobbied for would be fitting
for him, whose normally baritone voice can stretch to all possible
dimensions, making him one of the most versatile voices of the
night.
“I’m not one of those actors that can cry on cue, so
there’s another level of it that I’m not engaging
in,” Shearer said. “But comic acting has always come
pretty easily to me. I think you’re born with timing, and
once that happens it does come pretty easily.”
But comic acting is likely not something the Royce audience will
witness tonight as Shearer takes the stage. This time around, the
versatile talent isn’t interested in making the audience
laugh.
“Everybody’s got a dark side, so that’s what
we’re dealing with here ““ we’re playing with the
dark side,” he said.