Lightweight With a Punch
Without the 5 o’clock shadow, he’d look like a junior high school hall monitor. With his boyish blond hair drooping over his eyes and a tiny, striped pullover sweater stretched tightly across his narrow chest, it’s hard to believe this wisecracking imp is a regular in a hit TV series, has starred in a couple of successful feature films and now headlines his own HBO comedy special.
But David Spade, all 135 pounds of him, has made it big: turning his diminutive stature into a comic weapon of snide asides and goofy whining that has launched him to fame and fortune--the best revenge against all the dimwitted lug-heads who used to beat him up after school.
“What’s really neat about me--do you have a few minutes?” Spade, 33, joshes when asked to explain his appeal, which has taken him from six years on “Saturday Night Live” to a central role in the latest hot NBC sitcom, “Just Shoot Me.”
“The one thing that is good that all of my life was bad, is that I’m not super tall or huge or a football player or good looking,” Spade explained in a recent interview. “All that would play against what I do now. My sense of humor is based on how I look. If I was some studly guy, it wouldn’t be funny. You know that I’m at a disadvantage right off the bat, so it’s hard to hate me.”
On “Just Shoot Me,” Spade plays Dennis Finch, a wimpy, dateless and ultra-sarcastic office manager at a major fashion magazine. Cast alongside veteran actors George Segal, Laura San Giacomo, Wendy Malick and Enrico Colantoni, the 5-foot-7 actor has a specialty: the cutting one-liner. Basically everything out of his mouth is some stinging insult or quirky shenanigan.
“I don’t even really use the word ‘actor’ because when you start calling yourself an actor it sounds so self-important and horrible,” Spade said. “Enrico teaches an acting class where they do Chekhov, and they all make fun of me that I have no idea what that even is. But I don’t do drama. There are little waves of it in the show where I might have to console somebody, but I do it ineptly and it turns into some comic bit.
“And that’s the fun of it for me--doing my thing, saying something in a funny voice or acting goofy. No one wants to see me go do ‘The Razor’s Edge.’ I didn’t want to see Bill Murray do that and I love him. I just get mad when people want to break from what the audience likes. I owe the crowd. They are paying and I can’t get too self-indulgent and say, ‘Here’s my interpretation of a one act by Eugene O’Neill--tough [expletive] if you came here expecting to laugh.’ ”
Nevertheless, San Giacomo, who plays a serious-minded editor stuck in the fluffy fashion world, said that it is Spade’s ability to convey an underlying sense of pathos that makes him endearing.
“His persona is this guy a little bit above the emotional fray, and then you find out that there is a vulnerable center to that,” San Giacomo said. “That’s what makes him appealing. He’s really fast and funny and sharp, but underneath you can see there is a vulnerable person just like all of us. You can watch Finch spar with people and really get in good jabs and insults, but then his porcelain kitty gets smashed and he’s really upset. It’s a nice duality that’s really tough to pull off.”
Even tougher to pull off is “Just Shoot Me’s” transformation from an unheralded midseason afterthought last year to one of this season’s few success stories. Last fall, NBC bestowed an enormous gift on the series by scheduling it on Tuesdays behind “Frasier,” and it quickly jumped into the Top 20. More recently, as the network scrambles to figure out what to do once “Seinfeld” departs, NBC tucked the show on Thursdays between “Friends” and “Seinfeld,” where it has leaped into the Top 5.
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That success has led to speculation that “Just Shoot Me” is likely to become one of NBC’s linchpins next fall, expected to reel in audiences on its own without the benefit of a fortuitous lead-in--perhaps even, and Spade cringes in horror at the mention of it, the show that fills the hole left by “Seinfeld” itself.
“The stakes are getting higher and higher and that’s scary, because where do you have to go?” Spade said. “It’s great that people are watching and liking us, but how much of that is luck? I like milking off of ‘Frasier’ or snuggling up like a papoose behind ‘Friends.’ I’m not too proud to say that.”
Spade grew up “a nerd” in Scottsdale, Ariz., where a case of the measles in sixth grade kept him out of the state chess finals. The first time he got a girl alone in his house, he showed her his coin collection.
While such romantic disasters were painful at the time, he soon realized that his social feebleness made for funny stories. He began performing stand-up comedy in the Phoenix area and, after a couple of years, dropped out of college to pursue it full time.
Eventually, he spent six seasons on “Saturday Night Live,” then parlayed his celebrity into film roles, including “Tommy Boy” and “Blacksheep” with fellow “SNL” alum Chris Farley.
Spade’s most recent movie, “Senseless,” in which he co-starred with Marlon Wayans, bombed. But the success of “Just Shoot Me” has led to a wheelbarrow full of other movie offers for Spade to tackle during his summer break.
Nearly all of them “stink,” however, he said. Instead, he will see how his HBO solo act is received and then, he hopes, star in a fairly low-budget, funny romance--a script he co-wrote to be intentionally a bit more mature than “Tommy Boy.”
“It’s awful. The movies they’re sending me are written for such mass appeal that it technically can’t be funny, because they’re drawing from the same eight or nine jokes that are allowed because they don’t offend anyone on this planet. So maybe, they think, I’m the new guy to say them. There’s no benefit to doing that. If I don’t think it’s funny, then I’m not going to be funny. And now the stakes are higher. I have too much to lose, so I’d rather not do anything at all this summer. Maybe I can spend some of that free time getting back to where my heart truly lies.”
He pauses dramatically, then, emoting wildly, adds: “The theater!”
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* “Just Shoot Me” airs Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. on NBC (Channel 4). “David Spade: Take the Hit” can be seen at 11:30 p.m. Friday on HBO.