Nothing Funny About Death of This Funny Man

Yellow tape seals off the street. Such a pretty street it is--unmarked, no center stripe, just a leafy tree that leans across it, like a canopy. Trash cans are out, but trucks can’t get through. The cops have stopped all traffic.

A crime scene is being contained, right around the corner from Cha Cha Cha, fine Caribbean cuisine. This is just the kind of name and upper-class neighborhood those “Saturday Night Live” television cut-ups could have had a high time with, even after a gory murder, had one happened in, oh, say, Brentwood.

A few driveways down, Phil Hartman is dead. So is his wife, Brynn, who by all appearances shot him, then herself. Nice man. Nice couple. Neighbors testify to that. A gruesome homicide-suicide has occurred, leaving a couple of popular people dead, leaving a couple of innocent kids orphaned.

Maybe this time, “Saturday Night Live” won’t find it so damn funny.

A gunshot on a quiet morning on a quiet street is nothing to joke about. Not when a frightened neighbor dials 911. Not when a 9-year-old boy is found trembling in a doorway. Not when the police have to ease him from the house, then go back inside for his 6-year-old sister, only to hear a second gunshot from the bedroom and find those children’s parents there, dead.

Anything-for-a-laugh TV comics had a field day after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were found dead on a quiet day on a quiet street, with her kids not far away. The jokes, they always said, were at O.J.’s expense, but the mother of two children was dead, and the kids had to live with the jokes.

Maybe this time, comics will wait a while before coming up with all those hilarious lines.

*

As a performer, the best thing about Phil Hartman was his ability to be clever without being cruel.

He was surrounded at times by remarkably cruel individuals, who would stop at nothing. Hartman, however, could do anything, impersonate anybody, and he could have easily done it right in front of them, without making them feel abused or used.

“What I try to do is not an impression but an impersonation,” he once said, straining to explain the difference. “When I do somebody, I really try to be as much like them as I possibly can, and I don’t like to go too far with the caricature. I like to see how close I can get, because I think, in a way, that’s what my talent is--that I can really get so close that it allows the audience to suspend disbelief.”

I can see him now:

* As President Clinton, huffing and puffing his way into a typical McDonald’s restaurant, jogging in a Georgetown cap and an Arkansas sweatshirt, greeting the customers and eating off their tables.

(Secret Service agent: “Sir, we’ve only been jogging for three blocks. Besides, Mrs. Clinton asked us not to let you in any more fast-food places.”)

(Hartman: “Let me tell ya somethin’. There’s gonna be a bunch’a things we don’t tell Mrs. Clinton about. Fast food is the least of our worries.”)

* Or as Frank Sinatra, crooning and clowning and carrying on about what’s kooky and ring-a-ding-ding about stardom.

(“You’re riding that express elevator to the penthouse over Success Street, the main drag through Dreamtown. But hey, I’m just a saloon singer from Hoboken, not a thesaurus. Know this, sweetheart: One day you wake up, and you’re top dog, on the top rung of that thing up there. That’s when you get on your knees and thank the Big Man that he told the lady Fame to tap you on the shoulder.”)

* Or even as the obscure Adm. James Stockdale, on a 1992 campaign trail with Ross Perot.

(Dana Carvey as Perot: “Ain’t this pretty country, admiral? Aren’t you having fun?”)

(Hartman: “Who am I? Why am I here?”)

It was good, clean fun. Topical, yes, with a cutting edge to it, but rarely nasty, never vicious.

Just to watch him swagger in a neckerchief as Charlton Heston, pretending to do sequels to “Soylent Green,” or don a white wig and do Phil Donahue, tumbling face-first over a whole row of people just to thrust a microphone at one in the middle, that was Phil Hartman at the height of his comedy--screwball, but inspired. He broke people up. He hurt nobody.

*

A full five hours after the 911 call Thursday, a police commander stands in the center of the sealed-off Encino street, confirming that the Hartmans are indeed dead, hesitant to confirm as yet that the children were theirs. That would come later.

The case is “quite complex,” Cmdr. David Kalish adds, inasmuch as it affects innocent kids.

Sensational murder cases have happened in upper-class California neighborhoods before.

They aren’t funny, and they never will be.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or phone (213) 237-7366.