David Koechner, how does it feel to be one of the saviors of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live?”
“I don’t know if we can call ourselves saviors yet,” Koechner said with a laugh.
Koechner was one half of the Fops, those Restoration-garbed, powdered-wig and ruby-red lipstick-wearing, celebrity-fawning bizarros who used terms such as “delicious!” in their dialogue. Koechner played Fagen to Mark McKinney’s Lucien Callow, and the two claimed to delight in watching television shows naked.
(Koechner and McKinney actually were naked on the show at times. “Mark McKinney’s idea, and I cringed every time I had to do it,” Koechner said. He added that his parents heard from worshipers at church one Sunday: “Well, we saw a lot of your son last night….”)
The Fops became instant character stars on a show that, at the time, desperately needed them. Along with the popular Spartan cheerleaders (Cheri Oteri and Will Ferrell), “The Joe Pesci Show” (Jim Breuer) and accident-prone teen Mary Katherine Gallagher (Molly Shannon), the Fops helped “SNL” rebound with fans in a big way.
“I’ll tell you what: I’m proud of the work we all did this year,” Koechner said here at the Just for Laughs Montreal International Comedy Festival, performing some sketch comedy bits with fellow “SNL-ers” Ferrell and Breuer (Koechner and Ferrell were devastating in a mime-like routine keyed to the rap anthem “Gangstas Paradise”).
But it wasn’t just the Fops that kept the personable and likable Koechner in viewers’ faces last season. He scored with several other characters, including Gary MacDonald, “Weekend Update” anchor Norm’s “brother,” who fails miserably when trying to be as funny as his comic sibling (Gary also made a hilarious appearance at Just for Laughs); T-Bones, a porkchop sideburns-wearing oddball; and former presidential hopefuls Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan.
The 33-year-old actor admitted he felt “fortunate” to have been able to get so many recurring characters on “SNL,” no easy feat considering its large cast.
“Most of them came from probably an improv situation, where you just pull out a character in a scene,” Koechner said. “And you don’t know exactly where it comes from at the time, (so) you kind of keep working on it later.”
McKinney, whom Koechner admired from McKinney’s days with the Canadian sketch group Kids in the Hall, approached him with a character that could work with something Koechner was playing with. And the Fops were born.
Koechner was plucked by “SNL” out of the cast of Chicago’s Second City Northwest improv group along with Nancy Walls last year. Also added as writers last season were Second City vets Adam McKay and Tom Gianas.
Koechner, who got his initial comedy training at the ImprovOlympic in Chicago, said working on “SNL” was “an invaluable experience. You put on a show every week from scratch. You can’t beat that experience. It’s incredible.”
There were other perks, such as working with the top actors and celebrities who play host to the show each week, and catching hot music acts perform live.
And then there was Koechner’s dinner with Teri Hatcher of “Lois & Clark.”
“Oh, that was with everybody,” said Koechner, adding that the cast would regularly go to dinner with a guest host. “It wasn’t one-on-one, sorry to say. I can make it up–is that what you want to hear?”
Depends on your imagination.
That fine edition with Hatcher as host was seen by many as a turning point in “SNL’s” first season with the new cast, when the writing and the acting started firing on all cylinders.
“There was a feeling, I think after the first of the year, that things were clicking,” explained Koechner, a Missouri native who moved to Chicago in 1986, joined the ImprovOlympic the following year, and was hired by Second City in 1993. “We’re not really cognizant of which one (show) was better or which one wasn’t, because you don’t really do yourself a favor by judging each show harshly. You just hope each one is good.
“Lorne (Michaels, `SNL’s’ executive producer) usually comes out on Monday and says, `You know, we had a good show. I think it would be a good idea if we had another good show.’ “
Koechner hasn’t heard any official announcement about whether he or any of the other cast members would be back for another year on “SNL.”
“I hope it all works out,” he said. He added that he would like to return if for no other reason than to further develop friendships he made on the show. Friendships came easily, because the cast members were all “in the same boat” as far as the majority of them performing as regulars for the first time.
“Nobody knew anything; nobody knew what to expect or how people would react to you,” Koechner said. “So we all kind of like became an ensemble through that . . . it was an instant chemistry that developed between everybody.”
