Phil Hartman: The man who saved 'Saturday Night Live'

Michaels pleaded with Tartikoff to reconsider. While he’d just presided over the worst season since Jean Doumanian’s woeful ’80-’81 one-and-done, Michaels saw signs of life. Jon Lovitz’s pathological liar Tommy Flanagan had catchphrase potential (“That’s the ticket!”), while newcomers Nora Dunn and "Weekend Update" anchor Dennis Miller had shown promise. Michaels also had designs on poaching a creative associate of Paul Reubens who’d contributed some very funny material for Pee-wee Herman’s 1985 episode. Michaels hit up Reubens’s agent for the skinny on the writer-performer. Just how good was this guy? The agent’s reply: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

No performer from the twelfth season of “Saturday Night Live” can lay claim to single-handedly saving the show in one lightning bolt of brilliance like Eddie Murphy did in 1981, but if you're looking to identify why the program not only survived but thrived for the next decade, becoming the unkillable pop cultural institution it is today, you need look no further than Phil Hartman. A versatile impressionist with the vaguely handsome visage of a 1950s B-movie star, Hartman could just as easily lead a sketch as he could disappear into the background as a customer or waiter – and he would happily do either. He was immensely talented and supremely selfless, appearing in five or six sketches per episode, whatever it took to help his cast mates shine and put together the strongest show possible. He also, by virtue of his age, possessed a more moderate ambition than young(er) guns Dana Carvey and Mike Myers; while they sought the big-screen stardom of 30 Rock alums John Belushi and Chevy Chase, Hartman – who was 38 when he joined the show – considered being on SNL “the pinnacle.” For eight seasons, Hartman both elevated the show and held it together, prompting Jan Hooks to nickname him “The Glue.”

An Ontario-born graphic artist who designed memorable album covers for Steely Dan, Poco and America, Hartman found his comedic calling in the 1970s as a member of the Los Angeles-based sketch troupe, The Groundlings. It's there that he formed a close creative kinship with Reubens, assisting in the development of his Pee-wee Herman character, co-writing “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and co-creating both the adults-only “The Pee-wee Herman Show” and the Emmy-winning children’s program “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” By the time Hartman found his way to SNL, he was a fully formed and polished comedic dynamo, acing his audition with his hard-boiled private eye Chick Hazard, an over-caffeinated stun gun pitchman, and a German impressionist who does uncanny impersonations of Jack Benny, John Wayne and Jack Nicholson. His shape-shifting skill and rapid-fire, precisely enunciated delivery had Michaels convinced he’d discovered the next Dan Aykroyd: an explosively talented utility player who could write his own material.

Hartman joined fellow “unknowns” Lovitz, Dunn, Miller, Carvey, Jan Hooks, Kevin Nealon and Victoria Jackson for the 12th and, if they failed to make the show funny again, final season of SNL. While Lovitz and Carvey were the immediate breakout stars thanks to recurring characters like Tommy Flanagan and The Church Lady, Hartman made his mark as the show’s new President Ronald Reagan. Whereas most comedians were lampooning Reagan’s inability to remember anything related to the worsening Iran-Contra scandal, Hartman and writer Robert Smigel posited that the President’s smiling, know-nothing exterior was a ruse. Behind closed doors, Reagan knew everything. He was the cunning criminal genius who’d orchestrated the entire Iran-Contra operation, maintaining an alarmingly perfect recall of every minute detail.

Another early triumph for Hartman was his uncannily spot-on imitation of Phil Donahue. The daytime talk show pioneer had already toppled into self-parody, so Hartman focused on nailing the host’s over-dramatic cadence and microphone-clutching gesticulations while the writers painted him into situations that were only slightly more ridiculous than what commonly occurred on his cynically provocative program. The result was a devastating critique of the format, and a depressingly accurate prediction of where it was headed.

The highlight of Hartman’s first “Donahue” sketch was his interaction with an emotionally distraught guest played by Jan Hooks. It’s a tantalizing preview of the natural chemistry that would give the show its Bill and Hillary Clinton, Donald and Ivana/Marla Trump, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and many other memorable pairings. Hartman’s team player reputation was frequently burnished by Hooks (his “work wife”), who credited her frequent scene partner with helping her overcome debilitating stage fright. “He knew how to look you in the eye,” she said. “And he knew the power of being able to lay back and let somebody else be funny.”

It’s this generous quality that separates Hartman from Aykroyd, who, while versatile, possessed the same scene-stealing ambition that consumed Belushi. It’s not that Hartman didn’t have post-SNL dreams (he wrote a Chick Hazard screenplay and developed a horror-comedy called “Mr. Fix-It” with Robert Zemeckis), or that he couldn't dominate a sketch if need be (see "The Anal-Retentive Chef", "The Sinatra Group" or his Clinton-at-McDonald's cold open); he just happened to be content with how his career had played out, and wouldn't be heartbroken if he'd peaked. He was, as Hooks observed in her beautiful 1998 eulogy, serene. And in the hectic, tear-it-all-down-at-the-last-second-and-try-something-new atmosphere of SNL, Hartman's tranquility proved invaluable.

The season-to-season renewal panic that had dogged SNL since the departure of the original cast vanished after that twelfth season. The ratings, which had declined precipitously over the years, rebounded as Michaels’s group of “unknowns” became household names. Carvey, Myers, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley and David Spade would get the movie star vehicles and the magazine cover glory, but the glue that held it together – bridging cast and writing staff changes – was Hartman. As Michaels noted in 1987, "I know the things that are more accessible or have a little more sugar in them are taken up by the public, and real brilliant work doesn't necessarily get appreciated until years later.” Twenty years after his untimely death, there is not a single performer whose work has proven more vital to the enduring institution of SNL than Phil Hartman's.