Fred Willard, beloved American weirdo, colossus of eccentric normality, is gone. For an actor rarely cast in a lead role — he is probably best known for the improvisational ensemble films of Christopher Guest, including “Best in Show” and “A Mighty Wind” — the huge sense of cultural loss occasioned by his death Friday is remarkable. Not a character actor so much as a character who acted, he was always in some essential way himself. If you wanted a Fred Willard type you were going to have to get Fred Willard in: He was a secret ingredient, a special sauce, useful in all sorts of occasions and never out of demand. And we’ll never have that recipe again.
That isn’t to say that he didn’t have range, only that the variations in his performances were always on a theme of Fred Willard. You got two for the price of one: the actor and the role, the person and the personality, superimposed, inextricable. Encountering him onscreen was always a bit of a thrill, as if one had run into him on the street. (“It’s Fred Willard!”) Watching him, you perceived the practiced professional, but also a person who might have strayed onto a set, been handed a script — or not — and told, “Action.” Indeed, it’s evident just how useful and adaptable his talents were both from the quantity of his credits and their range, which ran from mainstream to fringe, comforting to transgressive, “Everybody Loves Raymond” to “”Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”
Willard was already over 40 when the mostly faux talk show “Fernwood 2 Night,” on which he played announcer-sidekick Jerry Hubbard to Martin Mull’s host Barth Gimble, made him (sort of) famous in the mid-1970s. Not that you could tell to look at him: Square-jawed, broad-shouldered, with good hair, a wide smile and bright eyes, he was boyish even as a senior citizen. (He could be coy about his age, interviews reveal; I can’t be the only person amazed to learn he was 86 when he passed.) Jerry Hubbard set a pattern for Willard characters to come — self-assured, well-fed, oblivious to criticism, dim. (“Did you ever wonder where weight goes when you lose it? Probably there’s a huge mountain of yellow fat they’re going to discover someplace, out where the elephants die or something,” Jerry asks a guest diet guru.) Willard and Mull would reteam several times over the years, including Mull’s “The History of White People in America,” as romantic partners on “Roseanne” and as robots in an episode of “Dexter’s Laboratory.”
Before “Fernwood,” there was a decade and a half of steady work, including the Greenwich Village comedy scene, a stint in Chicago’s Second City and the improvisational comedy group the Ace Trucking Company, which appeared often on variety and talk shows in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were guest shots on “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “The Love Boat” and “Love American Style.”