At some point during my childhood, I decided that few things were funnier than the sight of an obvious stunt dummy being put through some kind of unspeakable physical horror in a piece of filmed entertainment. The idea most likely coalesced upon seeing Ricardo Montalbán (or his stand-in) thrash a simulacrum of Priscilla Presley around like a rag doll during the baseball scene in “The Naked Gun.” Or when the Beastie Boys tossed a dummy off a bridge in the video for “Sabotage.” The joke is at once lowbrow and high concept—it mocks all the lousy shows or movies that had cheaped out on special effects in the past, but also puts those making the joke squarely in the tradition of the thing they are parodying. We’re all just messing around here, and, of course, all fiction is fake.
Bob Einstein, who died on Wednesday, of cancer, at the age of seventy-six, was the king of the dummy gag. As the recurring character Super Dave Osborne, a hapless stuntman in the mold of Evel Knievel who appeared on late-night variety TV and, later, on shows of his own, Einstein had a fake version of the character walloped by a wrecking ball, flung out the passenger window of a moving car, dropped from the top of Toronto’s CN Tower, crushed by a piano, driven off a pier, knocked from the top of a speeding bus, and, among many more indignities, whacked in the crotch with a golf club.
Einstein got his start in comedy writing for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” alongside Steve Martin, in the late sixties, leaving behind a job in advertising. He first played the character of Super Dave in 1972, on John Byner’s variety show, and made appearances through the eighties on Byner’s Canadian sketch show “Bizarre,” and on Carson and Letterman. Einstein, who had played basketball in college, looked the part of the hardy American daredevil—tall and ruddy and handsome—and appeared at home in a white jumpsuit, emblazoned with stars and stripes, and a hat with the letters “SD” on it. The only thing off was his voice, which was distinctively pinched, as though he were always in the middle of a terrible cold. Yet he brought to each doomed physical challenge a grand showmanship and inflated self-regard. Before one of his bits (wrecking ball, splat), he proclaimed, “I sense danger and react like a cat.”
Comedy was the family business. Bob was the son of Harry Einstein, a comedian’s comedian who performed characters on Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson’s radio shows in the thirties and forties, and famously had a heart attack and died backstage, in 1958, at a Friars Club roast of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. And he was the older brother of Albert Brooks, who changed his last name when he was nineteen. (Einstein sells his brother running shoes in “Modern Romance.”) People were often surprised to learn that the two were related. Whereas Brooks was precise and cerebral, Einstein appeared merely broad and goofy, the sunny jock. But both men had a similar sensibility—on talk shows, they would appear impatient and put-upon, and would mess with the fourth wall—and had similar comedic projects. Whereas his brother satirized the cultural desolation of the eighties as a forlorn outsider, Einstein mocked it by inhabiting its greatest excesses. Super Dave was a can-do Reagan man who couldn’t.
In 1987, Super Dave got his own variety show, which ran for five seasons on Showtime and made the character a household name. The world-building expanded: Super Dave lived on a compound and, along with his assistant Fuji Hakayito (played as an unfortunate Japanese caricature by Art Irizawa), ran a lab of useless modern gizmos. The show, rather incongruously, welcomed an impressive list of musical performers, ranging from Ray Charles to a young Céline Dion, who often referred to the host by his nominal first name, Super. Its combination of lavish buildup and flimsy execution was a forebear, along with the Letterman show, of the intentionally crappy stunts on Conan O’Brien’s late-night programs and the shenanigans of the “Jackass” guys. Super Dave himself was the prototype of the confident idiot characters played by Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell.
It’s rather hard to picture it now, but, for a moment in the early nineties, Super Dave was everywhere. In addition to the Showtime series, he was in Nike commercials, was name-checked by rappers, and even had an animated show, “Super Dave: Daredevil for Hire,” which aired for a season on Fox. Super Dave, this idiosyncratic creation, had become the very kind of mass-cultural star, a ubiquitous C-lister for hire, that Einstein had been mocking from the start. The character petered out after that, but he had a long tail, popping up on the rebooted “Hollywood Squares” and starring in a feature film, in 2000, that went straight to DVD.
Einstein, meanwhile, reëmerged later in life as part of Larry David’s coterie of Hollywood weirdos on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”—funny enough to run with the crowd but not famous enough to play himself. As Marty Funkhouser, an obtuse and aggrieved friend of David’s, he got to explore his Jewishness and the rage that had lived just beneath the surface of Super Dave. The Funkman, as David called him, lent the show some of its most outrageous moments, but my favorite bit of his was when he declared, in his seventh decade of life, that the death of his mother had made him an orphan. (Technically true, but come on.) And, in the penultimate episode of the seventh season, he tells one of the better dirty jokes I’ve ever heard, which makes Jerry Seinfeld wince and then double over. Marty Funkhouser is a singular character in American comedy—earnest and petty and mean and kind and dumb—and perhaps the truest expression of Einstein’s famed wit and bitter sense of humor. But when I think of Einstein I’ll think of that Super Dave dummy being smashed, smushed, and otherwise maimed—with the laugh track screaming—yet always coming back for more.
Sourse: newyorker.com
