Basic Provisions
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When Tina Fey was asked to talk about how she dealt with failed ideas in SNL , she immediately remembered one of Will Ferrell's sketches.
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A sketch in which Will Ferrell played an office worker who was so enamored with the star of the show «"Welcome back, Cotter."» Gabe Kaplan, who starts dressing like him, failed so badly that he was taken off the air.
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«The table read was so funny,” Fey recalled on the podcast. New Heights , - and then death.".
Any self-respecting comedian knows that every triumph is built on a foundation of failures... that the road to hits is paved, if you will, with failures.
Tina Fey easily came up with an example of a failure so incredible that it proves it happens to everyone. In a recent podcast episode New Heights with Jason and Travis, Kelsey Faye began to explain that in her ten years as a writer and actress on the program, Saturday Night Live failures were so predictable that they simply had to be accepted.
«"After a while, you just... I always compare it to the little I remember about sports. It's like, sometimes you give it your all, lose, and you think, 'Okay, I'm not dead. I live to fight again. I guess we'll try again next week.'" When the perfect example from her work in SNL , it wasn't one of her own sketches that best illustrated this, but a sketch featuring Will Ferrell.
«"Will Ferrell once had a sketch that we thought was really funny about a guy who looked exactly like Gabe Kaplan, the guy from the movie."» Welcome back, Kotter. «"," she explained.
The four-season NBC sitcom about a high school teacher (Kaplan) struggling with his rowdy class of struggling students is now best remembered for giving a young John Travolta his breakout role. But Kaplan was a popular stand-up comedian when Kotter debuted in 1975, and his curly hair, thick mustache, and penchant for waistcoats became instantly recognizable as the show's popularity grew.
Three decades have passed since the end TV series "Kotter"« , apparently didn't do him any favors, as audience members during the dress rehearsal completely missed Ferrell's resemblance to Kaplan, and therefore the joke. "Here's a guy who looks like Gabe Kaplan working at an accounting firm, and then he comes up and everyone's like, 'Oh, you missed it. Gabe Kaplan was here.' And he's like, 'You didn't ask me. Nobody came for me. You know I'm possessed,'" Fey explained. "The table read was so funny, and then—death.".
Will Ferrell on "Late Night with Seth Meyers"; Gabe Kaplan in "Welcome Back, Kotter." Photo: Late Night with Seth Meyers/YouTube; courtesy of the Everett Collection.
The sketch was pulled after it flopped during dress rehearsal. It was embarrassing for Fey, Ferrell, and everyone involved with the project at the time. But she learned a valuable lesson from it.
«"Seeing it happen to Will, who everyone, the audience, loves. It was almost comforting that even Will fell on his face," she said.
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Ferrell fully shares Fey's opinion. He has spoken about the cancelled sketch many times. about Kotter , in particular, in an interview with Andy Cohen in 2017 on the program Watch What Happens Live said the sketch "didn't get a single laugh.".
Last year, a colleague SNL , Seth Meyers, gave Ferrell a chance to redeem himself in a segment of "Second Chance Theater" on Late Night , where former sketch show contestants get a chance to perform material cut during dress rehearsal.
After performing the sketch in its entirety alongside John Oliver, Bowen Yang, and Rachel Dratch, Ferrell described it as reminiscent of "a college improv troupe you're forced to go to because your friend is in it." When Myers suggested that part of the problem might be that modern audiences aren't as familiar with Gabe Kaplan's comedic style, Ferrell joked, "We probably should hand out flyers to everyone at the show explaining what to look for.".
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.