Charles Grodin, master of the deadpan delivery, has died of bone marrow cancer, at age 86. He starred in films including Midnight Run, Heaven Can Wait , Beethoven and The Heartbreak Kid. He was also, in my opinion, one of the best talk show guests EVER.
Agreed. A lot of people didn't get the joke back then and hated him based on those appearances. He was way ahead of The Larry Sanders Show, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm and so on, with borderline-disagreeable characters who make you as uncomfortable as much as they make you laugh.
Other than Beethoven I’m most familiar with his famously terrible SNL appearance where he didn’t learn his lines.
As @auntiehill said, the master of deadpan delivery and of the slow burn double take. So many great performances but my own favourite has to be from Midnight Run. One of the great odd couple comedies, a perfect rebuttal to all the “DeNiro can’t do comedy” arguments. But even Bob wasn’t as funny as Charles.
That was him playing a character, an oblivious and insensitive actor named Charles Grodin who was unprepared for the show, in a storyline that threaded through several sketches, leading to a (scripted) blow-up with John Belushi. I just watched it last night and he was really funny in it. Not everything in it was great, like just about every episode of SNL, but they tried something different and it holds up pretty well.
Every anecdote I've heard from it suggests it wasn't a character, he was ad libbing and he was banned from the show after that.
That was a legend that grew up around it. Lorne Michaels is participating, delivering lines over the talkback. The cold open begins with a dressing room scene where John and Gilda wonder why Grodin wasn't at dress rehearsal and whether he's up to hosting. Everything in the show is timed out and blocked, every camera shot is set up. You can read any number of articles online about it.