40 2.13.22
classes. In any given sketch, as Odenkirk put it,
‘‘there’s a disrespect for the form itself.’’ You can
end a sketch by trashing it, he said, ‘‘and that’s
perfectly fi ne and wonderful.’’
For this reason, he said, ‘‘most people have a
phase of liking sketch comedy, and it ends around
- And I get it, because it’s just ideas and ideas and
ideas, and somewhere around that age, life clicks
in and people can’t take 10 more ideas every night.
They go: ‘Can you just have the friends show up
and do the same thing and behave the same way?
I have enough going on in my life.’ ’’ That sketch
comedy is a young person’s game, he went on, is
compounded by its driving ethos that ‘‘the world
is a bunch of clowns. As a young person, you get
such delight out of someone saying that. You’re so
happy to hear it, for a couple reasons. One, part of
you is an angry young person. And another, which
I can see in my own kids, is the intimidation factor
of the world. It’s a safety mechanism of saying: ‘I
don’t have to feel intimidated by this insurmount-
able world that I’ll never make my way in. I can
just call it all [expletive].’ ’’
Odenkirk was describing a perspective that
he is proud to have only partly outgrown. Even
as he has worked in other forms, his commit-
ment to sketch comedy has been unwavering,
whether this has meant shepherding younger
acts like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim or
reuniting with David Cross and most of the old
‘‘Mr. Show’’ roster for ‘‘W/ Bob and David,’’ a
resuscitated version of the show that they made
for Netfl ix in 2015. (The fi rst episode featured a
time machine, capable of traveling in real time
only, fashioned from a porta-potty. ) ‘‘Nothing
Bob does creatively is more important to him
than sketches,’’ Cross told me, praising ‘‘the abil-
ity and patience he has to go, ‘This seems like
a really awful idea, but let’s dig through it, and
there might be a nugget we can take everything
else away from, start from this tiny, dismissible
joke and build out from there.’ ’’
On ‘‘Mr. Show,’’ which refracted the silliness
and social bite of ‘‘Monty Python’’ through a
Gen-X prism, Odenkirk frequently sublimat-
ed his anger into deranged satires and loopy
parodies. In one celebrated sketch, called
‘‘Thrilling Miracles,’’ he played a sadistic
daytime- infomercial cookware pitchman who,
it emerges, thinks that saucepans talk to him and
scalds a kindly homemaker with boiling milk. In
another, he played a tracksuit-wearing mob boss
named Don Corelli: a tyrannical paterfamilias
who insists to his lackeys that ‘‘the highest num-
ber is 24’’ and threatens violence against any
who challenge this inane edict. Other sketches
achieved an anarchic silliness: In ‘‘The Story of
Everest,’’ which Odenkirk co-wrote with Jay
Johnston, he plays an aged father who guff aws
and bellows and speaks in an old-timey voice
as his son, back from a triumphant ascent of the
mountain, keeps losing his balance and falling
into wall-mounted shelves lined with his moth-
er’s thimble collection — over and over and over.
Odenkirk’s path to ‘‘Mr. Show’’ was bumpy.
In the late ’80s, Lorne Michaels hired him for
the ‘‘S.N.L.’’ writing staff , where Odenkirk wrote
one of the show’s most famous sketches — about
a self-hating motivational speaker named Matt
Foley, played by Chris Farley, who lives ‘‘in a
van down by the river’’ — and co-wrote another,
about schlubby Chicago-area dudes obsessed
with ‘‘Da Bears.’’ But Odenkirk says that the tri-
umphs were few and that he struggled to fi nd his
stride. He incorrectly assumed that he and his
cohort, that included Robert Smigel and Conan
O’Brien, could radically remake ‘‘S.N.L.,’’ when
in fact they were there to serve the prerogatives
of an institution. ‘‘My inability to grasp what was
happening around me, and what that show was,
speaks to my myopia and the kind of myopia
you need to have when you’re young and doing
creative work,’’ Odenkirk said. ‘‘You have to be a
guy who doesn’t fi t and says, ‘I’m doing my own
thing and you guys don’t get it!’ ’’
That attitude was bred into Odenkirk by Del
Close, the acting teacher, in Chicago. Close’s
earlier students included Gilda Radner and Bill
Murray, and his later students included Tina Fey
and Stephen Colbert. Close died in 1999, but he
remains an enormously important shadow fi g-
ure looming over contemporary comedy — one
who never enjoyed a fraction of the mainstream
success of his best-known disciples. In ‘‘Come-
dy Comedy Comedy Drama,’’ Odenkirk quotes
Close as saying, ‘‘I belong in struggling organi-
zations,’’ which he took to mean that there was
more freedom to experiment if you remained
a scrappy upstart, pleasantly installed on the
culture’s fringes.
Odenkirk internalized that lesson. His broth-
er Bill told me: ‘‘I think I have a wider love of
comedy than Bob. He’s more of a purist and
someone who wants his comedy to be more
challenging and more to the bizarre side of
things.’’ Until ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ came along, Oden-
kirk had in fact conducted his career almost
entirely on the fringes, leaping from one strug-
gling organization, as it were, to the next. When
he writes in his memoir that ‘‘I had no intention,
ever, of making it big,’’ you believe him, instead
of suspecting false modesty, because while he’s
inarguably ambitious, that ambition has always
seemed to point somewhere other than mass
adoration. It’s important to remember that,
while ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ fi nally did confer fame, the
show wasn’t a hit until a few seasons in, when
Netfl ix began streaming it and put it in front of
millions more people than had seen the origi-
nal broadcast, on AMC. In that light, you could
argue that Odenkirk never left the fringes for
the mainstream; rather, the mainstream fi nally
came to him.Odenkirk stood with Rhea Seehorn at the kitch-
en island in their house, talking about the fi nale
of ‘‘Better Call Saul’’ — very carefully, because I
was there. Odenkirk read Gould’s script the night
before, and Seehorn didn’t try to hide her curiosity.
‘‘You have 13?’’ she asked, eyes wide, referring
to the episode number. ‘‘You like it?’’
‘‘It’s a lot in there, a lot to think about,’’ Oden-
kirk replied. ‘‘I think I like it, but I was pretty
wiped out when I read it in the middle of the
night. I think it’s a challenging way to go, to
fi nish the series. It’s not fl ashy. It’s substantial,
and on some level it’s things I hoped for, for
years, in this character’s brain. On the other
hand, yeah, I have to read it again. But what
I like about it is, it’s not cheap. It’s not easy. It
doesn’t feel cartoonish. It’s pretty great, I think.
It’s pretty great.’’
He added: ‘‘I would wanna end with this kind
of character-development focus. That’s what it’s
about, instead of something that just has guns in
it. I guess there’s a few guns, but they’re not like
in other episodes.’’ He turned to me, explaining:
‘‘I spend a fair amount of time doing crimes this
season. Just stupid crimes.’’
By the end of the fi fth season, Saul has
embraced full criminality, symbolized by an
unsavory pilgrimage through the New Mexico
desert, with the wonderful Jonathan Banks, who
plays the baldheaded heavy Mike Ehrmantraut,
at which point his metamorphosis is nearly
complete: from a morally elastic but ultimately
well-meaning guy into one who decides his good
intentions have been punished so relentlessly
that he should probably set them ablaze once
and for all.
Of Season 6, Seehorn said: ‘‘It’s quite funny,
and then very dark — brutally dark. They turned
the volume up on all of it. Whatever direction
someone was already going in, they made it
more extreme.’’
Seehorn and Odenkirk interacted with an
easygoing, lived-in aff ection — one that they’ve
been building for years, onscreen and off , but that
deepened last summer, when Odenkirk collapsed
on set in front of her and Fabian. It was a heart
attack, and as he lay there without a pulse, it was
their screams that alerted a medic.
‘‘I’d known since 2018 that I had this plaque
buildup in my heart,’’ Odenkirk said. ‘‘I went
to two heart doctors at Cedars-Sinai, and I
had dye and an M.R.I. and all that stuff , and
the doctors disagreed’’ on treatment, with one
suggesting he start immediately on medication
and the other telling him it could wait. He lis-
tened to doctor No. 2 and was fi ne — until this
year, when ‘‘one of those pieces of plaque broke
up,’’ Odenkirk said. ‘‘We were shooting a scene,
we’d been shooting all day, and luckily I didn’t
go back to my trailer.’’ Instead, he decamped
to a space where he, Seehorn and Fabian liked
to retreat during downtime: ‘‘I went to play the
Cubs game and ride my workout bike, and IOdenkirk
(Continued from Page 31)