Jim Downey is having a lovely little career renaissance at the moment, with the veteran Saturday Night Live and Late Night writer the subject of a new Peacock documentary, Downey Wrote That, focused on his multi-decade contributions to TV comedy. But also, he’s just kind of been popping up all over the place lately, and always in welcome ways: As one of the whitebread villains in One Battle After Another, as the bubble-blowing Douglas in The Chair Company, or just the guy asking, incredulously, “Jeff Epstein? The New York financier?!” in a recent viral clip from Conan O’Brien’s podcast. In celebration of Downey’s sudden ubiquity, he did a fresh interview with Variety this week that touched on many aspects of his career—none of which we can bring ourselves to care about half as much as the revelation that he and fellow SNL legend Jack Handey still communicate, at length and apparently almost exclusively, in the form of two extremely angry lawyer characters who are threatening to sue each other.
Here’s Downey, fielding a question about what outlets he has for his comedy energies since leaving SNL about a decade back:
I have outside interests, personal things. What a lot of people like me do now is send goofy emails or texts to old friends, often other writers. I’m constantly texting back and forth with George Meyer, who wrote for The Simpsons and worked with me at Letterman 45 years ago. Jack Handey, another great writer, and I have had this running joke for more than 40 years where we write each other emails or call each other as attorneys threatening to sue one another. It involves this mix of performance and writing—we create these fake legal documents and send them back and forth. It actually takes up a fair amount of time. Sometimes Jack will call, and when I see his name on the caller ID, I won’t pick up because I can’t think of anything to say as my angry attorney character screaming at him. So a lot of my comedy energy gets burned up in those ways.
Surely we cannot be alone in dearly wishing we could get our hands on some of those emails, voicemails, and fake legal documents, yes? (From the minds that brought you “Colon Blow” and “Tales Of Fraud And Malfeasance In Railroad Hiring Practices”!)
Even beyond this apparent treasure trove of angry lawyer comedy, Downey’s interview is full of great tidbits: He talks about working on One Battle—noting cheerfully that his instantly iconic line “A semen demon?” was in the script, not an ad-lib—and delivers his full condemnation of actors who break during Saturday Night Live sketches. (“Phil Hartman, for instance, may have been in more sketches than any cast member in history, and he broke exactly once, in a piece Jack Handey and I wrote. The set started to collapse around him. All hell broke loose. Everyone else in the cast was breaking, and Phil held out for as long as he could, but eventually he lost it. Then you had guys like Horatio Sanz, who I don’t recall ever not breaking. It always seemed cheap to me.”)
