Fixed and Dilated: The Comedy Stylings of Will Ferrell

By Tom Johnson and David Fantle

Just to look at him is to laugh.

Comedian Will Ferrell is the proud possessor of a cinder block head with a doughy face plopped onto a burly frame as stolid as a Steichen photograph of New York's Flatiron Building. And if that isn't funny enough, the perpetual expression of dazed detachment that he's struck in every movie from "Superstar" to "Zoolander" to "Old School" almost always elicits guffaws. Face it, his eyes have more glaze than a Krispy Kreme donut.

You would think then that in addition to his hilarious, God-given physical accoutrements, Ferrell would be a joke-spouting machine just laying audiences in the aisles. But you'd lose that bet. Ferrell's funny all right (anyone who's followed his career from his days mugging as George "Dubya" Bush in "Saturday Night Live's, Indecision 2000" sketches can attest to that). But his real gift doesn't stem from spoken jokes. Ferrell's humor is character-driven, not airborne.

"I've always built everything from the ground up," Ferrell says. "I generate most of my comic inspiration from the idea of a character being totally committed to the premise, as opposed to thinking up specific jokes. From that commitment to a comedic situation, the jokes just flow.

"Not to sound highfalutin', but I've always tried to approach characters from an acting standpoint rather than from the standpoint of just being funny," he continues. "That's where a number of us on SNL, like Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon, all agreed. We didn't believe in the approach of, 'Boy, wouldn't it be funny if I dropped a stack of plates.' We really weren't joke-driven."

Later this year Ferrell will again put his theory to the acid test with two new movies. He has just wrapped production on a film he co-wrote with former SNL alum Adam McKay, which McKay will also direct. The comedy is called "Anchorman" and Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, a 1970s San Diego anchorman and local news "legend" with an inflated ego and not enough journalistic expertise to back up his boasts. All hell breaks loose when a real newswoman (Christina Applegate) enters the mix and threatens to usurp Burgundy and his tight-knit crew of gallivanting male-chauvinist pals.

"I lead a team of 'face guys' who read the news and then hightail it to parties. So when Christina who plays the character of Alicia comes in, we find out quickly that she's got the real goods and that makes her very threatening. Adam was a head writer at SNL for a stint when I was there and we have a good shorthand together. That said, we weren't taking any chances and managed to buttonhole a bunch of friends -- Fred Willard, Jack Black, Vince Vaughn -- into making cameos."

Ferrell knows something about the insanity of broadcast news and about the anchor slot. At the University of Southern California he majored in something called sports information and briefly worked as a sportscaster on a weekly show broadcast over a local cable channel.

"We did a show nobody watched," Ferrell says ruefully. "It was one of those gigs where you worked the camera one day and were the anchorman the next. I found out very quickly that I didn't care about getting the big news story. I really wanted to be Chevy Chase doing 'Weekend Update.'"

Ferrell Child

"Elf" is the other comedy Ferrell has in the hopper for release November 7^th and it presents the biggest challenge he has faced yet as an actor. If indeed, as Ferrell fervently believes, that the best comedy stems from an interesting storyline, then the script for "Elf" pulls out all the stops -- stretching its premise more miles than Santa Claus covers in his sleigh each December 24^th.

"Santa visits an orphanage and puts his bag down and a baby accidentally falls into it," Ferrell says. "Back at the North Pole, they discover the very human baby and decide to raise it as an elf. That elf becomes me and I never quite put together that I'm not an elf, despite the size difference and that my toymaking skills are lacking."

If this synopsis reminds you a bit of the 1960s stop-action animated classic, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" with it's malcontent elf named Hermie who secretly yearns to be a dentist, then you're not alone.

"We pay homage to the cartoon in the movie via some of our own animation," Ferrell says. "Eventually I find out that I'm human and try to enter that world and find out where I really belong -- kind of like the character in the cartoon."

According to James Caan who costars with Ferrell in the movie, "Elf" is a feel-good film, tailor-made for the holidays. "Will is very funny, but very serious," Caan told us. "I would tease him and say: 'You're not any fun to be around at all … you're like going out with a piece of wood!' But he's really a nice guy."

Oddly enough, Ferrell owes his start as a comedian to his mother … and it wasn't because of anything funny she said. In an inspired moment (probably after watching him flail about as Orange County's answer to Wayne Campbell on that hodge-podge cable-access show), she presented him with a nine-week series of free acting lessons at South Coast Repertory Theater.

"I got hooked instantly," Ferrell says. "I took more classes, then signed up for a summer conservatory thing where I met my wife. By 1990, I was doing standup comedy at all these local Italian restaurants and taking classes at The Groundlings."

One Line Wonder

Until producer Lorne Michaels plucked Ferrell (along with Cheri Oteri) from a Groundlings showcase to be a regular on SNL, he had landed a few bit parts on some sitcoms. But any light at the end of the tunnel was probably that of an oncoming train. As Ferrell remembers, his high point came when he got three lines to read on three different shows in one week -- "The George Wendt Show," "Grace Under Fire" and "Living Single."

"I had been doing a one-act play where the director told me not to cut my hair. And after two months, it was pretty much a huge Afro. I kept going to these auditions and getting these little one-line parts because I looked crazy with the hair."

SNL was a milestone for Ferrell providing a rich, creative environment in which to concoct such characters as Craig the Spartan Cheerleader, the musical middle-school teacher, Marty Culp and Tom Wilkins, the hyperactive co-host of "Morning Latte."

"We all heard war stories from people like Tim Meadows who was on the show when I arrived [the 1995-96 season] and stayed another five years, that the environment at SNL was hyper-competitive like a shark feeding frenzy. He had come up with Chris Farley and Adam Sandler and people like that. I don't doubt him, but Cheri, Molly, Chris Kattan and Daryl Hammond and I all came more from sketch comedy backgrounds as opposed to the world of standup which, let's face it, is more cutthroat and breeds a little more of the 'eat or be eaten' kind of mentality."

Will Power

To combat the grueling physical attrition demanded by scenes like his nude nighttime jog in "Old School" (O.K., we're exaggerating just a tad), Ferrell and his wife regularly enter -- and finish -- marathons. Recent races and finishing times are as follows: New York City in 2001 (5hrs: 1min), Stockholm in 2002 (4hrs: 22 mins) and Boston in 2003 (3hrs: 56 mins). "I finally broke four hours in a race, which has always been my goal," he says, "Although lately, with the craziness of filming, we've kind of fallen off the wagon. We used to run about 20 miles a week."

Ferrell says that the last movie he took time out to see, and liked, was "Spellbound," the hit independent film about another cutthroat world -- children's spelling bees.

"I'm also creatively humbled every time I watch 'Six Feet Under' on television," he says. "I'm still very much gripped by the fact that all this success could go away. I don't obsess about it, but I do tend to make comments like: 'Hey, I could always go to work for UPS.' Quietly I do have other aspirations that would be fun to explore … to do the kinds of things that Bill Murray has been able to do over time would be really fun -- quasi-serious character parts like his Polonius in 'Hamlet'"

Will Ferrell as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, perhaps. Just to look at him would be to laugh!