Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 5, 1990 TAG: 9005050164
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TODD ALLAN YASUI THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
You see, there's this wacky, long-haired, guitar-playing teen-ager who is introducing the nation's young and hip to a new lexicon of cool-speak.
In Wayne Campbell's dictionary, good-looking women are "babe-ticious" or hail from "Babe-alon," regurgitating is "spewing," and a good idea is "bonus."
And to make matters worse for the Every-moms of America, this bard actually has a nationally televised vehicle for his seditious adolescent patois: NBC's long-running ensemble show, "Saturday Night Live."
Welcome to Party Central.
Welcome to "Wayne's World."
Set in the fictitious basement of Wayne Campbell's parents' house in Aurora, Ill., "Wayne's World" is ostensibly a public-access television show with a guest list that is so ultra-rad it could wipe the hipper-than-thou smirk from David Letterman's face in a second.
Forget jaded movie stars with a flick to flack. On his show, Wayne - played by Michael Myers - and his sidekick, the drum-playing Garth, have jammed with rock titans Aerosmith, played hockey with another Wayne named Gretzky, and joined with Bruce Willis to make crank phone calls to Wayne's mom.
Aerosmith? Wayne Gretzky? Bruce Willis?
No way!
"Yes way!" as Wayne Campbell is wont to say.
Yes, it's true (the translation of "Yes way!"). Wayne is hot, and "Wayne's World" is becoming the place for young America to be for some irreverent yuks at the expense of adults, squares and authority figures.
And you don't even have to move to Aurora to tune in. You just need to keep your eyes open late enough on weekends and hope that a "Wayne's World" segment will turn up on "SNL."
The spoof doesn't appear all that often, fewer than 10 times since Myers joined the "SNL" troupe in mid-season last year. But even with that limited exposure, "Wayne's World" has become one of the show's more popular skits and one of its more quoted since Dana Carvey gave the world "Church Chat" a few years back.
All this surprises no one more than the 26-year-old Myers.
"Is that right? People quote `Wayne's World?' I thought it was just my friends in Toronto," he said. "Well, that's neat."
"Neat?" Why, only a turbo-geek would use a word like "neat!" That couldn't be Wayne talking. As a matter of fact, it certainly isn't.
"Neat." It's the type of thing Mike Myers is wont to say.
Forget the fact that he was picked up by Toronto branch of the Second City comedy troupe (the comedy breeding ground for Martin Short, Dave Thomas and John Candy, among others) on his high-school graduation day. Forget that he was hired by "SNL" producer Lorne Michaels during their first meeting. Forget that he's risen from "featured-performer" status to "cast- member" status in a little over a year.
Mike Myers is still just a nice guy from the north who got a break. A guy who would use a word like "neat." A guy who less than two years ago was gawking at the view from Michaels' Manhattan office.
"Oh, I was blown away, are you kidding? I stayed in New York City, where I'd only been once before, and only drove through it," he said of his "SNL" job interview. "I went into that famous Lorne Michaels office and behind his head was (a view of) the Empire State Building. I'd only seen it in movies and stuff. And I turned to him and said, `Is that the Empire State Building?' . . . In mid-interview! I couldn't believe it.
"And then he said, `Would you like a job?' And I was like, `Of course I'd like a job.' I started the show Jan. 21st (1989)."
Enter the new kid on the block. A young Canadian in the company of seasoned vets. "We'd all been there three seasons, so we all knew each other and knew the system, and the writers' knew us," said Carvey of the other cast members' reaction to Myers' arrival. "So it could have been a situation where it could've gotten ugly. But he's so disarming, there was never any of that. He was nice and humble and works so hard."
Carvey - who plays Garth - paused to think about his praise for Myers and then laughed. "I sound like I'm his dad or something."
Myers' father can certainly take some of the credit for his son's success. While most parents might frown at their offspring's showbiz aspirations, it was different in the Myers household.
"My dad would allow us to stay up for only five things: `SNL,' `SCTV,' [Monty] Python, Peter Sellers movies and Alec Guinness movies. So any other time, we had to go to bed. In fact, we were almost woken up. He'd say, `You gotta stay up, you gotta watch this.' "
He appeared in commercials as a youngster, dreamed of being on "SNL" and went through a "metal-head" and "punk" phase in his teens. But this nice-guy stuff just wouldn't let him cop an attitude.
"I hung out with those [types of] guys, but I was always the guy who would say, `Hey, we shouldn't break windows. They just paid for that window, and I think it's not a good idea,' " he said. "It was always like, `Myers, why do you hang out with us?' I couldn't really be mean. It was exciting hanging around these guys, because they were interesting, but I could never really be mean."
But his adolescent peer group did supply him with some lingo that would be useful later in life. While other "SNL" cast members are busy writing the scripts for their sketches, all Myers has to do for "Wayne's World" is jostle a few memory cells.
"You just write them as they come," he said of Wayne's totally excellent vocabulary. "It's not really a situation of `Give me a 17-year-old in my office, quick!' It's more just, you know, as I remembered it, hanging around and being a goof."
"I think everyone had their own kind of language in their peer group, whatever it may be," said the 34-year-old Carvey.
And that language can be pretty far-ranging. "I use `sphincter,' " said Myers, a particular Wayne in sult, as in, "I see you dabble in the ways of the sphincter."
"Somebody claims that little kids said it a lot at one point," said Myers. "I never heard anyone say `sphincter,' but it was just one of those words that you know if you heard it in health class, people would just be saying it ad nauseam."
Carvey has put some thought into how his character should complement Myers's.
"I felt that I had to abstract it more and take it a step further to contrast from his Wayne," said Carvey, who's main line in the skit is usually "Party on, Wayne!" He knows a bit about creating enduring comic characters - his include The Church Lady and Hans of Hans and Franz.
"I started playing around with attitudes, and it just sort of developed that Garth really admires Wayne and is really deferential to Wayne and is really a good friend to Wayne," said Carvey. "So he's sort of this quiet, shy kind of guy."
But Carvey gives Myers the credit for making the Wayne-Garth patter work. "He deserves all the credit, all the glory," Carvey said.
Glory seems to be what Mike Myers is getting a lot of these days. In his short tenure at "SNL" he's been hailed in Rolling Stone, USA Today, Talent magazine, the Philadelphia Daily News and TV Guide. He's even turned up on "Late Night With David Letterman."
He's a standout in an ensemble, no doubt due to his ability (and agility) to create vastly different personas with a rubbery face, manic gestures and dialects.
Unlike other "SNL" members who are basically one-dimensional in characterization (Victoria Jackson only plays ditzy blondes effectively and Dennis Miller basically is a stand-up comedian who sits down during "Weekend Update"), Myers is a Chaplin kind of guy, a physically comic actor. He's a skeletal mish-mash of body language - a jangly, gawky teen-ager for Wayne and a measured, robotic Teuton for the hyper-pretentious Dieter, host of the German culture show "Sprockets".
Dieter ("Vould chu like to touch my monkey?") and Lothar of "Lothar and the Hill People," are now "SNL" staples, and some of the funniest characters since Carvey's Church Lady and John Lovitz's Pathological Liar.
But all the attention and star treatment one gets from being the newest and funniest cast member on a beloved, nationally televised show apparently hasn't changed Myers much. It's that neat-nice guy thing again.
At a recent "SNL" post-show cast party at Manhattan's trendy Sfuzzi restaurant, Myers, who is only 5-foot-7, stood out among all the slicked-back, pony-tailed and carefully coiffed heads for one reason: He was wearing a red baseball hat.
He greeted strangers with that Wayne face, all smile and nods, caterpillar brows a-flutter, as though he was actually listening to the conversation at hand while the likes of Sean Penn, Rob Lowe, Michael Douglas and Justine Bateman mingled in the background.
"It's only great to have him around for me," said Carvey. "I know that sounds like, `Oh, come on, you must hate him or some thing.' But believe me, his personality is so humble and nice. He's completely unpretentious, patient, kind. I don't know - I can't say a bad thing about him."
The public seems to think the same thing. And that's good news for Lorne Michaels and everyone else at "SNL," where it usually takes a long time for viewers to accept a new member or new character.
"It truly is the funnest, hardest job I've ever had," said Myers. "I mean, I get to play with Aerosmith, I get to play with Wayne Gretzky. If I have an idea on Sunday while I'm taking a bath, next Saturday you can see it on TV. I mean, what gluttony. It's just amazing."
He loves his job, this nice guy does. So Myers and Wayne will be around for a while on Saturday nights.
Neat.
by CNB