Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Cathy DeDe, Chronicle Managing Editor
Tim Meadows tells The Chronicle he was a high school kid when he discovered Saturday Night Live.
“I’m almost positive it was the very first show,” he says, “Though I’ve seen it so many times I can’t be 100 percent sure. I remember finding it late at night, and feeling like the network had been taken over by somebody, some people, and then they turned it into this odd variety show.”
Mr. Meadows went on to become a 10-season veteran of SNL — he was on from 1991 to 2000, at the time, the longest-running cast member at the time — among other television and TV credits.
Trained in improv comedy at Chicago’s famed Second City, he’s now taken up stand-up, too.
Mr. Meadows brings his show to The Wood Theater in Glens Falls as part of this season’s Comedy Works series — this Saturday night, live! — on Sept. 29, at 8 p.m. Tickets: $$25 advance, $30 day of show, $4 venue fee. Box office: 480-4878.
Mr. Meadows played OJ Simpson, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey. Sammy Davis Jr., Michael Jackson and other celebrities on SNL. He’s had featured and lead roles in several SNL spin-off movies including one made for his own signature character, the smarmy, clueless and Courvoisier-drinking “Ladies Man.”
He’s likely most familiar to a new generation as the overwhelmed principal in the movie Mean Girls, a role written for him by fellow SNL cast member Tina Fey. He’s had recurring roles on several TV and streaming programs including ABC’s The Goldbergs. — for which he’s picked up his own spinoff show…
Mr. Meadows spoke to The Chronicle from Detroit, his hometown. “I was born here, raised here and recently moved back. I’m transitioning to making Detroit my home base.” He was the youngest of six kids, and remains close to his large family, he reasons. “I have two nieces who are graduating high school. I realized, it goes so fast. “I want to be around for them, for more than just special occasions like funerals and weddings.”
Perfectly normal. “Yeah,” he says.
He’s 57, divorced, with two teenaged boys, 16 and 18, who go to high school in Chicago.
“Over the last five years they’ve really gone from being kids to young men,” he observes, then laughs to contradict himself: “Even though they are getting older, they’re still children.” He stepped out on an errand recently, he says, ran back in to get something he’d forgotten and found the older one, supposedly left in charge, “just dancing around the room, in such joy that they had the house to themselves.
Deadpan, tone slightly wry, Mr. Meadows says, “I told him, that’s not what an adult does.”
As a kid himself, he says, “I couldn’t wait to get out of Detroit. We were poor, so it was not a great lifestyle.” His mom was “basically a single mother,” he said, Their father was only an occasional presence. “When I talk to other comedians, a lot of times, they are the youngest or only child, and also they have some traumatic thing in their life that shaped them.”
Was he a funny kid?
“I think I was silly,” he says, but not a class clown, only around people he knew. “They allowed me to be funny without feeling like I was being ridiculous. I wasn’t like that with people who didn’t know me. They thought I was very serious.”
Not just a casual fan, from early on, he was a student of comedy. He says he taped the SNL episode that Richard Pryor hosted — audio taped, that is, holding a cassette recorder next to the television. He played it for friends, sharing the discovery.
He read as much as he could about the show, its cast and writers. “How did they get there,” these comedians?
He learned about Second City, the Chicago improv group. He saw the writers’ names pop up in the National Lampoon magazines he read, on the comedy record albums he listened to.
Still, he kept any comedy aspirations “a secret,” he says. Went to college for advertising and marketing.
Talking Heads’ impact
“There’s a story I’ve told before. I’ll tell you,” he says. “The moment the switch really flipped.I was a big Talking Heads fan, David Byrne. I went to see the documentary Stop Making Sense. It was playing at the Detroit Art Institute, over a couple of weekends. I saw every show. After the last showing, I was sitting in my car thinking: At some point, there they are, these friends in school studying Design, and they had to make that decision, to stay there, or to make the step of becoming a professional band.
“I told myself, I’m going to leave Detroit and go to Chicago. If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.”
Otherwise, he predicts, “I would’ve been the very funny guy in the advertising company, writing the funny commercials and winning awards.”
Instead, on the eve of his senior year, he left Wayne State College. The goal: Second City Improv. The plan: Give it five years, or go back to school. He took classes, did the work, made it into Second City.
“I did the dates and realized, exactly five years after the promise, to the month,” he says, “I was hired by Saturday Night Live.”
He recalls: “I had read a lot about the show, and knew what to expect. Coming from Second City, you know people who’ve been on it, but this was my first television job. It was overwhelming to me.”
He studied old scripts and past shows to learn the technical aspects, stage directions, how to do dialogue, “craving all the info I could get my hands on.”
He found himself working alongside the likes of Al Franken. “They were nice to me, but on Tuesday night (sketch readings), it’s every man for himself.”
His third week on the job, he wrote a sketch for guest artist Alec Baldwin, a take on Cyrano de Bergerac where Baldwin would play the front man and he, Tim, would be Cyrano, behind the scenes, feeding Baldwin’s tongue-tied would-be lover romantic prose.
Except, rather than Cyranno’s hideously long nose, Mr. Meadows gives himself an exaggerated, six-inch-wide African nose — and the romantic words he feeds to Mr. Baldwin are “very white,” he recalls.
Lorne Michaels laughed out loud, and the sketch made the show, he reports. “Once I had these guys laughing, I was accepted. It felt great.”
Jack Handy championed his work, he recalls. “That meant a lot, because I was a big fan. He’s so original and far beyond everyone else.”
Molly Shannon “used to kill me at dress rehearsals, she was so committed.”
He worked alongside Anna Gasteyer, Cheri Oteri, Tracy Morgan. “It was a very productive time.”
He says he still watches, especially if something’s happened in the news he knows they’ll spoof.
Post-SNL, Mr. Meadows says, “right after 9-11, everything slowed down.”
Now, he says, “I continue to work a lot on movies and television.”
The stand-up is a new challenge.
“I know how to talk and get to something funny, but to stand up in front of people and be funny, that’s a new thing I had to learn how to do.”
He watched a lot of Jerry Seinfeld and Seinfeld’s comedy documentary, he says. Same with Steve Martin. He read books and articles by comedians, too.
He says, first, “I would do stories that I’d told on talk shows that were successful. Then I slowly expanded my material.
“I took what I learned and built a set, doing open mics in Los Angeles and Chicago, 5 to 8 minute chunks.
“I kept doing it and doing it,” he says, until he had 30 minutes of material. He figured he could take audience questions to fill a set.
”On the road, I’ve learned how to put new material in, shift it, keep it fresh.”
He’s not shy about sharing his efforts with the audience, he says.
Recently in a New Jersey gig, he had enough material in pocket, he says, “I was talking to the audience,” totally transparent, he started remembering aloud to the audinece that he could pull from his now large store of material.
He told them, “Oh yeah, I have a bit I can do on this…oh, and I can tell you this other thing…”
Anything else? What’s he promise here in Glens Falls?
“You’ve exhausted me,” Mr. Meadows tells The Chronicle. It comes out sounding like a compliment. “I look forward to having a nice night,” he says.
Copyright © 2018 Lone Oak Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.
