- [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's HealthCare, and by... And also by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- It's a bizarre thing to have a week like that full of movie stars and woo-woos and trips to the Museum of Natural History for an event, and there are celebrities and you're out there in front of the world and the president's watching and you do your show, and then Sunday comes and you can't move.

And then Monday comes and you still can't move, you're so tired, but it's time to do it again.

(majestic music) (majestic music fades) (upbeat music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

Since the Library was dedicated by our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, over a half a century ago, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Darrell Hammond is one of the longest serving cast members of NBC's "SNL," where he performed over 100 memorable impressions, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Sean Connery.

Tonight, I talk to Hammond about the art of satire, his approach to developing the characters he plays, and the lessons he's learned throughout his long career in the serious business of comedy.

Darrell Hammond, welcome.

- Thank you.

Pleasure to be here.

- Well, we're delighted to have you.

- Thanks for the hearty welcome.

(Mark laughing) - Delighted to have you.

You are a master impressionist.

- Am I?

- Yes, you are.

You've done over 100 impressions on "SNL" where you hold the record for being on the cast.

- [Darrell] I'm number two, Kenan's number one.

- But you're- - In longevity, you mean?

- In longevity.

- Yeah, Kenan's the longest running, I'm second.

- 14 years as a cast member, but you're still the voice of the show.

- Yeah.

- And you've been the voice of so many other characters.

How did you know you were a good impressionist?

- I don't know that I ever thought I was good.

I thought I was going to try really hard to improve, and I did, you know, I got this thing from Tony Robbins about constant and never ending improvement and I tried to make one improvement per week, end of the year that's 52 improvements, you know?

And I started that when I was 27, and then I auditioned for "SNL" when I was 39, and I didn't get 52 improvements a year.

I probably only got 20 improvements a year, but 20 improvements in one year is a hell of a lot of improvements.

You know, and that's the way that I approached to it, and the only thing that I thought I could do to keep myself sane at all was to just keep trying to improve.

You know?

The thing about, you talking about "SNL" and all the impressions I did on there, I want to protest degree of difficulty.

You know, I want to protest, just learned about Brit Hume the other day.

(Mark chuckling) And please excuse my flaws and character defects because some of them were not fully baked, but they were ready, they were funny enough to get out there and get the laugh.

You know what I mean?

I don't know, there was a bunch of 'em like that.

I say I wish I could have had them in the shop more.

- But this is really seat of the pants stuff on "SNL," 'cause you've got to crank out a show a week, right?

So what's that like?

- It's like if you're not prepared to lose a thumb, if you're not prepared to lose a digit, if you're not prepared to try that hard, you're gonna have a bad week.

Gonna have a bad week, gonna have a bad time.

It's sort of like playing middle linebacker in the NFL.

You kinda can't show up when you're not in the mood.

"I'm just not feeling it.

Oh, it's Monday.

I'm just so tired.

I'm just not feeling it.

You know, I worked 90 hours last week and I only got that one little thing on the air.

I'm just not feeling it."

Tough.

That's real tough.

- You and I have talked about how you formulate an impression.

There's a whole process that you go through.

So let me throw some of your more iconic impersonations at you, and talk about how you came up with those voices, those characters.

And we'll start with the preside you played, Bill Clinton.

Where did you start with Bill Clinton?

- Well, the first thing that bothered me about Clinton was the vowel sounds.

I just didn't understand.

I'd heard quote unquote Southern dialects before, but I hadn't heard this dialect.

I mean, to get nerdy for you, I mean, we're PBS, so maybe people wouldn't be interested in nerdy stuff like this, but- - That's our audience, that's our core audience.

- Okay.

Me too.

I'm one.

All of us here, me, you, all the people that were here in Austin, all your time here, have the same consonant sounds.

In other words, if we splice out the vowels and we hear the consonants, all of our consonants sound the same.

P, k, t, p, k, t, k. Right?

The humanity is in the vowels, right?

So when I was gonna do someone, I'd pick a vowel, or two if I was lucky, because remember I don't really have much time.

I don't have a lot of time, and I gotta get something going fast.

So I would pick one, or two, if I was lucky, two vowels to focus on.

And in the case of Clinton, although this was happening over the summer, before "SNL," so I had a lot more time, you know, I was confused by his vowels.

I mean... And then, you know, I was sitting in my little apartment in Hell's Kitchen with the toilet in the living room, bathroom in the kitchen, and I'm sitting there, and suddenly it hits me to look at a map.

So I get a map.

Arkansas sits on top of Louisiana.

Louisiana has the Cajun, very, very French dialect.

So suddenly his u sound, the u sound that Clinton was making, now it made sense to me, you know?

This was a Louisiana Southern meld.

And so I just tried to blend the Southern dialect that I knew with that oo, that roo sound, that oo, (Darrell coughing) and he would say, "You, you, you."

It's like Y-E-O-U.

You know?

Y-E-O-U.

And I would write that out, "Y-E-O-U."

"I."

I would write out A-I-A-I-H-E-E-A.

So, then I had two vowels.

(Mark chuckling) And so, but something else was throwing me.

From the beginning, almost at the time I was thinking about those vowels, from the very beginning, I thought, "He's doing somebody.

Clinton is doing someone."

So I started reading about him.

It turned out that Kennedy was his hero.

John Kennedy was his hero.

Now, when I say we derive from our heroes, I'm only complimenting both, the hero and the new participant.

We all derive from somewhere, we're all inspired by something, and he was inspired by JFK.

Then it hit me, John Kennedy's vow.

He puts his commas in places that don't make any sense.

Like in an oral interpretation class, which I failed mightily when I was in college, you know, "Ask not what your country can do for you," but he says, "Ask not, what your country can do for you."

He's throwing a comma in there, you know?

And it doesn't make sense, but he's doing it the way God told him to do it.

He's following his God-given instincts.

You know, Churchill, think of the great orators in history that would have failed oral interpretation class, but they're doing their own thing.

You know, you can't discount Ronald Reagan as a master of the spoken word.

You know, whatever comments there were about him when he was getting older, you still can't.

He's as good as it gets.

- The Great Communicator.

- Oh my gosh.

I mean, that thing he did with Mr.

Gorbachev combined Sunday school and an F-16 fighter that goes twice the speed of sound.

(Mark laughing) And he managed to combine it so brilliantly with, what was it?

"Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down that wall."

Like that.

I was like, "Oh yeah.

Apple pie, USA, baseball."

(Mark laughing) "SEC football."

(Darrell chuckling) It was just so brilliant, but again, master of the spoken word.

- So you had an opportunity not only to do Clinton, but to do Clinton in front of Clinton.

I was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner a couple of times where you were doing your impersonation in front of Bill Clinton.

What was that like?

- I think, you know, when I got to "SNL" in my first year, I started having moments that were so surreal, my brain would sort of flat line, you know, trying to comprehend it all, like trying to comprehend the moon.

Eventually my brain would just quit.

To come from obscurity and to be in a building with the most famous and powerful people alive, a lot, was really unfathomable.

And my brain just sort of gave up on that.

And so the thing with Clinton was I thought to myself, "I don't know what 'grab the bull by the horns' actually means, but I think I'm going to have to grab the bull by the horns and be a little audacious.

It's my only way to survive this moment."

(Mark laughing) - So how do you do that?

- I don't want to say something indelicate.

(Darrell chuckling) What are they saying?

Football, root hog or die poor?

Those coaches used to come around, "Root hog or die poor, root hog or die poor," when I was a kid.

Yeah, so that's what I did, and I decided to go for it all the way as, you know, first I said, "Bill Clinton."

And then of course there was a pall fell over the room because you don't call the president by his first name.

I corrected myself, I was like, "Oh my God, sorry.

President Clinton is the only guy in the world that can say to a woman and get away with it, 'You know, if you would only take your clothes off and you know, let me see you naked, there would be no more racism anywhere, I swear to God.'"

Right?

- You know what I would like to tell you all about tonight?

How much I hate- (audience laughing) How much I hate waiting around to see if I'm gonna pinch hit for him today.

(audience chuckling) It's demeaning.

It's dehumanizing.

I don't know how Al Gore's put up with it all these years.

(audience laughing) (Darrell laughing) - You also did his vice presiden Al Gore, very memorably.

Talk about how did you formulate your imitation of Al Gore?

- Well, I'd been going to the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village for years, and I was probably doing, you know, four or five sets a week for years.

And I'd been doing Al Gore for about a year, and we even tried a "Weekend Update" as Al Gore, couldn't make it work, couldn't get a laugh.

You know, and I don't know if you know anything about a little show called "Saturday Night Live."

They're kind of into that thing around there.

And we had no sketch two hours before the show, after the 2000 first presidentia 2000 Gore-Bush debates.

We didn't have anything, but that's 'cause we knew that Jim Downey was gonna float in at the last minute.

- Jim Downey, writer- - Jim Downey, the fantastic writer, he blows in with about two hours to spare, (Darrell chuckling) and he says, "I got it.

This is what we're gonna do.

Overbearing school teacher.

Right?"

I'm like, "What is that?"

He's like, "Well, Jim, in my plan," he started doing it like that, which Gore doesn't really talk like that, and yet it represented Gore so well.

He did the impression for me, and I had two hours.

And what he had conceived was so cleverly crafted, it was really easy to steal, or to repeat, you know?

If you go to the Met and you see one of those statues, let's just say the statue of David, that's easy.

If you're a sculptor, it'd be easy to copy that, 'cause the work's already done, it's so brilliantly conceived, as was the way he did Al Gore.

Remember, we're talking about the comic version, not the sonar version where you try to match molecules with the other guy's voice, which was something I did once, when I was doing ET for Universal Studios.

You know, I saw that and so that's how I went to "SNL" and that was a big mistake.

And it's the funny part.

It's the funny version.

It's the version that you can read the fine print in an insurance contract, and it'll still be funny, it's that.

And I didn't have it, you know, and Downey did, and he did it for me.

And I just took it out there, and then we picked- (Darrell coughing) We picked some hand gestures.

You know, we picked a couple of physical things to do, because when you have no time and you're prepping to go on, what I would do is pick two vowels and two gestures.

- [Mark] Right.

- Two hand gestures and two vowels.

- Simplify.

- Yes.

Streamline the person.

- Yeah.

- You know, most people have three or four or five without even thinking about it, you know?

Clinton had 43.

- Right.

- "What?"

"Huh?"

43.

(Darrell chuckling) Masterful.

I mean, another master, you know, of the spoken word.

- But you got great advice on impressions from Lorne Michaels, and you had a great exemplar in Dana Carvey.

- Dana taught me how to succeed on "SNL," 'cause when I first started, I was trying to do that sonar perfect, you know, electrically perfect impression of Ted Koppel, and it was a solid Ted Koppel, you know?

And it bombed, and that was happening a lot.

- Hm.

- Like in read through, I would go on with this really solid impression, and it wasn't working.

And it wasn't until Dana came on the show and he requested, "I want Darrell to do Phil Donahue and I want to do Johnny Carson."

And man, when I got out there and I saw what he was doing, I realized he was doing a Hirschfeld.

Hirschfeld was the caricaturist of the 40s and 50s in Times Square and Broadway and Hollywood.

- New York Times caricaturist, and he would do frequently Broadway actors.

- And Hollywood, some.

- Right.

- [Darrell] Yeah.

He always printed the word "Iris" somewhere in his caricature, which- - His daughter.

Right.

- His daughter.

And I was just blown away by his work anyway.

Weird book to have in my house anyway, and I did.

And watching Dana, I realized "That's what I gotta start doing now.

I gotta start taking these things and pulling them and stretching them out of shape like a balloon at a kid's party, being stretched and pulled out and make them larger."

'Cause remember, we don't have two hours, you know, like a Broadway play.

We don't have two hours to sell this thing.

- Mm.

- It's real quick.

It's four minutes.

And the president's watching and the joint chiefs of staff and Congress is watching and 40 countries are watching.

And the New York Times is watching and Chicago Sun and the Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle and the Miami Herald.

And what is it in Denver?

- Denver Post.

- The Denver Post.

Washington Post.

Everybody watching, just four minutes.

- Yeah.

- So I didn't understand that at the time.

I just was saying "Dana's my model, I'm modeling what he's doing.

I'm gonna do a Hirschfeld."

And that's when the whole thing started to come together.

And then, you know, you saw that with Downey coming in again doing a Hirschfeld.

- You talked about the characters that you make these caricatures from.

- Mm-hm.

- The most memorable to me, Darrell, is Sean Connery.

- Right.

- [Mark] A brilliant character that you created from a living person.

How did that come about?

- Start out with the real person.

The line that I was using was a, "You don't have to think about it, just nod."

Right?

That was my line, that was my home base.

And then I just said, "Let me start stretching and pulling this guy out of shape so that I can handle a script and make an imprint."

Now, when you're doing Connery on "Celebrity Jeopardy," you know, you get 15 seconds to score.

- Right.

- They gotta buy this in 15 seconds.

So I was bringing this italicize version of him out there and it scored really quickly.

And I don't know that any of us were really expecting it to score like that.

It was one of those things that didn't make sense because, you know, I sort of have always felt like the audience has to, to laugh, they kinda gotta know what you're talking about.

- Right.

- So they gotta understand your premise and more or less agree with it.

You know?

So now we have a premise where Sean Connery is stupid and hates Alex Trebek and is homophobic.

It doesn't make any sense.

- Right.

- It doesn't come from, it doesn't derive from anywhere, you know what I mean?

There's no parallel to it for anyone to, and yet they laughed at it anyway, and I think it comes under the heading of something I heard Lorne say once about Monty Python, silly and smart.

Silly and smart.

So we gave Connery all these clever things to say, you know, with these great Emmy award-winning writers, you know, writing these great scripts, and that's kinda how it came to be.

- As you think about your time on that show, what are the more memorable moments for you, Darrell?

- I think it's almost impossible.

You know, we're talking about the funniest things, the worst things?

- Anything that comes to mind.

- I think that when I was doing, Molly Shannon was doing the 50 year old dancer and I was supposed to be doing Tony Soprano, and I had a representative Tony Soprano.

It was pretty good, it was pretty okay.

I mean, didn't have much time to put it together, but it was okay.

(audience laughing) - Zip it, Paulie, I don't wanna talk about some stupid show.

I wanna talk about business.

- And I get out there to start with this first time impression of Tony Soprano, pretty popular guy, and the cue cards aren't real.

- Oh no.

- So I've got no dialogue.

And my brain said, "Don't die on this hill.

Try not to.

Just do Marlon Brando."

You know, just do Marlon, like, I had a line where Silvio said, Fred Armisen as Silvio said something like, "Hey, how old do you think she is?"

So I'm out there going, "She said she's 50."

- She said she's 50!

(audience laughing) - I've gone back and looked at that first 15 seconds where I didn't have a cue card, and I represented myself admirably, I thought.

I thought it went pretty well, I mean, under the circumstances.

- Mm.

- But those are the kinds of things that happen like all the time.

Or, you know, you realize, at some point, you realize, it hits you, "I'm 20 feet from Tina Turner.

She's singing 'Proud Mary.'

20 feet."

Or "I'm 20 feet from Adele."

(Mark chuckling) And whatever magic you hear about Adele or Tina Turner, be 20 feet from them when they're doing their thing.

Those are memorable.

- "SNL" is comedy graduate school.

I mean, that's where you get a comedy PhD, it seems to me.

There's no better school- - I think you get your PhD before you go there, brother.

- Okay, fair enough.

- You have a PhD, but then you go there and then you have the "SNL" license.

(Mark chuckling) - So what did you learn?

What's the principle thing you learned from "SNL" that you didn't have before as a comedian?

- Yeah, well, the first was to italicize the, do more of a character than an impression.

That was the first thing.

And the second thing was you can't look down.

If you're on a ledge in a high building, they say you can't look down, you might fall.

And it became like that.

When I did my first sketch and I bombed as Ted Koppel, I was like, "I will never allow myself to get that scared out there again."

- Mm.

- "No matter what, I will not let myself get that scared again."

I mean, I managed to do what I set out to do, and it was, of course, ineffective, but I did achieve my goal, which was not a great goal, but I did it.

And listen, it's a bizarre thing to have a week like that full of movie stars and woo-woos and trips to the Museum of Natural History for an event and trips to the Waldorf and we're in our tuxes and there are celebrities and you're out there in front of the world and the president's watching and you do your show, and then Sunday comes and you can't move.

And then Monday comes and you still can't move, you're so tired, but it's time to do it again, just as good.

- Yeah, climb right back up the hill.

- Yeah, and remember, we're not just playing a baseball game, as admirable as that profession is.

I love baseball.

Like we're creating something new.

- [Mark] Yeah.

- Something that didn't exist before.

It's a lot of pressure.

- Darrell Hammond, thanks so much for being with us.

- It's my pleasure, man.

Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for letting me expound like the nerd that I am.

(majestic music) (majestic music continues) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's HealthCare, and by... And also by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(bright music) (upbeat music)