The 25 most memorable Phil Hartman characters

One of Hartman’s earliest and best recurring SNL characters was Eugene, a remarkably fussy PBS chef whose exacting standards and maniacal cleanliness keep him from getting around to the actual cooking. Hartman prolonged Eugene’s sketch lifespan by taking him out of the kitchen into other occupational fields. We’re still in awe of his knit scotch-tape-dispenser cozy.

Keyrock was just a caveman. He fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of our scientists. Our world frightens and confuses him. Hartman’s Neanderthal barrister was the ultra-absurdist dream child of writer Jack Handey, and quickly became one of the most popular recurring characters of early 1990s SNL. In one of his last sketches, Keyrock ran for the Senate as an anti-capital gains tax crusader.

Many longtime SNL cast members struggle to find their place once they leave the show, but as the pompous, underhanded and nowhere-near-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is anchorman Bill McNeal on “NewsRadio,” Hartman seemed primed for success in the years to come. Alas, he was killed before the start of the fifth season, which forced the producers to replace him with his former SNL castmate Jon Lovitz. The show just wasn’t the same without Hartman, though, and was cancelled at the end of that season.

The Simpsons were not a family of means, so when they got into legal trouble, their only option was the cut-rate, works-out-of-a-mall attorney Lionel Hutz. Hartman voiced the hilariously inept lawyer with a mix of unearned swagger and pathetic desperation. But he didn’t lose all the time. For instance, he did successfully prove that the Frying Dutchman failed to serve Homer all he could eat at their all-you-can-eat buffet.

Joe Piscopo’s blustery take on the Chairman of the Board was considered definitive in the mid-1980s, but it was also toothless due to the comic’s reverence for the legendary crooner. Hartman’s version of Sinatra was boorish, arrogant and dismissive. These qualities were best exploited on “The Sinatra Group,” a goof on “The McLaughlin Group” that found Frank moderating a panel featuring Billy Idol, Sinéad O’Connor, Luther Campbell and brown-nosers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé.

The man who saved Chrysler in the 1980s was a ubiquitous presence on television and the lecture circuit, where he preached the gospel of success through grit and determination. He was a humorless blowhard, which made him a nice, juicy target for Hartman, who played him as a man with nary a thought in his head aside from “Buy a Chrysler!”

Dana Carvey’s spot-on impersonation of the King of Late Night was perfectly complemented by Hartman’s indefatigably obsequious Ed McMahon, whose responses were largely limited to “Hey-o!” or “You are correct, sir!” The pair took their “Tonight Show” parody to absurd heights with “Carsenio,” where Hartman played McMahon as a b-boy with a hi-top fade.

Alongside Kevin Nealon’s sleepy Brent Musburger, Hartman slayed in this parody of CBS’ “The NFL Today” as Vegas bookmaker Jimmy the Greek. The character would be retired along with Snyder in 1988 when the real-life personality uttered some racially insensitive comments, but they went out with a bang: Hartman’s Jimmy the Greek swan song found the chastened commentator buttering up Washington quarterback Doug Williams (Carl Weathers) with politically correct platitudes.

An inspired bit of late-‘80s SNL stupidity brought the English mangling Tarzan (Kevin Nealon), Tonto (Jon Lovitz) and Frankenstein (Hartman) together for a panel show where they were asked their thoughts on fire, bread and the recently brokered Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Hartman famously corpsed during the sketch, which turned what might’ve been a one-off character into an unqualified hit. The trio would return to sing seasonal songs and star in the soap opera, “As World Turn.”

The pioneering daytime talk show host was an obvious target for SNL, and Hartman was the perfect cast member to skewer Donahue’s deliberate and declamatory style. Whereas most SNL impressions are exaggerated to the point of innocuousness, Hartman’s Donahue was a just a slightly enhanced version of the genuine article. It exposed Donahue for the empty provocateur he was.

Hartman was great as a benevolent, yet slightly peeved lord and savior who had to contend with annoyances like David Spade’s gatekeeping Hollywood secretary and Sally Field’s overly solicitous evangelical mother. The fun was in watching these incredibly irritating characters hop all over Jesus’s last nerve, and watching Hartman find subtle ways to convey his thorough contempt for these people without breaking. 

Darrell Hammond became an SNL star with his second-term Clinton, but Hartman got there first with more of an Arkansan hillbilly take on the forty-second President. Ask people to name their favorite SNL Bill Clinton sketch, and they’ll likely cite Hartman as a jogging Bubba who drops by a D.C. McDonalds to mingle with regular Americans – which he does in between bites of their fast food.

It’s movie star Troy McClure! You might remember him from such movies as “Jagged Attraction,” “Give My Remains to Broadway” and “Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die.” Hartman imbued the washed-up B-movie actor with a stiff, stentorian baritone not too far off from his Charlton Heston imitation. McClure’s finest hour was starring in the stage musical version of “Planet of the Apes.”

It’s unnerving to watch Hartman today as a casually cruel and dominating Trump, especially as he humiliates his ex-wife Ivana (Jan Hooks) by undercutting her threats by noting that everything has been anticipated and thwarted in the ludicrously thorough prenuptial agreement she signed, but evidently did not read. Hartman nails Trump’s sleazy, slack-jawed manner, but the sketch’s lopsided dynamic plays like it was written by Trump himself.

Hartman joined SNL at the tail end of Reagan’s second term, which left him just enough time to play him in an all-time classic sketch where the president’s much-ridiculed senile behavior is revealed to be a clever ruse; underneath the addled exterior is a cunning leader who, it turns out, has masterminded the entire Iran-Contra deal down to the very last detail.

As the host of PBS’ “Discover,” Hartman played the former star of “Mission: Impossible” with an air of utter cluelessness. When told what reptiles are cold-blooded vertebrates with short legs, Graves responds, “So reptiles are cold and short like a glass of beer.” The portrayal is reminiscent of Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin in “The Naked Gun” movies, and presages Will Ferrell’s supremely silly “Space, The Infinite Frontier with Harry Carey.”

SNL writer Jack Handey’s recurring spoof of spiritual affirmations were often hilarious on the page, but it was Hartman’s soft and soothing readings that put them over the top. “If God dwells inside us, like some people say, I sure hope he like enchiladas, because that’s what he’s getting.” When Handy published a “Deep Thoughts” book, it was a crime not to release an audio version read by Hartman.

The star of “Ben-Hur” and “The Ten Commandments” was a parody of himself by the time Hartman got a hold of him in the late 1980s, so the only way to make his note-perfect impression feel like more than a toothless Rich Little bit was to paint Heston into ludicrous scenarios like, for instance, an audiobook recording of Madonna’s “Sex” book. Hartman plays Heston as an over-enunciating pro struggling with the profane text. He’s hectored throughout by “Screw” magazine editor Al Goldstein (Danny De Vito), who’s been hired to describe the photographs.

When the popular televangelist Jimmy Swaggart got caught in a sex scandal with a prostıtute, he took to the airwaves and delivered a weepy, over-the-top pseudo-confession (“I have sinned against you, my Lord!”) that was tailor made for ridicule on SNL’s then most popular recurring sketch, “The Church Lady.” Hartman’s face is already soaked with tears when he enters, and Carvey’s Enid Strict extracts the explicit confession Swaggart refused to give in real life. (Sadly, we cannot find an image of this amazing skit, so here is Hartman as Jim Bakker, another religious blast from the '80s past Hartman had no problem nailing.) 

Hartman co-created “The Pee-wee Herman Show” with Paul Reubens in the early 1980s, which is where he first played the friendly seaman Captain Carl. He made the leap to CBS for “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” in 1986, where he’d drop by with various (and legitimately educational) oceanic discoveries. Hartman left the show after the first season when he was cast on “Saturday Night Live.”

Hartman plays the legendary film critic opposite Kevin Nealon’s Gene Siskel on an episode of “At the Movies” dedicated to new adult film releases. Hartman doesn’t look a thing like Ebert, but he nails his flat, seen-it-all delivery when opens each review with a ho-hum “The sex was hot, the production values were first rate.” Aside from the movie clips, the sketch is played absolutely straight; it’s just Siskel and Ebert reviewing pornography like they would the newest Martin Scorsese movie.

Hartman was hysterical in his first and only portrayal of everyone’s favorite historical footnote, Admiral James Stockdale, who ran as H. Ross Perot’s vice president in 1992 and delivered one of the most disastrous debate performances ever opposite Al Gore and Dan Quayle. Hartman goes overboard on Stockdale’s shouting “Why am I here?” bewilderment as he’s driven out to the middle of nowhere to be abandoned like an unwanted pet by Dana Carvey’s Perot.

“I just stepped in a big pile of sassy!” “Sassy’s Sassiest Boys” was a one-joke recurring sketch that earned huge laughs primarily on Hartman’s ability to find new variations on the word “sassy.” Clark, the fictional senior editor of Sassy Magazine (Jane Pratt was still overseeing the publication when the sketch premiered in 1993), would bring on teen heartthrobs like Joey Lawrence (Mike Myers), Mark Wahlberg (Adam Sandler) and Andrew McCarthy (Jay Mohr), and declare them “sassy.” Only Hartman could make this work.

The gold medal winning figure skater Dıck Button had become a popular and highly opinionated commentator during the 1988 Winter Olympics, and Hartman had a ball lampooning him in a sketch starring Tom Hanks as an American skater doing an awful routine, replete with toy pistols, to the theme from “Bonanza.”

The bald-headed star of “Kojak” had become famous in his later years as the spokesman for Players International, which offered a Players Club card that hooked up members with various discounts in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. This prompted SNL to do an obscenely juvenile goof called the “Player With Yourselves Club”, where Hartman’s Savalas shilled discounted hourly hotel rooms for self-love while repeatedly asking, “Who loves you better than yourself, baby?”