Photograph by Alan Singer / NBC via Getty
Jan Hooks, one of the all-time great “Saturday Night Live” cast members, died yesterday, at the age of fifty-seven. Hooks, a talented singer and actor who played everyone from one of the lounge-singing Sweeney Sisters to Hillary Clinton, was a key part of what made her time on the show, from 1986 to 1991, the second “Saturday Night Live” golden era. Like her fellow cast member and frequent onscreen partner Phil Hartman, Hooks had a gift for subtlety. She could satirize without resorting to meanness; she had the timing and restraint to highlight the humor in a script without overwhelming it. She wasn’t “big.” She, like Hartman, and Nora Dunn and others, was a grownup. Her performances were both kind and acute. When she showed up as Verna, Jenna Maroney’s up-to-no-good mom on “30 Rock,” in 2010, people in living rooms everywhere quietly rejoiced.
Hooks grew up in Decatur, Georgia. As a young comedic performer, she joined the Groundlings, in Los Angeles, and appeared on the great HBO show “Not Necessarily the News.” In 1986, she joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” She left in 1991 for a role on “Designing Women,” and later co-starred in “Primetime Glick” with Martin Short. She had roles on “The Simpsons” and “Futurama,” and was beloved for her performance as a tour guide at the Alamo in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”
There’s a moment in the 1986 Sweeney Sisters Christmas sketch that captures the greatness both of Hooks and of her era of “Saturday Night Live.” The snazzy, big-haired, gown-wearing Sweeney Sisters are medley savants, able to turn any jail cell or house party into a B-list Vegas night club. Hooks plays Candy Sweeney, and Dunn plays her sister Liz, who’s just announced to everyone at Candy’s Christmas get-together that she and her boyfriend (William Shatner) just got engaged. The guests, delighted, demand a medley. Giant microphones appear out of nowhere.
“Well, this is just so sweet of all of you,” Dunn says.
“Yes it is,” Hooks says.
“When we think about Christmas, we think of one thing,” Dunn says.
“Yeah, maybe you do too,” Hooks says.
“Bells!” they say together.
They rocket through a brilliant, crazed mashup of “Sleigh Ride,” “Jingle Bells,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Silver Bells,” “The Trolley Song,” “Carol of the Bells,” “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” and scat singing. Partway through, Hooks pauses, and makes a sombre speech:
But seriously. I’m going to get serious for a minute and say that my sister slash bride-to-be has found her fella. For that I’m very happy. Although it’s not going to be too easy being the Lone Ranger out there on the range by myself.
She gives a strained laugh. Her voice nearly breaking, she continues:
But you know—it may sound corny. But there’s a word in this business, people. And that word is “support.” And this gal has given me nothing but from the get-go, and I mean that. I do!
Dunn says that she’s not getting the gift of gab for Christmas—she’s got that already.
“Guilty!” Hooks shrieks, delighted. They launch into “Jingle Bell Rock,” back to giddy showbiz.
Hooks was brilliant at these shifts in tone, finding humor even in the way in which joy, sadness, joking, and suffering pile up on top of each other. She seemed to empathize with all of it. She could invest over-the-top characters such as Candy Sweeney, Tammy Faye Bakker, Sinead O’Connor, Ivana Trump, and Nancy Reagan with something we recognized as dignity. Hooks and Phil Hartman’s portrayals of Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker in a 1987 “Church Chat” sketch seem to be in a different genre of comedy from what Carvey is doing. Carvey’s Church Lady, by that point, has already become shtick—a delivery system for catchphrases like “Isn’t that special?” But Hooks and Hartman play the Bakkers more subtly than they played themselves.
Her Sinead O’Connor on the ingenious “Sinatra Group” sketch, from 1991, had this same quality. Wearing a bald cap, a leather jacket, and tinted glasses, and speaking in a strong Irish accent, Hooks played O’Connor as proud and smart, principled to the point of humorlessness. We could both laugh about O’Connor’s taking herself too seriously and see the value in it—and sympathize with the way the cigar-chomping blowhards of the world, as embodied by Hartman’s Sinatra, treated her.
Hooks is charming as the Alamo tour guide in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” a role that would be easy to overplay—she’s the obstacle to the hero’s goal. Pee-wee has spent the whole movie travelling to get to the Alamo; he thinks that his stolen bicycle is in the basem*nt. Pee-wee must attend an entire tour before he can get to the basem*nt, and Hooks, the smiling tour guide, is eager to patiently educate the group about every imaginable fact about the history of Texas. Here, too, Hooks conveys kindness. She’s not just a power-mad tour-group leader. On some level, she is genuine in saying “Buenos días” to the Mexican-Americans on the tour; she genuinely wants to teach everyone thousands of uses for corn; she genuinely thinks that Inez is holding a basket that she looks very proud of.
