HOLLYWOOD -- He may not quite be a household name, but Harland Williams is certainly a certified star of the comedy stage and screen.
Or maybe you should make that "certifiable." See him and figure it out for yourself. You can go catch him in the movie Superstar, playing the mysterious, motorcycle-riding love interest to Molly Shannon's Saturday Night Live-spawned geek queen Mary Katherine Gallagher. You can tune in to his standup show, Harland's Hilarious Hour, on The Comedy Network Sunday at 11 p.m.
Or you can catch him tomorrow night -- live -- as he hosts the Just For Laughs Homegrown Comic Competition. Williams will introduce six local comics vying for an all expense-paid berth to next year's annual Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. Then he'll finish off the evening with a performance of his own standup material.
You have a choice. And so did Williams when it came time to decide between maintaining his standup act or making a go of a movie career.
He chose both.
"I won't give that up," he says of standup during the course of a recent publicity junket for Superstar. "I try to work every week doing a show somewhere and I love it. They feed each other."
Like Jim Carrey, the Toronto-born Williams began his career in Hogtown comedy clubs and quickly graduated to the L.A. comedy circuit, where he attracted the attention of the talk show holy trinity -- Conan O'Brien, David Letterman and Jay Leno.
"And then I ended up getting a sitcom ... and then I got Dumb And Dumber ... and it was one thing after the other, and daddy's on his way to Puffville," says the non-sequitur-spouting comic.
He starred in a 1997 Disney comedy titled Rocket Man, but Williams is probably best known for his memorable three minutes of screen time playing a hitchhiker/serial killer/would-be exercise video impresario opposite Ben Stiller in last year's hit comedy There's Something About Mary.
"I went to do the movie The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis in Montreal," Williams says, "And as soon as I met him, he started rifling off the lines I did in Something About Mary and telling me how much he liked it." (Williams says he plays an undercover FBI agent in that comedy, which is set for release in 2000. "I'm hired as a hit man by Roseanna Arquette to kill Bruce Willis ... finally!")
If the demands of standup and film weren't enough, Williams is also the successful author of a series of children's books about a brontosaurus named Lickety Split.
It almost sounds like Williams is hedging his bets when it comes to sustaining the standup career. He acknowledges it can be a rough gig. Asked whether the cliche that comedians are really unhappy people is true, Williams goes into one of his trademark improvisational tangents
"I got into standup comedy and I thought I was going to be around the happiest, funnest people in the world," he says. "And I jumped into it and as I started to get to know a lot of comedians, I found a lot of them were depressing, angry, sometimes-bitter people -- a good percentage of them."
And why is that?
"I think there's a lot of intensity to it. There's a lot of acceptance and rejection that goes on in standup and in acting," he says, "And I guess people have trouble dealing with that and I guess that's what makes people lock themselves in a room and blow their brains all over the wall and watch the chunks of skull drip down to the floor, stain the shag carpet, and the children walk in and see an eyeball on the bedpost ... "
Harland Williams. Don't get him started.
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