Wallace & Ladmo
Featured Clip of the Month
from the personal video collection of

Dan Horn

Title: Strangest Job

Title: Strangest Job - Redo

Description: Orson’s most unusual past employment…

Date: 1983

Comments:

It didn’t happen very often, but sometimes we would redo bits that we had already done on the show.  There were various reasons for this, but usually for me it was because I just liked a particular bit and wanted to do it again. 

Here are two clips from 1983 featuring the same material.  Probably six to nine months separate these two “takes” and subtle differences define each one.  Both demonstrate how hard I was trying to emulate Wallace’s style of delivery, which was often very conversational and underplayed.  I used the premise of this bit—asking Orson to tell me about the strangest job he ever had—a few other times over the course of the show, and those scripts are some of my favorite because his answers, just like in this bit, were usually pretty silly. 

We nearly always taped the show as if it was live, and in the first clip here, there’s a minor gaff—but not one serious enough that it warranted a stop-down.  In the clip, Ladmo pitches to me and there’s a long pause before I start talking.  The reason is that Ladmo and Boffo had just finished doing a bit, and when Lad pitched to me, my prompter wasn’t cued-up yet.  A blank page attached the Boffo prompter and my prompter together—suddenly, I was on camera, but that empty paper had to run through the machine (for several seconds) before I could see my first line.  An experienced pro like Pat would have just started ad-libbing something—but I froze like a deer in headlights, only getting back on track once my lines appeared. 

The on-the-job training I got from the show was invaluable to me—and if anyone ever asked me what the strangest job I ever had was, the answer wouldn’t be Wallace & Ladmo.  That’s the greatest job I ever had. 

Dan Horn

2009 

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