SPOT THE ACTOR (THE GORGEOUS GOOFBALL)

            The Gorgeous Goofball is an ever-present fixture in the acting community.  He is generally in his 20’s to 30’s and about as dumb as a bag of rocks.  However, calling him talentless is being a bit shortsighted.  The one thing he has mastered in his short years is the ability to ‘wow’ a casting director.  He’s that Jim Carrey-esque type.  A chiseled jaw line, slightly muscular in the right places, but not too muscular.  Always in whatever’s fashionable that season.  But most importantly, he does everything he can to make the casting person laugh, even if it’s a lame impression of an SNL character from five years ago.  He ‘pops,’ he ‘locks,’ he finds a way to work in a pratfall when seemingly appropriate.  All of these types of attempts shield the fact that there’s nothing truly behind any of this.  And the casting director eats it up with a spoon (especially if the casting director is female).  “Oh, he’s cute AND funny,” she thinks.  “Whatta’ catch!  Wonder if he’s single.”

            But when the real work is in front of him, when he really needs to nail that role, he falls short.  Again, he’s not talentless, he simply lacks any sort of originality, especially if the role calls for comedy.  He is a shell, a shill.  His act is, in a sense, like his existence.  Hollow.  Sadly, he never heard the expression, “Comedy isn’t hard.  It’s just hard for the idiots.”

            All of his bits are store-bought and secondhand.  And the casting director will wonder what happened between his hilarious audition and the finished product.  Or she’ll be so snowed by the Gorgeous Goofball’s good looks that it won’t really matter anyway.  The finished product will be weakened because when one is gorgeous and seemingly funny as hell to those who don’t know what the concepts of ‘gorgeous’ or ‘funny’ actually mean, maybe the final product deserves to suffer.

-SLL