The Long, Ugly Shadow of “Kidder, Downey & Heche”
You forget most sketches almost immediately. But there are some sketches that stick with you for one reason or another, that take up valuable real estate in your psyche and refuse to leave.
A cartoon that ran on Robert Smigel’s short-lived Saturday Night Live spin-off TV Funhouse entitled “Kidder, Downey & Heche” is such a sketch. It made an indelible impression on me initially because it is so fucking dark.
The brutal, nihilistic and ultimately deeply ugly joke of “Kidder, Downey and Heche” is that the titular trio of troubled thespians are “Private Trespassing Investigators” who use their “uncanny knack for wandering into the homes of total strangers” to get around the need for search warrants and many other laws.
In Robert Smigel tradition, “Kidder, Downey & Heche” uses the soothingly banal medium of a cheap, poorly animated cartoon from the 1970s or 1980s to deliver a vicious satirical beatdown on three walking punchlines who deserved much better then and most assuredly deserve better now.
Smigel had inherited Michael O’Donoghue’s vacated throne as the comedy institution’s Prince of Darkness. He made a point of taking things way too far in a largely successful quest for big, dark, cathartic laughter. He has consistently been the darkest and edgiest part of Saturday Night Live but with “Kidder, Downey & Heche” he took things to a place so ugly and cruel that it’s legitimately painful to watch the cartoon now.
The singularly unfortunate short film takes a mean premise in an even more sadistic direction. Kidder, Downey and Heche are dispatched to look for a lost dog for a client using their “unique” “skill set” of disrobing, babbling nonsense and entering the homes of strangers for unknown purposes.
Make no mistake: this cartoon is very specifically and overtly mocking Kidder, Heche and Downey’s very public battles with mental illness as well as their exhaustively documented struggles with drug addiction.
Downey at least gets to be the leader. As always, Heche gets it worse while poor, sweet, brilliant Margot Kidder is portrayed as an oblivious murderer who beats a dog to death with a bat and then eats its roasted corpse alongside her professional colleagues.
I don’t want to sound like Werner Herzog in The Grizzly Man but do not watch this cartoon! It’ll depress the shit out of you. I am a big fan of Robert Smigel in general but those three minutes pass slowly and agonizingly.
I’m no believer in censorship but out of respect for the dead as well as sensitivity towards the living, that cartoon should be taken out of circulation permanently. It never should have been green lit in the first place.
I’s a cartoon I can’t get out of my mind in part because I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing Margot Kidder for The A.V. Club.
It was both one of the greatest interviews and conversations I’ve ever had and one of my biggest missed opportunities because I was so mesmerized by everything Kidder had to say that I did not notice that I had not pressed the record button for the first 45 minutes of the conversation.
Thankfully I noticed my error and even though I was only slotted twenty minutes to talk to her about a TV movie she was promoting we talked for fifty more minutes.
She was amazing. She was so funny and smart and self-effacing and real, just a terrific, immensely lovable human being. If I were a more confident and assertive soul I would have ended the call by telling her that I was flying out to Montana the next day to help her write her autobiography.
Instead I left the call with that wonderful natural high you get when you really hit it off conversationally with someone you admire.
Because of the wonderful hour and a half we spent together I felt, and continue to feel, an emotional connection to Kidder. So it is agonizing seeing that strong, tough, brilliant survivor treated like a cheap, mean joke.
It’s important to remember that the world was a much different place when that cartoon aired. Look at the way Britney Spears, a SIXTEEN YEAR OLD CHILD was treated by the press, the way she was simultaneously intensely sexualized, mocked for being sexualized, coached to continually profess her virginity as if that mattered or was anyone’s business but her own and, for good measure, the subject of culture-wide gossip as to whether or not her breasts were real.
And that was a goddamn child! The conventional wisdom at the time seemed to be that all celebrities were fair play for satire and mockery, that being made fun of was the inevitable price famous people paid for being rich, well-known and professionally successful.
We feel differently now. From the vantage point of 2022 it’s difficult, if not impossible, to see the cartoon as anything other than vicious mockery of three vulnerable, mentally ill people with drug problems who needed understanding and empathy, not mockery.
I’ve obviously also been thinking about “Kidder, Downey & Heche” because Heche recently died in a manner horrifyingly analogous to what happens in this unspeakably mean-spirited cartoon.
Only instead of wandering into a neighbor’s house while under the influence Heche apparently crashed her Mini Cooper into a stranger’s home with such force that it destroyed the house and started a fire it took fifty-nine firefighters over an hour to put out.
It was a tragic tabloid end to a tragic tabloid life. Heche and Kidder are now both gone while Downey got sober, rose like a handsome, talented, connected white male Phoenix from the ashes and is now one of the biggest movie stars in the world. That’s partially because he is an extraordinary talent who has gone through hell and come out on the other side but also because he is a white man, and pretty much everything is easier for that particular demographic.
I can’t imagine a cartoon like “Kidder, Downey & Heche” getting made today. Social media would be apoplectic, and for good reason. We’re more sensitive about mental illness and drug addiction and punching down towards vulnerable people with very real problems.
If Smigel were to make this cartoon today in violent defiance of taste, propriety and the prevailing sensibilities of the day, there’s a chance that it would now be a quartet with the last slot filled by Ezra Miller.
Like Heche, Downey and Kidder, Miller are notorious for random run-ins with the law and regular people. They are also clearly mentally ill and self-medicating poorly with drugs and alcohol but there’s a sinister, cult-like quality to Miller that sets them apart and makes it difficult to empathize with them and their struggles.
We can see in the culture right now a push-pull between social media wisenheimers and pop culture writers REALLY, REALLY wanting to score big laughs at Miller’s expense and pulling back out of sensitivity not just to Miller but towards everyone who is wrestling very publicly with drugs and mental illness.
Smigel has evolved along with the culture. We’ve learned, and learned again, that there ARE, in fact, things more important than being funny, like not being unnecessarily cruel and making the world an uglier, more unkind place in the process.
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