Shortly after joining the cast of “Saturday Night Live” back in 1985, Jon Lovitz found himself on the ninth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, staring into a glass display case.
In it hung John Belushi’s famous bee costume from the show’s first season and Eddie Murphy’s equally iconic Gumby costume.
“I remember looking at that and thinking, ‘I can’t do what they did,’ ” Lovitz says today. “I said to myself, ‘I’ll just be funny the way I’m funny and hope it works.’ ”
Oh, it worked. Just utter the words, “Yeah, that’s the ticket,” and any “SNL” aficionado will recognize the enduring catch phrase from Lovitz’s character Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar.
Lovitz’s tenure on the show ended in 1992 but he went on to a career as an actor, voiceover artist and comedy club owner. Add standup comedian to the list. Lovitz will headline a three-night stint starting Friday, July 10 at Cobb’s Comedy Club in San Francisco.
The L.A. native has been at the standup game for only a dozen years. He came late to it after years of training as a sketch comedy actor with the Groundlings and later on “SNL.”
“Standup is completely different from sketch comedy,” he says, “a whole other discipline. You have to hold their attention for an hour. It’s a lot of fun.”
Lovitz finds himself drawn to all kinds of material, much of it topical. Racism is one subject he often brings up, and with the Confederate flag so much in the news these days, he thinks the subject is on target.
“I was in [South Carolina] eight years ago,” he recalls. “I saw the Confederate flag on the Capitol and thought, ‘What is that doing there? Didn’t they lose?’ ”
Lovitz attributes much of his social consciousness to his Jewish upbringing in Los Angeles. He says he internalized his father’s message to treat “everybody with respect regardless of race or religion, do the right thing and try to leave the world a better place than when you’ve found it.”
Though he came from a family of doctors, and he originally wanted to be a baseball player, Lovitz was drawn to theater and comedy. His friend Phil Hartman and he auditioned for “SNL” together and both landed coveted spots as part of one of the show’s best casts.
In one of his more memorable sketches, Lovitz played Hanukkah Harry, a spirit who saves Christmas after Santa catches a stomach flu. He brings all the good little Christian boys and girls nylon socks (“eight pair!”) and chocolate coins.
Al Franken, who is today a senator from Minnesota, wrote the sketch.
Lovitz was one of the show’s Jewish cast members, a relatively small club given the outsized impact Jews have had on comedy over the years. Other Jewish “SNL” alumni include Gilda Radner, Adam Sandler, Rachel Dratch and Billy Crystal. But the total barely tops a dozen over four decades.
“At the time, 90 percent of all comics were Jewish,” Lovitz says, adding of the relative dearth of Jewish cast members, “It did and does occur to me. [“SNL” producer Lorne Michaels] would say ‘I hire the funniest people and I don’t care what religion they are.’ ”
Though he went on to a memorable role on “Seinfeld,” played the title character in the animation cult favorite “The Critic” and had many other roles, Lovitz readily admits there was nothing like “Saturday Night Live.”
“You can’t reshoot,” he says of the show’s format. “You get one chance, so if I hit every joke, I’d be high as a kite.”
For several years, Lovitz owned and ran a comedy club in Universal City. It closed last fall, but he’s still very much alive, despite a cameo on the “SNL” 40th anniversary show earlier this year, in which Lovitz was listed on the “In memoriam” sequence. It was all in good fun, in honor of the edgy show he loves.
“We were very proud of the work we were doing,” he says of his era on “SNL.” “One thing we consciously tried to do was be as funny as possible and do the best acting we could.”
Jon Lovitz appears at 8 p.m. July 10, 7:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. July 11 and 7:30 p.m. July 12 at Cobb’s Comedy Club, 915 Columbus Ave., S.F. $30. www.cobbscomedy.com