It’s a little-known fact that Harry Shearer — the mellifluously voiced comic actor who may or may not have uttered “Blackjack!” when he portrayed his 21st character on “The Simpsons” — was the first young actor cast as Eddie Haskell on “Leave it to Beaver.”
But playing tricks on Wally and The Beav was not to be — Shearer’s Jewish immigrant parents would rather he led a normal life at Los Angeles public schools than be educated on a set.
As it was, Ken Osmond got the part. A Kenny Osmond appearance at the Osher Marin JCC probably wouldn’t spark a stampede, but when Shearer shows up on Wednesday, Dec. 6, you never know. Well, there’s one thing you do know — if you ask him to record an outgoing message for your answering machine, he will politely decline.
Actually, far fewer people demand Shearer to “Do Otto! Do Mr. Burns! Do Smithers!” than you would think. But they do bring up his “Simpsons” characters in a roundabout way, as if a certain combination of words can “trigger me and just pull it out.”
For the record, in a phone interview with j., he was not asked to “do Flanders!” nor did we stumble upon the trigger phrase to induce a “Hi-diddly-ho, neighbor-ino!” But Shearer did do dead-on impersonations of Jack Benny and Frank Nelson (who famously portrayed the smarmy clerk on Benny’s radio and TV programs).
The trigger for that was to ask Shearer about his portrayal of Benny as a child on TV back in 1953. Shearer also played a part in the biblical epic “The Robe” as a tyke as well as roles in “Abbot and Costello Go to Mars,” and the television series “General Electric Theater” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
Shearer feels his sense of humor is less due to Jewishness than being the child of recent European immigrants and “basically having to spend an awful lot of my childhood learning about this country along with my parents … it led to a sense of humor that combines an insider’s knowledge with an outsider’s point of view.”
The road to “The Simpsons” was a circuitous one for Shearer. Before switching to show business fulltime with the comedy troupe “The Credibility Gap,” he taught school, worked for the state legislature and wrote for Newsweek.
As a young man he was famously fired on live radio — DJs at the L.A. station where The Credibility Gap did its weekly show barricaded themselves in the on-air studio anticipating a staff liquidation after an ownership change. Shearer and Co. stayed away from the station, but when a manager came down and, indeed, fired everybody, a DJ asked “What about The Credibility Gap?” The manager responded curtly “They’re fired, too.”
“When we came in to be fired live and in person, the same general manager said one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard — I haven’t been fired that much but this was one of my favorite lines from that process,” recalled Shearer.
“He sat back, a little thoughtfully, and said ‘You know, I envy your freedom.’ We envied his paycheck.”
With his newfound freedom, Shearer would go on to two turbulent stints on “Saturday Night Live,” a starring role in “This is Spinal Tap” and several other collaborations with former SNL colleague Christopher Guest (including “For Your Consideration,” which is in theaters now).
Over the past six years, he’s churned out his first novel, “Not Enough Indians,” a comic romp about a bankrupt and derelict upstate New York town that finagles the federal government into declaring it an Indian tribe so residents can open a gargantuan casino.
In all, he’s kept himself busy — early on, Shearer found he had a low boredom threshold, which is why he pursued comedy instead of, say, doing the voice-over work for which he is richly qualified.
So it’s funny, then, that the voice-over work he fled from comes back in spades with the repeated requests to record outgoing messages.
“You see?” he asked. “It all comes around.”
Harry Shearer will appear 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 6 at the Osher Marin JCC, 200 N. San Pedro Rd., San Rafael. Tickets: www.marinjcc.org or (415) 444-8000.