Let Jiminy Glick Host the Next Presidential Debate
Let Jiminy Glick moderate the debates! This was a popular sentiment online leading up to and following last night’s disastrous presidential Alien vs. Predator event on CNN. The infamously inept interviewer character was top of mind as his creator, Martin Short, guest hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week, filming pre-taped interview segments with Bill Hader and Sean Hayes and “taking over” for Short to host an entire episode on Thursday. Watching Hader laugh uncontrollably as Glick asks him what Lorne Michaels smells like (Glick’s theory: “a combination of chicken piccata and silver dollars”), you realize that getting interviewed by Glick must be a harder, more tear-inducing, more rewarding endurance test for a celebrity than eating even the hottest of wings. It’s a genuine delight. To learn how this late-night team pulled off this triumphant return of Glick, we spoke with Jimmy Kimmel Live! co–head writer and supervising producer Danny Ricker.
What was the conversation like with Martin Short about bringing Jiminy Glick back?
We started discussions pretty early on about what we wanted to do for the week, and he had floated the idea of Glick to us. We’re all such massive fans of the character, so the idea of him doing anything as Jiminy Glick on the show was very exciting to me, and to our whole writing staff and our producers. He goes, “I’ll do a couple of pre-taped interviews, and we can sprinkle them throughout the week.” Then he mentioned the possibility of maybe doing the whole show live as Jiminy Glick one night, and we were so enamored by that idea. We didn’t want to push him in case he changed his mind, but he was into it. It gave us something fun to tease all week, too — that Marty was pretending he was only hosting three shows, and Jiminy was “guest hosting” for him on Thursday.
After deciding to do Glick, how do you make that come to life? Was hair and makeup freaking out?
Marty brought in his Glick glam team specifically to do that stuff. I think somebody came out of retirement to do it. It was the people who did it for Primetime Glick and who have done it for years.
The process yesterday was really interesting. With a guest host, we usually have a set schedule for the day, but Marty was in makeup almost the entire day. It takes about two or three hours to get fully into the makeup. So all of our writers’ meetings were with him in the makeup chair in various stages of prosthesis. He did our morning rehearsal with the face makeup mostly done, but he wasn’t in the wardrobe, so he still had his skinny little Martin short body in a bathrobe, and Jiminy Glick’s face, which was one of the funnier things I’ve ever seen. The staff was dying laughing when he walked in.
What was the writing process like?
Marty has a back catalogue of material he’s generated over the years of questions he could one day ask someone as Jiminy Glick. And then as we booked people for the pre-taped interviews and live episode, our writing staff was helping him write for those specific guests. It was like comedy-nerd fantasy camp, getting to write Jiminy Glick questions. It was one of the cooler experiences of my career.
All the writers were just so happy all week to be working with Marty but specifically with Glick. It was like writing dialogue for your favorite cartoon character. We pitched Marty a ton of stuff. He gave us some direction, getting the voice down, and he used a combination of stuff we wrote and stuff that he had written. And obviously he improvises a ton in the moment, too.
Glick’s whole bit is asking inappropriate, sometimes offensive questions. How did you toe the line of writing naughty material for him?
Marty told us, “Jiminy’s an idiot with power.” That helped us focus our writing. I think he said the questions we were writing at first were a little too directly mean. He told us, “Jiminy will always phrase it as a compliment even if he’s saying the meanest thing you’ve ever heard.”
As we got into the live show yesterday, we knew we wanted to cover the debate, and we weren’t really sure how exactly we were going to do that with Glick: We have a character hosting our show on a really big news night, what are we going to do? We started the discussions early in the week, and Marty goes, “I think Glick would be a Trump supporter. Not in the way that some Trump supporters are racist or whatever; I think he just believes things he hears in passing on Newsmax or he reads on Facebook, and he just takes it at face value and believes it.” So anything that was mean or off-color, we wrote it from a place that he’s just misinformed.
The last time I saw Jiminy Glick full time on television was in the early 2000s, so it was fun to add in current events material, too — like having him ask Bill Hader, “I heard you’re staying at Diddy’s pool house?” Jiminy’s ageless. He looks exactly the same as he always has, so it’s fun to bring him into the modern era.
Tell me more about making an entire Jiminy Glick episode set to air immediately after a presidential debate.
We found it both a blessing and a creative challenge to cover the debate with Jiminy. How do we cover it without knowing what’s going to happen? Because if Jimmy Kimmel was hosting the show that night, we probably would’ve delayed our taping and gone live after the debate and covered everything. That wasn’t going to be possible with Glick for a number of reasons. One of them is that we shot our show earlier than usual yesterday, because we knew Marty wanted to go long with all the interviews and cut them down. Jiminy Glick isn’t really a political character, but that was the big pop-culture moment yesterday, so we knew he had to cover it.
We actually shot part of a man-on-the-street segment, one of our “Live Witness News” bits with Glick, for one of the episodes. It was a bit of a gamble. When we do those bits, we’re trying to get people to lie on camera about things they’ve seen. But every pedestrian we spoke to was so happy to see Jiminy Glick, so delighted just to see Martin Short, that we realized the bit doesn’t work when you’re doing it with a beloved character. Marty gave it his all, but we ended up scrapping that.
How did you go about getting Bill Hader and Sean Hayes for those pre-taped Jiminy segments?
I will tell you, I’ve been involved in lots of comedy bits and trying to book celebrities for them, and it’s not always easy. Scheduling is tough. Everyone who Jiminy asked to come in and do something came in and did it, and they were so excited. It was like if the pope invited you over for dinner. No one turns down the pope. Jiminy Glick is the comedy pope, I guess. Bill and Sean agreed immediately and came in just to do that. They had nothing to promote. Same with Kroll. He was so excited to come on and be insulted by Jiminy Glick. Melissa flew in from New York to do Glick and then, I believe, went right back. That’s how much people love Martin Short and love this character.
What was it like on set during those pre-tapes, with Bill Hader cracking up?
In the early cuts, you can hear the crew stifling laughter at every single line. It is amazing to watch. Marty has all these great questions in front of him, but some of the funniest stuff is what he riffs in the moment or a cutting response to something his guest says. He is a force of nature in every way. You think, Who would show up just to have their career and appearance and everything torn down by this fake character?
But working with Martin the last two weeks — he put in so much prep work — you really see why he’s one of the greats. His work ethic is unparalleled, and his instincts are great. Marty knows what works with Glick, and we just follow his lead on it with the writing and the look of it and the edit. It almost felt like we were in a tribute band who got to play with the lead singer of the band that they’re covering.
What were Bill Hader and Sean Hayes’s reactions to the experience after taping?
They just loved it. I think they saw it as an honor that they would be picked by Marty to do this. I was chatting with Sean Hayes before he went in and he told us, “Go tell Marty to literally say whatever he wants to me. He can’t hurt my feelings. Nothing is over the line. I want Marty to give me the full Jiminy Glick experience.” That’s why the bit works so well. No matter what Jiminy Glick says, the guest thinks it’s so funny, and they love Marty so much that they’re always in on the joke.
It’s funny … We do a show every day, and we work hard to make it good. It kind of feels like it drifts away into the ether sometimes. But I have gotten more texts about Jiminy Glick this week than I do about almost anything. It feels like the week we do the Oscars when I get texts from people I haven’t talked to in five or ten years of people going, “Oh my God, this Jiminy Glick thing is so funny. I can’t believe you guys got him to do that!” It feels like something broke through in a really fun way. Multiple people have texted me, “I could watch Bill Hader giggle at Jiminy Glick for hours on end,” and I couldn’t agree more.
Do you have a favorite improvisation Martin did while in character?
Saying Bill Hader was dressed as a cat burglar really makes me laugh, and saying Bill Hader clearly didn’t go through hair and makeup.
When he was hosting as himself, we’d go in with monologue revisions and just talk them through. But we gave him a monologue yesterday, and hearing him read it as Glick was a really interesting experience. Once he starts doing it in the voice, he can make something that’s not actually a joke get a huge laugh. We had a joke in the live show about how he interviewed Busta Rhymes at the BET Awards red carpet, and there was a punch line after it, but the part that got the laugh was just how he said “Busta Rhymes” in that Glick inflection. Glick is like an instrument Marty knows how to play.
What’s been Jimmy Kimmel’s reaction to Glick Week?
He’s very glad to be on his well-deserved vacation, but I get the sense he’s a little jealous we got to hang out with Martin Short for the week. I sent him a picture of Marty in the Glick face makeup and bathrobe, and he was wearing the star-spangled top hat in front of a big screen that said “Let’s Go Brandon” on it. I sent it without context. Jimmy had no idea what was going on, and he just wrote back, “That looks really fun.”
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