“Well, Marty’s done it again,” said Joe Flaherty in the SCTV writer’s room. “Created yet another disgusting, unlikable character!” Jackie Rogers Jr. was basically a version of the Johnny Del Bravo character I created for The David Steinberg Show, dialed up to the point where he made the entire SCTV cast and crew go “Eww!” every time I did him.
Jackie Jr. was supposed to be a one-off, a footnote gag. Early in my tenure at SCTV, circa 1982, I used to go into the writer’s room and do this stylized freak singer who I called Jackie Rogers. Dick Blasucci, Paul Flaherty, and my brother Michael, all then writers for the show, suggested that I play this character in a sketch, but I resisted. “Cheeseball lounge singers have been overly satirized at this point,” I said. “Nothing fresh there.”
However, it occurred to me that if I introduced the character of Rogers and then had him killed off in the same piece, we could have some fun without overdoing it. So the four of us—Michael, Dick, Paul, and me—wrote a piece in which the SCTV Network was promo-ing an upcoming Jackie Rogers special called Old Mother Nature, She Loves Me. In the promo, Rogers was shown bantering with various creatures of the forest and singing upbeat standards to them: “Pardon me, miss, but I never done this with a real live squirrel!” You get the idea.
Abruptly, the promo cut to a shot of a lurking cougar, who lunged at Rogers in mid-song and fatally mauled him. At the very end, Jackie Jr. popped up in a little inset circle on-screen and said, “Hi, I’m Jackie Rogers Jr. In 1970, my dad gave his life making this special. . . . I miss my old man. I hope you don’t—Saturday nights at nine on SCTV.”
I had recently seen a picture in a newspaper of Mickey Rooney Jr., a musician son of the famous actor who, for some reason, struck me as albino. (He was merely blond.) So I rather randomly made Jackie Rogers Jr. a cross-eyed albino. And as the character gained legs on SCTV and SNL (legs encased in silver-lamé tights, that is), I made Jackie Jr. this grotesque vehicle for the idea of a child using a famous parent—a dead parent, no less—as a way to gain credibility in show business.
Jackie’s facial tics were a nod to Sammy Davis Jr., and his laugh—a dorky thhh-thhh-thhh emitted by raising my tongue to my upper teeth and breathing through them—was taken straight from Andrew Alexander, the head of Second City Toronto and executive producer of SCTV.
Andrew for years denied that he laughed this way, but then he got married, and among the wedding pictures was a shot of him caught unmistakably in the middle of a thhh-thhh-thhh laugh. He sent it to me with a note that read, “Dear Marty: Fuck you.”
JACKIE ROGERS JR.
(ENTERS SINGING.)
I’m Jackie Rogers Jr.
And I’m like “this” with all the high flyers
Yes, I’m Jackie Rogers Jr.
My show’s hipper than Seth Meyers’
Had better best beware
’Cause the Jackie Rogers Jr. show
Is on the . . . airrrrrrrr!!!!
Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen! Oh, aren’t you kind. Aren’t you sweet. Aren’t you everything I’d hoped you would be. And even though I wasn’t your first choice as a performer tonight, it doesn’t really bother me, because Gary Busey is such a different type.
Interesting story: I was getting some plaque removed from teeth that had already been bonded—which is not supposed to happen, by the way. At any rate, this cute little dental hygienist with magnificent hooters says to me, “Mr. Rogers Jr., sir, what are the Pointer Sisters really like?” And here I’d just been with those dudes two nights before, in the South Shore Room at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe—
(SUDDENLY THE PRERECORDED VOICE OF AN ACTOR DOING JACKIE’S LATE FATHER EMANATES FROM ON HIGH.)
“Jackie!”
(LOOKING SKYWARD.)
Wh-what the f-hell? Who be you?
“I am your father, the late Jackie Rogers Sr.!”
(IN WONDERMENT.)
You . . . are my father? I . . . am your son?
(SNAPPING OUT OF IT, ADDRESSING THE AUDIENCE.)
Gee, is the Holy Spirit nearby? Because with three you get egg roll!
(BREAKS HIMSELF UP LAUGHING, SLAPPING HIS THIGHS.)
I’m sorry . . . so sorry. . . . Please, let’s bring up the lights. Someone get a shot of this teleprompter. Ladies and gentlemen, I must explain. That line that I just laid on you, about the Holy Spirit—who can be lots of fun, by the way, when you get him alone—cannot be found withinst the confines of the script. It was a totally spontaneous addition. I have no idea where that came from. But, you see, that is what you call . . . improvisation!
(The prerecorded voice of Jackie Sr. booms back in.)
“Jackie.”
Yes, Papa?
“So you know the Pointer Sisters?”
Does anyone, really?