Lawrence was one of the more unsung carryover characters to travel with me from SCTV to Saturday Night Live. He began his life as a simpleton I played in a sketch written by Eugene Levy called “Half-Wits”: a game show whose contestants were slow people. I’d been toying with the idea of a character who had never gotten his second teeth—his first teeth never fell out, so he was an adult with baby teeth. Bev Schechtman, SCTV’s endlessly inventive makeup wizard, would simply blacken the bottom halves of my upper teeth and the top halves of the lower teeth. It worked brilliantly. For Jackie Rogers Jr., Bev started painting my teeth white, giving them a cheesy bad-cap look. Years later I met Carol Burnett and told her about this trick, and she loved it. “How could I have been working in comedy all these years,” she said, “and no one told me about painting my teeth?”
So that was the beginning of the character, Lawrence Orbach. I wasn’t planning to go particularly broad with Lawrence’s appearance, because we’d received a request from hair and makeup to tone down the massive looks to spare SCTV’s exhausted staff. But one day I walked into the makeup room and saw this huge honker of a prosthetic nose sitting on one of the molds. “Who’s that for?” I said. Judi Cooper-Sealy, our hair and wig chief, responded, “Oh, it’s for Joe. He’s gonna wear that in ‘Half-Wits.’”
Well, that did it. If I’m competing with that nose, I thought, I’ve got to amp it up. It had always made me laugh, in a sad kind of way, when I’d see guys in their late twenties going prematurely bald. So as Lawrence I would wear a bald pate covered by a receding hairline. I also requested pockmarked skin, just to add a certain je ne sais quoi. As for Lawrence’s demeanor, I knew a TV writer who had a nervous, slightly mouth-breathing way of talking—I’m leaving him nameless because he’s actually handsome, successful, and not a moron—that I borrowed for Lawrence.
Lawrence gained his greatest fame in the very first episode of Saturday Night Live I did, appearing in a pretaped segment with Harry Shearer in a sketch about two brothers going for the gold in the Summer Olympics.
HARRY: My brother and I know it’s not going to be easy. Men have never done synchronized swimming in a sanctioned competition in this country. Officially it’s got, like, zero acceptance.
LAWRENCE: I don’t swim.
HARRY: My brother doesn’t swim. So no one is going to walk up and hand us a gold medal, especially since men’s synchro isn’t even in the Olympics . . . yet.
LAWRENCE: But that’s okay, because we could use the time. ’Cause I’m not that strong a swimmer.
LAWRENCE ORBACH
High-lo. I am talking into a recorder that is inside my portable telephone. It is my understanding that this will be transcribed.
Although I have a strong command of the English language, I can neither read nor write. So words like transcribed are such a mystery to me.
My morning glass of milk comes from cats.
Even though I’m in my mid-twenties, I’m having some degree of difficulty getting through high school. But I’ll do it, because I have certain goals in life I feel compelled to achieve. One of which is becoming a circuit court judge, and the other is to perhaps play professional hockey.