(from the portroids project)
 
When was the first time you saw Fred Willard? Was it Fernwood 2Night? Or perhaps the happy-go-lucky military officer in This Is Spinal Tap? If you’re a little younger it may well have been his delirious turn as a dog show commentator in Christopher Guest’s 2004 satire Best in Show. For me it was Real People, the weird prime-time magazine show with a live audience on NBC around 1980.

Whatever the case, it’s in keeping with Willard’s guileless Middle American everyman schtick that it might almost have seemed as if he were hardly performing at all, as if he had wandered onto the set practically by accident.
 

Willard during his Second City days. Robert Klein is the taller guy.
 
Such an impression could hardly be farther from the truth. Let’s say you first saw him in Fernwood 2 Night, right? That would have been 1977. So we, the American audience, were just getting to know him, right? He was just starting out. No, on the contrary: By 1977 Fred Willard was a highly seasoned veteran of sketch comedy, with more than 15 years of hard-won experience under his belt. In 1962 he (along with his longtime partner Vic Grecco, sometimes styled ‘Greco’) appeared on the same bill as Barbra Streisand at the hungry i in San Francisco! Hell, maybe Barbra opened for them!
 

 
Fred Willard was a member of the Second City improv troupe for a number of years—his audition with Robert Klein secured a spot for both comedians. He also starred in the first successful production of Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders in 1969. Ironically, at Second City his ostentatiously “straight” demeanor and appearance made him “weird,” as he confessed in the pages of Mike Thomas’ oral history Second City Unscripted: 
 

I was kind of the weird guy. The original Second City guys all had beards and sat around smoking dope, and I heard stories of when the thaw came in the spring, you’d go out in this garden next door, and there were all these hypodermic needles and drug paraphernalia, but I was never into drugs.

 
If you are in the L.A. area next Saturday, January 17, the formidable Kliph Nesteroff will be hosting an intimate Q&A at the Downtown Independent. The event is at 3 p.m., and costs just $10. Do hurry, though, because tickets are limited. Nesteroff is almost certainly the best-informed person born after the heyday of Julius Erving on the old-school nightclub comedy of the 1940s through the 1970s, and Fred Willard has so many incredible stories to tell, it’ll make your head spin. If you’re not already reading his Tumblr Showbiz Imagery and Chicanery, you’re missing out, because it’s great.

Here’s an episode of Get Smart that was actually conceived as a stealth “pilot” for a sitcom starring Willard and Grecco. However, their agent held out for more money and the production company changed their minds.
 

 
Here’s a pretty astonishing TV commercial from the Nixon years in which a family that includes Willard, Peter Boyle, and James Woods (!) enjoys some Campbell’s fuckin’ Home Style Pork ‘n’ Beans: