“The audience knew that I had blown my line,” writes Shatner. “But for farce to work it has to be played earnestly. If the characters are in on the joke, if we were to start laughing, the entire suspension of disbelief would disappear, ruining the show.” So he stood there, stone faced, as the audience began to laugh. Snickers first. But the chuckles gave way to howls, laughter so loud it doubled back on itself — the audience laughing at the sound of its own laughter. Even Julie Harris began to laugh. Not Shatner. He never tipped his hand, never resigned himself to appearing as if he were in on the joke. It was a matter of his anticipating the audience’s response, and astutely managing his own reaction.
“Bottom line: Bill takes himself very seriously,” says David Fisher, who collaborated with him on Up Till Now. “He understands the public perception of Bill Shatner. Totally. The expectation the public has of him is not fiction. It’s not a character he’s created. He’s going to meet the expectation simply by being himself.” There, as the Shakespearean may say, is the rub. Or, in Shatnerian parlance, the poof.
Christopher Walken has the Shatnerian poof. So do Alec Baldwin and Henry Winkler and Betty White — all actors who possess a self-deprecating, but masterfully oblivious, posture that allows them to play into the pigeonholes the culture has carved out for them. Nicolas Cage, with his own distinctly spasmodic speech rhythms, and a tendency to parade his private weirdness in public, is a breed of next-generation Shatner: subject to bizarre, Jeff-Goldblum-in-The-Fly meta-mutations he can no longer control.
Jeff Goldblum is Shatnerian. Big time.
This Shatnerian je ne sais quoi has buoyed Shatner’s career for nearly half a century. It’s the droll, high-level wakefulness that was apparent even in Star Trek, where, as Kirk, the young Shatner played Horatio Hornblower with a bit of Buck Rogers bravado, bringing humour, smarm, and a rugged, salt-of-planet-Earth charm to something as cerebral and silly as space travel. Well before self-parody became the hallmark of hip, fashionable, ironic comic performance, it’s what made Shatner viable in generic spoofs like Loaded Weapon 1 and Airplane II: The Sequel. It’s what makes him so interesting and eminently likeable that, along with CBS’s $#*! My Dad Says, he is the current star of Biography’s Shatner’s Raw Nerve (an intimate talk show where he’ll uncover the “soft, gentle, loving” side of Rush Limbaugh, or speak compassionately with “Weird Al” Yankovic about the pain of being alone); and the Discovery Channel’s non-fiction paranormal probe William Shatner’s Weird or What?, which has its host recurrently posing the nagging question his own persona raises.
So yes, the Twitter show.
Justin Halpern was twenty-eight and living with his parents in San Diego when he started publishing an online account of the pearls of wisdom dispensed by his seventy-three-year-old father. He minted his Twitter account (@shitmydadsays) on August 3, 2009. By October, it was popular enough to land him a book deal with HarperCollins. By November, he was developing a sitcom. Casting the title role was a cinch. “When we had written the script, we had been given a list of actors CBS was interested in,” explains Halpern. “We saw Mr. Shatner on the list and immediately were like, ‘Okay, he would be amazing.’ He was the first guy we went after.”
It’s no real shock that a rushed-to-market sitcom based on a series of 140-character quips (all offending expletives deleted) isn’t very good. $#*! My Dad Says wallows around in subadolescent non-humour, expecting the laugh track to light up at the mere utterance of words like “balls,” “boobs,” and “wiener.” Shatner isn’t so much its leavening touch as its entire rationale. He’s the star around which all the strained scatological jokes and MADtv cast-offs orbit. If $#*! My Dad Says is anything, it’s a Shatner delivery device. Because forty-plus years after Star Trek, there’s still a marked demand to see William Shatner stomping around a sitcom set in his pyjamas, sort of swearing.
Unlike Raw Nerve or Weird or What?, which hinge on the public’s appreciation of both Shatner himself and the semi-constructed Shatner front, $#*! My Dad Says speaks to his viability as a working actor. In Up Till Now, he writes that “every actor has spent days… months staring at the telephone, willing it to ring. And living with the hollow fear that it might never ring again.” Perhaps this accounts for his dogged productivity, even when he can easily rest on his laurels (as well as all the money he has accrued playing a puffed-up version of himself for Priceline, which some uncorroborated guesstimates have valued in the hundreds of millions).
“He’s a survivor,” says Halpern, “and I feel that a lot of people respect that.” Survivor. It’s a word Fisher echoes. Many celebrities can subsist in a hand-to-mouth, paycheque-to-paycheque, “I’ll take Martin Mull to block” kind of way. But few endure in a manner that’s not just saleable in the eyes of network sitcom bigwigs, but culturally salient. And nobody else teleports from Shakespearean thespian to sci-fi icon to streetwise crusader to patron saint of studied self-parody.
Weird? Yes. Undeniably. Winkingly, nudgingly, smirkingly so. But weird in a way necessitated by all the pop songs left to be incongruously covered, all the hotel and flight rates left to be ruthlessly negotiated, and all the shit left unsaid. Weird in the way that psychokinesis, or magnetism, or an adrenaline-pumped mother jacking a Buick over her head to free her trapped toddler is weird. The kind of person whose sundry quirks can be explained but never explained away. In a word: Shatnerian.
