He has been beaten and bruised, squashed by moving vehicles and human feet, dismembered, beheaded and exploded into pieces.
And those were the funny moments.
Thanks to what was supposed to be a one-time completely unpaid gig in the first season of Saturday Night Live, an ungainly ersatz boy formed from common Play-doh splattered his way into American culture five decades ago and never really left.
He’s Mr. Bill, and millions not only recognize his white clay mug, they know his adventures so well they will do his panicked falsetto voice at the mention of his name: “Oh noooo!”
Is he a highlight of the groundbreaking comedy launched by SNL beginning in 1975? That’s a matter of opinion. Lorne Michaels is said to have not been a fan, but in an Entertainment Weekly readers survey a few years back, Mr. Bill ranked as the show’s funniest-ever recurring character—beating out such other SNL luminaries as Wayne Campbell, The Church Lady and Mary Katherine Gallagher.
Whether Michaels likes him or not, he’s inescapably memorable, even 50 years on.
He is also inescapable for Walter Williams, for whom Mr. Bill became Mr. Big.
This is how it happened. Williams, a native of New Orleans, acquired a Super 8 camera as a teen and began making short films. One introduced “The Mr. Bill Show,” a parody of a cheaply made children’s show where you could see the creator’s hands manipulating the static characters. Along with some of his other work, Williams sent the little sketch to a film processing lab.
The lab lost all of it. (Oh, noooo!)
It turned up in the mail about a month later, just about the time a friend told Williams about a new show, then titled NBC’s Saturday Night, and a contest it had announced for submission of home movies.
Williams entered his entire oeuvre of short films. He didn’t hear anything back, so he called the SNL offices at NBC and was informed Mr. Bill had been chosen to air that very Saturday.
A small issue: The NBC station in New Orleans was pre-empting the show that week for the Mardi Gras parade. Williams, frothing of course to see it, talked his way into the station to watch the live feed—the one not being beamed into New Orleans homes.
“It went over pretty well,” Williams said of Mr. Bill’s debut and the laughs it generated in Studio 8H. “But when I told people my film had been on, nobody in New Orleans believed me.”
Mr. Bill returned later that year; and they believed.
The rest of the nation was able to see that first episode, hosted by Jill Clayburgh. And they saw Dan Aykroyd introduce Williams’ filmed submission, where he noted for the record: “No pay, just play.”
Sensing a career about to take off, Williams moved to New York, looking to expand his comic talents in comedy clubs. It was a rough time. He lived in a hotel that rented by the hour, while he also almost starved. “I was eating popcorn at the cinema where I worked,” he says. He wore his cinema tuxedo to The Improv where he got on at 1 am, long after bigger acts like Andy Kaufman and Larry David.
Three more Mr. Bill shorts, in which he and his dog Spot were clobbered and flattened in various ways by the unfeeling Mr. Hands and his evil hitman Sluggo (blue Play-doh because that was all Williams had left), aired on SNL that season and the next, entirely without compensation.
But not without growing attention. One night back at his seedy hotel, the doorman informed Williams he’d gotten a message from “Lornay Michellos.” He had won a meeting with the on-his-way-to-legendary SNL producer.
“Lorne told me the son of a friend of his had gotten in trouble at school by writing ‘Here comes Mr. Bill’ on the bathroom wall,” Williams said.
Michaels assessed Williams his creation for him: “It must be working.”
Williams heard second hand that Michaels had originally had some reluctance about the bit, and Michaels did tell Tom Shales in an interview in The Washington Post: “If there’s anything annoying, it’s when you do something you think is breathtakingly innovative and all people say is, they love Mr. Bill.”
Still, the meeting led to a real paying contract for ten more “Mr. Bill” shorts and a place on the SNL writing staff. (Williams also created a memorable commercial parody about Elvis’s coat going on a concert tour.)
Speaking of apparel, Mr. Bill T-shirts started appearing everywhere and neither Williams nor SNL got a taste. It took years, and chasing down Mr. Bill product-makers all the way to Taiwan, for Williams to get some share of the merch.
But he did cash in on something else: that early lack of cash. “It turned out to be the best thing that happened,” Williams explains. Because his creation went on the air nationally five times for free, he had a firm claim to sole ownership of the character.
That position was challenged in court anyway. The original Mr. Hands, Vance DeGeneres, (yes, Ellen’s brother), sued. Williams counter-sued. Williams said the judge decided almost entirely in his favor but handed down the judgement by having a clerk make up copies of Mr. Bill and Sluggo. He dissected Mr. Bill’s body into pieces and literally threw them at the complainants.
“He thought he was doing a comedy bit,” Williams said.
After the big 10-episode season, “Lorne decided to call it quits,” Williams said. But it wasn’t like Mr. Bill went back into the can permanently. Over the years he has popped up in many places, from commercials for Ramada Inn and Burger King among others, to Jeopardy!, to more than 30 episodes of a series called Ohh Nooo! Mr. Bill Presents on what once was the Fox Family Channel.
Along the way he has been asked deep-thought questions about possibly heavy themes in “Mr. Bill”: the brutal clash of good vs evil, the echoes of Aristotelian theories about the comedy of superiority, where the laugh comes at the expense of someone else’s misfortune. After all, the joke is always Mr. Bill being violently abused—not the viewer.
“I think some people try to find some deep meaning,” Williams says, dismissing the notion. “I do what I think is funny.”
Williams says he is of course aware of the massive cultural footprint left by the show where Mr. Bill was introduced. “There’ll never be another moment in history like those Saturday Night Live early seasons,” he said. In the years since, he says, his main goal has been “to keep the integrity of the character, not get bogged down.”
But like other creators of enduringly memorable characters, he said he recognizes the shadow they cast can be challenging to come out from under.
“I’m constantly writing other scripts and trying other things,” Williams said. “It has been a double-edged sword in that way.”
Which means, he said, “I don’t want to make any more Mr. Bill stuff really. It’s too hard.” He added, “As long as people have good memories of it—that’s number one.”
