JUST AN ORDINARY GUY: A SALUTE TO MICHAEL KEATON’S DECEPTIVELY NORMAL 1980S COMEDIES

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/michael-keaton-1980s-comedies

Whether hanging out in a morgue in ‘Night Shift’ or getting paranormal in ‘Beetlejuice,’ the veteran actor was one of the decade’s most underrated funnymen — and also one of its most restless and self-critical.

Welcome to Misleading Men, a regular feature where we look back at the actors who ruled Hollywood for one brief shining moment.

If Michael Keaton had stopped making movies after 1989 — and thank god that didn’t happen — we would think of his career very differently. Obviously, we would have missed out on a number of great performances — his Oscar-nominated turn in Birdman, his role as a hard-edged special agent in Jackie Brown, his total authority playing newspapermen in The Paper and Spotlight — but we would also think of him as primarily a comedic actor. Because Keaton has been so good for so long doing so many different kinds of films, younger viewers may not be able to fully appreciate what a terrifically funny performer he could be. In fact, he might have been one of the best of his era, back before he decided he didn’t really want to be pigeonholed that way.

We tend to think of comic actors as people who just do comedies, occasionally switching gears to dabble in something serious. (The Robin Williams model, you might say.) Keaton is different: He’s a very good comic actor who chose to remake himself because he knew he could do more. He’s been so successful at that transition, we don’t automatically lump him in with Williams or Eddie Murphy or other big 1980s funnymen. The Keaton we have today is an incredible actor, but the world shouldn’t forget the guy he left behind.

Keaton started out doing TV and stand-up in L.A. in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Not much of his stand-up exists, but this clip is pretty remarkable just because, as sharp and funny as some of this material still remains, even here it’s clear that he was destined to be an actor — and an especially intense one. For Keaton, comedy was about dialing up to a degree, but not to the manic extremes of, say, Jim Carrey. In this early clip, you see how he knew to be locked in, how it gave his onstage persona a little bit of a spark. His observations aren’t spectacularly funny — he comes across as an actor playing a stand-up — but his edgy demeanor suggests a seemingly normal guy who might snap at any second. That tension was the fuel for his future film stardom.