Jason Bateman’s earliest and most important comedy influences: “There was nothing in between”
There are a few things that the British did very well in the 1970s, namely lava lamps, glam-rock and making Star Wars, although to be fair, that was just allowing Americans to come over and giving them somewhere to do it. But as Jason Bateman will attest to, another thing we did very well back then was comedy.
For some reason, probably because of rampant inflation, widespread strikes and practically no electricity, British people honed their gallows humour and translated it into some of the finest TV comedy ever known, with series like John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers still standing up to repeated watchings today. But undoubtedly the most influential was Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which actually began in the final year of the ‘60s, the year Bateman was born, in fact.
For a long time, pretty much until The Office was made, Americans really only had two frames of reference when it came to British comedy: the fairly lamentable Benny Hill, and then the Pythons, whose popularity on these shores was spun off into two superb films, 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail and 1979’s Life of Brian.
By the end of the 1970s, meanwhile, Bateman was already about to take his first steps into child stardom, booking his first commercials in 1980 and then a year later being cast in a major TV show, Little House on the Prairie, in which he appeared in 21 episodes and became a familiar face across the country. He spent the rest of the decade in and out of various shows before, in 1987, he landed his first movie, Teen Wolf Too, a sequel to the Michael J Fox hairy basketball hit.
It didn’t lead to the kind of fame Fox enjoyed, however, and over a long period of time, Bateman was on the outskirts of success, appearing in a raft of shows that either only lasted one season or featured him in just one episode. That changed in 2003, however, when he was cast in Arrested Development, signalling the beginning of Bateman’s career in comedy.
He won a ‘Best Actor’ Golden Globe for his work on the series and would go on to appear in a raft of successful comedies over the next 20 years, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Horrible Bosses, Identity Thief and Game Night. On making the switch, Bateman told Hot Press: “I think when you start doing comedy, you end up liking everyone else doing it. Because you appreciate the talent it takes to go past drama into that weird dark little cave where comedy lives.”
Ironically, in the last ten years, Bateman has found considerable success pivoting back to drama, winning several awards for the hit drug-dealing series Ozark on Netflix and putting in a standout baddie performance in Taron Egerton’s thriller Carry On.
Considering his early comedy influences, though, Bateman added: “It takes talent and timing and awareness of tone, so it’s a joy watching those who do it well. I was a big Gene Wilder fan, and I was into Bill Murray and Monty Python as well. Monty Python was so broad on one side and so dry on the other, there was nothing in between, which I kind of enjoyed.”
He’s now going to be mixing comedy and drama with his latest miniseries DTF St. Louis alongside Stranger Things’ David Harbour. It tells the darkly comic story of three middle-aged adults who get into a love triangle with deadly results, and hits streaming sites the first week of March.
