Morgan Freeman names his all-time favourite comedians
A lot of actors maintain that comedy is much harder to pull off convincingly than drama, but Morgan Freeman has adopted the unique approach of never viewing any material as being intentionally designed to generate laughs.
That’s not to say he can’t be funny because there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, but as it applies to his own approach, the Academy Award-winning icon prefers to treat every line of dialogue in the same way. His collaboration with Jack Nicholson in Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List was most definitely played with a lightness of touch, but that wasn’t the way he saw it.
“I don’t do comedy,” he explained at the time. “I think if a situation is funny you just play it for real and if it’s funny, it’s funny.” That being said, he admitted that his uniquely sonorous tones meant he “always knew that someone was going to come at me with a script to play God,” which is something he wouldn’t consider “unless it was a comedy”. As fate would decide, Bruce Almighty came along, and he gave one of the most memorable performances of any star to have ever played the man upstairs.
Freeman lent his talents to The LEGO Movie as Vitruvius in a sly subversion of his wizened sage persona, provided a voiceover for a Dave Chappelle comedy special on Netflix, and has displayed a lightness of touch in films like Last Vegas, Going in Style, and Just Getting Started, so he’s very familiar with the comedy arena.
However, as much as the art form tends to evolve over time and adapt to changing attitudes, it’s clear his personal preferences are rooted in the past. That’s not to say he doesn’t enjoy any form of modern stand-up, slapstick, or gross-out, but the comedians he listed as being among his favourites in an interview with The Guardian aren’t what you’d call particularly current, even if they’re all hugely popular.
“Charlie Chaplin. Jackie Gleason. Peter Sellers – Sellers was a very, very funny man. And I remember the first time I saw Richard Pryor on Johnny Carson’s show,” he said. “He wasn’t the Richard Pryor we all know and loved; he hadn’t found his voice yet, but once he found it, he was hilarious. That man could make me laugh until I wept.”
Chaplin died in 1977, Gleason passed away in 1987, Sellers has been dead since 1980, and Pryor was lost in 2005, so these aren’t guys at the cutting-edge forefront of the medium. That’s not to diminish their contributions to comedy in any form, though, because countless generations of stand-ups, actors, and everyday people have all been inspired by and indebted to their own distinct approaches. Each one of them are regarded as all-time greats for a reason, with Freeman just one of their many supporters.
