Who Shot Charlie Rocket?
Does Charles Rocket deserve to be the joke of Saturday Night Live?
“I wouldn’t want to be the next Charlie Rocket. Would you?”
Phil Hartman
Saturday Night Live has produced a lot of leading lights, and also its share of blown globes.
Some didn’t live up to the promise they showed, some never even showed that, and some it seems were jerks behind the scenes. Somehow, Charles Rocket gets saddled with all three.
If poor Charlie is known for something, and he’s really not, it’s getting his entire cast sacked for saying F**k on SNL. He wasn’t the first, and he wasn’t the only. But unlike the Jenny Slates, Norm McDonalds of the world, he seemed to do it maliciously. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know.
But I am here to defend the rest of his legacy.
Charles Rocket was fine in a pretty bad era of the show.
1980. Saturday Night Live exploded onto the screen, and kept exploding for five seasons. Chevy Chase left, but fear not Bill Murray was there to fill the hole. It took Bill Murray to fill the hole of Chevy Chase. So what do you do when everyone leaves? That is everyone: the entire cast (including Bill Murray), most of the writers (all but one), and Lorne Micheals? How do you fill that hole? Bring in Charles Rocket?
It was Saturday Night Live in name and time-slot only, as fellow cast mate Gilbert Gottfried called it a ‘restaurant on a good location’. It was the very worst season, but Rocket was not the worst thing on it.
Charles Rocket was fine in any season.
I’d say he was better on the show then other ‘worst’ candidates like David Spade, Rob Schneider or Finesse Mitchell. I’d actually put him on the side of ‘good’ players, but I have a soft spot for the white-shoe blowhard comedy types.
Charles Rocket should not have been fine
This is where the compliments get back-handed. Charles Rocket was more than an also-ran, because he was less than an also-ran. There are those that deserve revisiting who had a lot more to give to the show, such as Tim Robinson or Beth Cahill. Rocket had nothing more to give to the show. He held kept Saturday Night limping onward with very few talents. Rocket didn’t have much knack for character range, physical humour, or impressions. He also didn’t seem a particularly funny person.
Does that make sense? Like, he wasn’t a great wit, or improviser, or in possession of that spark your best friend has that makes you howl. Its OK, most people, even in comedy, aren’t those diamonds in the rough. He was just a guy. He didn’t have a stellar reputation from the Groundings, Second City, not even The Practical Theatre Company. He wasn’t a hot young stand up, or an even hotter even younger star actor like Anthony Michael Hall or Robert Downey Jnr. He was a weather man that dabbled in short films for bands. He was some guy, who somehow ended up on sinking flagship, and god damn he had a job to do so he got to work.
So how does a unfunny man with everything to prove and nothing to use get to work? He went to the streets of early eighties New York (a cold, dark, grubby place) and made something, anything, for his Rocket Report.
The Rocket Report
I mean, what was that? There pitch for the Rocket Report was, as far as I can tell “we need three more minutes”.
You know you try some things, and often times it just doesn’t work out
- Charlie Rocket
There are episodes where he is literally just talking to people on the ferry, or walking alongside Christmas shoppers. Here he is doing a man on the street, but just one street.
Did they find any funny responses? No. Did they go out with any kind of agenda, or prepared question? Not at all. Did they include bits where he just got completely ignored, or alternate takes of the same introduction? Yes, for some reason. I would be surprised if this took much longer to film then it did to run.
But I wouldn’t call any of them outright failures. He somehow got a dead horse to move enough inches to finish.
When he isn’t saying f**k on television, Charles Rocket is also noted for kinda seeming like a slimeball. That’s who he played. Very well, I might add; as good as almost anyone. But he doesn’t come across actually that guy, at least not in these reports. Many man-on-the-street interviewers seem like you’d punch them if there wasn’t a camera, but Rocket’s kind of charming. Playing hide and seek with strangers, that’t not a million miles away from Jimmy Fallon, surely?
He was just never seemed the handsome jerk he was portraying, or indeed that people believed him to be. On camera at least he was working hard, a clear team player, he was a salesman!
I mean, Jesus; he let himself get stripped and strapped to a wall while Denny Dillon plays funny buggers with a whip. The guy did his dues.
And then sometimes, sometimes, he struck gold.
I mean, come on, this is early Armando Iannucci stuff, right?
In my humble opinion, these sketches hold up better to a modern viewer that anything of that SNL era, and I’m including Eddie Murphy. Yeah, I know, I’m wrong on that one, but gosh darn, there’s something about them.
Maybe it’s nice to see real people for a change. Maybe it’s how live and dangerous it feels. It feels much more in the spirit of the midnight happening SNL debuted as.
Charles Rocket was not some f**kstick in a chair.
One of the many problems of that 1980 season is desperate clinging to the success of the past 5 years.
To introduce the new cast in 1980, the show had an opening sketch with Elliot Gould in bed with the players, being introduced to them in direct comparison to the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players. It’s here if you’re interested. I know, I know, you’re not.
Charles Rocket is introduced matter of factually as a mix Chevy Chase and Bill Murray. This is of course ridiculous hyperbole, from a show desperately clinging to the success of the last 5 years, and so very afraid they can’t live up to it.
But Rocket kinda is that mix. He possessed the secret weapon of both of those guys (the former damned, the latter praised for it); an apparent causal regard chasing the spotlight, whilst being unafraid of the audience. Really, he was a failed prototype of the smarmy all-american business type captured by Phil Hartman only a few years later.
Unfortunately, whilst Hartman was the GOAT, and Chase and Murray were undeniably dynamite stars, all Rocket had to work with was horse sense and a certain degree of tenacity.
After the Rocket Age
Charles Rocket didn’t stop working. He appeared in good projects such as Dumb and Dumber, and Titan AE. But mostly he appeared in a whole lot of bad.
Charles Rocket died in 2005, at the age of 56. I don’t include this as a bummer, or to pretend he was an undiscovered comedy genius. He wasn’t. He was just some guy that somehow managed to get onto what was even then a comedy institution. But Rocket worked hard on it, and I resent the implication he disrespected the show based on one sketch, and it saddens me when I become king of all comedy I won’t be able to tell him so.
So, to Charles Rocket, a guy who hawked the little he had for all they’re worth.
Learn to tolerate immense pain — Charlie Murphy
