Teri Garr Was the Smartest Dumb Blonde in Comedy

The ditzy blonde was a comedy archetype long before Teri Garr came along. Comedians from Johnny Carson to Monty Python to the ribald gang on Three’s Company played the stereotype for cheap laughs, somehow equating blonde hair and big boobs with a comic lack of intelligence. But Garr, who passed away Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 79, turned the archetype on its ear, playing characters that might be described as flighty or eccentric while secretly being the smartest person in the room.

Take her Oscar-nominated turn in Tootsie as Sandy, Michael Dorsey’s eternally flustered best friend who deserved way better than she got. Like Dorsey, Dustin Hoffman was a notoriously difficult scene partner, but Garr gave as good as she got, improvising and arguing with the actor about the best ways to insult Dorothy, his female alter ego. “We have the same comic rhythm,” Hoffman says in Making Tootsie. “The same comic instincts. I like her too. We should be married. No. We should be divorced and working together.” 

Director Sydney Pollack let Garr write many of her own lines although he secretly worried she’d sink the film. The reason? “You’re gonna like Teri Garr too much.”

In Young Frankenstein, Garr put a satirical turn on the blonde, buxom sidekick as Gene Wilder’s lab assistant. How did she get so funny? “I don’t think you can learn comic timing,” Garr said on Fresh Air. But “I was an incredible fan of Mel Brooks’ ‘The 2000 Year Old Man.’ I had listened to those records hundreds of times as a kid and memorized them and did them over and over again. So I sort of knew his rhythm.” 

Was there any other reason Brooks cast her? “I like people with big talents and small neuroses,” he told Playboy. 

While Garr starred in several hit comedies in the 1970s and 1980s — Oh God, Mr. Mom and After Hours — it was her regular appearances on Late Night with David Letterman that cemented her iconic comedy status. Garr guested a jaw-dropping 32 times. The first time was to promote a movie. Her subsequent appearances? “I came back as the fool, the court jester,” she said. 

But that was selling herself short. Roger Ebert pointed out that Garr was one of the only Letterman guests who could “put dents in his aplomb.” Like Carson with Carol Wayne, flirtation was part of the comedy, but the Letterman/Garr repartee felt more real, undercut by gleeful irritation and oneupmanship. Get the better of Garr? Even Letterman couldn’t manage it.

Garr set the stage for smart, sometimes frazzled women who didn’t always have their acts together — Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, Elaine on Seinfeld, Jennifer Coolidge in just about anything. They’re all emulating the woman Pauline Kael called "the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen."