David Lynch Was Always Up for a Good Joke
The great David Lynch has passed away at the age of 78. And while the legendary artist and filmmaker will no doubt be remembered for his surreal, often nightmarish works, what arguably made him such a beloved cultural fixture was his sense of humor.
While one might expect the guy who made Eraserhead and Blue Velvet to be a brooding, self-serious loner, Lynch was anything but. He was a uniquely charming, offbeat character who wouldn’t shy away from the talk show circuit. He made regular appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and once decided that David Letterman’s Late Night was the ideal place to ask fans of Twin Peaks to write into the network to help save the struggling show.
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Almost all of Lynch’s films contain at least some comedic elements; like how Mulholland Drive includes a mini-comedy of errors about an incompetent hit man.
Interestingly, Lynch once tried to make a straight-up comedy with Steve Martin and Martin Short (Selena Gomez was not yet born). The comedians would have played the leads in One Saliva Bubble, which Lynch co-wrote with Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost prior to their TV work. “Mark and I started working on One Saliva Bubble, and we were laughing our butts off,” Lynch said of their 1987 script, all about a secret government project that causes residents of a small Kansas town to swap bodies.
According to Lynch, Martin loved the script and “wanted to do it with Martin Short.” They were just six weeks away from shooting it, when producer Dino De Laurentiis informed Lynch that his company was “out of money.” As some fans have pointed out, certain absurd comic elements of One Saliva Bubble were seemingly incorporated into Lynch and Frost’s Twin Peaks revival, specifically the “Dougie” scenes.
Aside from his own work, Lynch proved time after time that he would happily play his oddball persona for laughs. While Louis C.K. may have tarnished his old show’s legacy, the two-parter episode of Louie is still worth watching for Lynch’s unexpected turn as a veteran TV producer.
Even more surprisingly, Lynch guest-starred as himself in an episode of Family Guy and had a recurring role in the short-lived The Cleveland Show, playing the distinctly Lynch-like Gus the Bartender.
This came about because co-creator Mike Henry was a huge fan, and credits Wild at Heart with inspiring him to enter show business. Henry simply got a hold of Lynch on the phone and asked him to join the cast. “I told him about the show, and he was completely down. And so he’s our eccentric bartender,” Henry told Entertainment Weekly.
Lynch himself confirmed that there wasn’t much more to the story.
And Lynch’s YouTube channel, as well as his pre-YouTube internet videos, were often as hilarious as they were eccentric.
Somehow we haven’t even mentioned his comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, which consisted of the same panels with new jokes that Lynch literally phoned in.
Not many people have the ability to make you laugh while simultaneously chilling you to your bone. Comedy was David Lynch’s White Lodge.
