Will Ferrell’s Weirdest Comedy Gig Was Performing for O.J. Simpson Jurors
Performing in an improvisational comedy group will inevitably lead to weird gigs, like working a corporate holiday party or hamming it up for a mere handful of paying customers. But when pre-Saturday Night Live Will Ferrell was with the Groundlings, he booked one of the strangest jobs of all — acting out comedy sketches for jurors in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
Ferrell’s Groundlings career happened to coincide with the trial of the century, he told Graham Norton per Chortle. “The jury was sequestered for a long time and couldn’t go out anywhere, so someone came up with the idea of performing our sketch show for them in the court to lighten the mood,” Ferrell remembered. “It was just us and the jurors. They seemed mildly entertained, but it was very bizarre.”
Everyone felt sorry for the jurors, Ferrell explained to Conan O’Brien back in 1997. So the comedians did their thing under trying circumstances — middle of the day, in a brightly lit courtroom, for an audience of 12. Ferrell says he got no laughs but a few amused smiles when “I did Cat Guy for them.”
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Er, Cat Guy? That was a character Ferrell was trying to convince Lorne Michaels to put on Saturday Night Live, he told O’Brien. Imagine being isolated from the world for months, then being brought into a room to see a curly-haired man-child do this.
“This is starting to explain their verdict,” concluded O’Brien.
Ferrell agreed. “I think we had an adverse effect.”
Ferrell recently appeared on The Graham Norton Show with Reese Witherspoon, his costar in the upcoming wedding comedy, You’re Cordially Invited. Witherspoon, whose most famous role might be aspiring attorney Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, had her own peculiar courtroom story to share. “About seven years after Legally Blonde came out, I was called up to do two solid weeks” of jury duty, she told Norton. “When we went to deliberation and it came to choosing a foreman, the entire jury picked me. When I asked them why, they said it was because I went to law school!”
As O’Brien noted, stories like these explain why we get strange verdicts.
