Jan Hooks
Jan Hooks is an actor, born 1957.
Five years as a repertory player on Saturday Night Live, from 1986 to 1991, is the line on Jan Hooks that everyone knows, and she kept turning up in cameos there until 1994. She was working before that, though: Not Necessarily the News in 1983, and Tina in Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, a year before she joined the SNL cast.
Her gift was the character rather than the joke. She played women with an unshakeable belief in their own good taste, and she played them straight, staying inside the person long after the sketch had made its point and moved on. That commitment is what made her funny where a lighter touch would have made her merely broad.
The post-SNL television work is where a lot of people actually met her. She joined Designing Women for its last two seasons as Carlene Frazier Dobber, had a recurring run on 3rd Rock from the Sun as Vicki Dubcek, voiced Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon on The Simpsons, turned up on Futurama and 30 Rock, and played Dixie Glick on Primetime Glick and again in the feature Jiminy Glick in Lalawood. The films were mostly small: Gladys Johnson in Coneheads, Stephanie Needham in Wildcats, Jen in Batman Returns, Miss Leavey in Simon Birch.
She died on October 9, 2014, of complications of throat cancer, at 57. The archive compilations now carry a large share of her work forward.
Movies (11)
- Batman Returns (1992)
- Coneheads (1993)
- Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)
- Wildcats (1986)
- Jiminy Glick in Lalawood (2005)
- Simon Birch (1998)
- A Dangerous Woman (1993)
- Saturday Night Live: 25th Anniversary Special (1999)
- Saturday Night Live: The Best of Chris Farley (2003)
- Saturday Night Live: 15th Anniversary (1989)
- The Women of SNL (2010)
TV (7)
Where to start with Jan Hooks
Her sketch work is the reason to be here, and the compilations are the practical route in. The Women of SNL is the best-assembled of them, and Saturday Night Live: 25th Anniversary Special catches her among the cast she came up with.
For a full performance rather than clips, go to 3rd Rock from the Sun. Vicki Dubcek is the purest distillation of what she did: enormous confidence, zero self-awareness, and total commitment to a woman who would be mortified to know she was the joke.
Designing Women is the more conventional showcase, two seasons of a network sitcom that gave her a proper ensemble to work against, and it is the easiest thing here to simply put on.
Pee-wee's Big Adventure is the fun one to catch, filmed before she joined the SNL cast, with the technique already fully formed. Coneheads is the feature version of the sketch world she came from, and The Simpsons is where her voice reached the largest audience of all.