Jimmy Kimmel devotes entire episode to Fred Willard, replays 2014 April Fool's "tribute"

The Daily Beast

On Monday, Kimmel mourned Willard's death for the second time on his show. As part of an April Fool's prank in 2014, Kimmel remembered "our good friend Fred Willard, who passed away today at age 74." Seconds later, the camera revealed Willard to be holding the cue cards. Kimmel mourned Willard's real death at age 86 by devoting Monday's entire Jimmy Kimmel Live! episode to the comedy legend. "Tonight’s show will be a special show,” said Kimmel. “It will be a sad show. But we will also laugh a lot as we pay tribute to a lovely and genuinely funny man named Fred Willard.” Willard first appeared on Kimmel's show in 2004 and participated in the show's comedy bits over the years. But after Willard's wife Mary died in September 2018, Kimmel invited him to become a regular on his show, and appear in monologue sketches. “I’d heard that he was feeling down and we wanted to come up with something for him to do,” Kimmel said. “And whenever we called him—every time we asked him to do anything—he said yes.” Kimmel added that "we could not get enough Fred," pointing out that Willard could easily handle last-minute scripts without rehearsing in front of a studio audience. “And he nailed it every time," said Kimmel. "Dozens of times. Up to 86 years old. He killed it.” Kimmel also played tributes from Willard's collaborators, including Norman Lear, Christopher Guest, Martin Mull, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Ray Romano, Ty Burrell and Julie Bowen.

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• Fred Willard was the special sauce in satire comedy: "He was a secret ingredient, a special sauce, useful in all sorts of occasions and never out of demand. And we’ll never have that recipe again," says Robert Lloyd. "That isn’t to say that he didn’t have range, only that the variations in his performances were always on a theme of Fred Willard. You got two for the price of one: the actor and the role, the person and the personality, superimposed, inextricable. Encountering him onscreen was always a bit of a thrill, as if one had run into him on the street. ('It’s Fred Willard!') Watching him, you perceived the practiced professional, but also a person who might have strayed onto a set, been handed a script — or not — and told, 'Action.' Indeed, it’s evident just how useful and adaptable his talents were both from the quantity of his credits and their range, which ran from mainstream to fringe, comforting to transgressive, Everybody Loves Raymond to Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”
• Willard's genius was taking the ridiculous seriously: Willard, says Rob Harvilla, "was a zen master at playing utter ridiculousness utterly straight, the noblest possible doofus, a walking surrealist Dad Joke, a deadpan fount of heartwarming zaniness. Think Leslie Nielsen or Phil Hartman: a suspiciously handsome leading man who wanted nothing more than to lead you merrily off a Looney Toons cliff. He was born and raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, as a Cleveland Browns fan, which means he knew black humor, but there was no darkness, no meanness, no despair to him whatsoever. Just a joyfully anarchic spirit that would make him a crucial component of some of the funniest movies ever made, and some of the smartest funny movies ever made, and all the smarter for how dumb he was willing to look."
• Willard was the personification of "dad jokes": "Dim, oblivious, unconscionably funny: the characters of Fred Willard stand out for being completely unflappable and wonderfully sincere," says K. Austin Collins. "I think 'dad joke,' and I think Fred Willard. I think: This is the guy you want cracking jokes you’ve heard a hundred times before when you’re all stuffed from eating too much on Thanksgiving. This is the guy you can count on to joyfully don the ugliest sweater on Christmas. This is a man made for anecdotes. Which is definitely, at least in part, a result of my becoming acquainted with Willard through his string of syndicated sitcom roles—roles that put him on my radar and, more importantly, placed him squat in my living room. Made him a part of the family. I can’t really imagine the last 30 years of American comedy—particularly TV comedy but also very much movies—without Willard’s gallery of yokels."
• No one had instincts like Willard: "All along, Willard’s instincts made us feel better about our own, by showing us characters who are even more absurd than we are," says Sarah Larson, adding that in real life, "he was a master at following his instincts, and at inspiring fellow-actors to follow theirs. He was a comic’s comic, beloved onscreen and off."
• Willard did so many TV show guest appearances he would forget them: "I’ve been in a lot of shows, I will say that," he told Vulture in 2011. "Every once in a while I’ll look at a tape of something I’ve done and I won’t even remember having done it. I’m trying to think what I saw the other day — oh, a sketch on the Jay Leno show. I did over 90 of them, and I just happened to have one on my TiVo, and I looked at it and I said, 'I have no memory of the character or any of the jokes.' So I could watch it objectively and say, 'Oh, this is funny.'"
• Willard also made his mark on TV commercials
• Five performances that show off Willard's comedic talent, from Johnny Carson's Tonight Show to Modern Family