Cabin Man

Late Night challenged the conventions and clichés of television and talk shows that Nielsen audiences had come to blindly accept over the previous 40 years of the medium, playing with "the disparity between what television told us and what really existed" as a writer from this magazine once put it. And, for his part, Elliott usually played the antithesis of the good talk show guest — stupid, recalcitrant and repulsive instead of witty, entertaining and debonair. The talk-show host and his guest were supposed to flatter each other, but whenever Elliott was sitting next to Dave, seething antagonism was the order of the day. That little twist on the television audience's expectations was funny enough — Elliott's arrogant idiot was original, to say the least — but what made these interactions shockingly funny was that, like Andy Kaufman before him, Elliott played these characters so convincingly and with such an utter lack of vanity that it was entirely possible to conclude that he was not acting at all.

It was the kind of in-your-face humor that, "if you don't get it, you've got a long night ahead of you," says Gerard Mulligan, who was a writer at Late Night and currently performs with Elliott on Late Show With David Letterman. But for those who did get it, Elliott's idiot act worked on more than one level. On one hand, Elliott was blasting all the showbiz phonies and self-absorbed assholes who came onto Dave's show with the notion that all they needed to do to be entertaining was show a clip of their latest project. And on another, more personal level, he was building upon his father's legacy by creating a series of running characters who were more psychotic versions of the "Bob and Ray" staple Barry Campbell, an actor whose ego overshadowed his talent.

After almost nine years at Late Night, Elliott went to Hollywood and created an even more brilliant idiot: Chris Peterson, the 30-year-old paperboy of the short-lived Fox-network series Get a Life. Peterson was a slightly different kind of ass — less arrogant more infuriatingly clueless, and very cutting edge. Elliott and co-creator Adam Resnick, who had been his writing partner at Late Night during the latter half of the '80s, took what they had learned at Letterman's knee and made a series of it. So, 11 years before Ben Stiller satirized male modeling with Derek Zoolander and his Blue Steel look, Elliott's Peterson — a balding, slump-shouldered wimp with the physique of a soft-boiled egg — attended the Handsome Boy Modeling School, where he adopted the working moniker of Sparkles, studied the "What's-Off-in-the-Distance-While-I'm-Being-Handsome" pose, sent up Irene Cara's topless modeling scene in Fame and vanquished his rival, Sapphire, by accusing him of betraying "the muted beauty of the buttocks."

If you're under the age of 35, chances are you're not familiar with Elliott's Letterman stuff or Get a Life. Aside from a handful of scattered YouTube videos and bootleg products, much of Elliott's earlier work is not commercially available. In that case, you should rent the Farrelly Brothers 1998 There's Something About Mary and watch Elliott dare to portray Dom Woganowski, a hive-covered nutjob enslaved to the radiant beauty of Cameron Diaz. (The hives were Elliott's idea.) Or better yet, get Cabin Boy, the 1994 film starring Elliott as a spoiled, mincing Fancy Lad who mistakenly stows away on a ship of crusty old salts. In both movies, Elliott is doing a kind of jokeless comedy — so pure that it does what only first-rate comedy can, it creates its own universe.