Louie Anderson Tribute: On His Comedy, Love for His Mother - Vulture

It felt right that Louie Anderson hit the peak of his popularity playing a version of his own mother on the FX comedy series Baskets.

Throughout his long career as a stand-up comic, writer, actor, Family Feud host, and series creator (the animated Life With Louie), Anderson drew on what he called his “poor white trash” Minnesota youth.

Paul in a house with eleven children where every month the family would have to decide “whether to shut off the gas or the lights.” He described his father, Louis William Anderson, a trumpeter who once played with Hoagy Carmichael, as a self-pitying alcoholic who invoked his World War II experience to win arguments (“Oh yeah? Well, have ya ever been pinned down by a sniper in France?”) and constantly groused and snarled at his spouse, his kids, and random strangers.

Anderson described his mother, Ora Zella Anderson, as an upbeat and inexhaustible person — the kind of housewife who might’ve been a performer, entrepreneur, or politician had she not been born in 1912 who managed to be kind despite her husband’s cruelty.

He returned to the stark differences between his mother and father so regularly and incisively that he made it the text rather than subtext of his life’s work.

He cast them as recurring characters in his routines, including his very first national TV appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1984, in which he described his father as “the kind of guy who hates everybody” and who would sometimes slow the family car down and glare at a stranger who had committed no offense besides “being a little different.”?

“For crying out loud,” Anderson growled, imitating his father, “Get my rifle!”.

Anderson’s mother, in contrast, was the sort of person who responded to the question of whether to shut off the gas or the lights by going without lights, because, as he told Conan O’Brien, “she had a million candles.” She’d want to buy a broken 25-cent toaster at a garage sale, he joked in his 1987 special Live at the Guthrie, because “‘the cord’s worth a quarter’ … Then she says the real funny thing: ‘Anyways, your father could always fix it.’” In another joke, Anderson said he couldn’t throw a grocery bag away without hearing his mother’s voice in his head asking, “What are you doing.

Talking to Hawaii Public Radio in 2017, Anderson told host Dave Lawrence that he had modeled his demeanor on Ora.

Anderson told Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2016 that he chose a prenatal health charity because their family would’ve had 18 children if his mom hadn’t lost seven to miscarriages.

“To my mom, who raised 11 children, and my dad was mean to her, and no matter how tough it got for Ora Zella Anderson, she never lost her humanity,” Anderson said while accepting his Critics’ Choice Award for his Baskets performance in 2016.

In fact, Anderson’s stand-up and talk-show history is packed with fantasies of murdering his father, from the 2019 appearance on Conan when he described a coupon book he gave to his mother on her birthday, each pledging to complete an essential household chore (“I’ll wash the dishes … I’ll do the laundry … I’ll kill dad for you”) to his much-shared 1988 routine about his father’s fixation on a Pontiac Bonneville sedan.

Compare the glowing book Anderson wrote about his mother to the title of the 1991 book he wrote about his relationship with Louie, Sr.: Dear Dad: Letters From an Adult Child, described by the publisher as a memoir of “a household held hostage by the unpredictable and violent behavior of an alcoholic father.” It’s a volume of posthumous letters to a patriarch who died in 1980.

He waited to write the book until the year of his mother’s passing, presumably to spare her from having to react to it.

“But really, dad, what did we do together?” Anderson wrote.

As a self-described “fat guy” whose weight generally ranged between 270 and 400 pounds, Anderson knew he wouldn’t be able to get people’s attention if he didn’t lean into the obvious, so he told lots of fat jokes about himself.

By the end, Anderson had become an artist who projected into the world the nourishing warmth that radiated from his mother.

You can see it in a People magazine profile published the year Anderson won awards for channeling his mother on Baskets.

Anderson told Stephen Colbert in 2017 that a year before landing Christine on Baskets, he prayed for a part that would let him play a full range of emotions and experiences, and that when he got the call, he looked up and said, “Thank you, Lord!” When Anderson talked about his performance on the series, he described himself as “being seized by” or “channeling” his mother?

And I try to make Louie Anderson the person disappear in there.”?

Disappearing into the vessel of his mother helped Anderson find his truest voice as a comedian.

Anderson wrote about feeling himself become stronger as a person and an artist by trying to understand his parents?