Kevin Nealon does less than almost anyone else in the scene and gets the laugh anyway. His trade is the slow blink and the late reply, and it has kept him usefully employed in other people's comedies for four decades.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Doug Wilson in Weeds (2005) take a question. The eyes close, slowly, as though the lids weigh something. They open again. Then, a beat after any reasonable person would have answered, Kevin Nealon answers, in the voice of a man who has only just been told what the conversation is about. Doug is a councilman and an accountant and he carries a briefcase, and Nealon gets a laugh out of every one of those blinks. We laughed at him far more than we felt we should, given that the man spends eight seasons doing what suits him rather than what is right, and the reason is the delay: Nealon lets the pause do the work so that the line, when it comes, only has to confirm it.
He started as a stand-up in the late 1970s and joined Saturday Night Live in 1986, staying until 1995 and taking over Weekend Update in 1991. With Dana Carvey he was Franz to Carvey's Hans, and alone he was Mr Subliminal, muttering the truth under the sentence. After that came the Adam Sandler years, Happy Gilmore (1996) and The Wedding Singer (1998) among eight films together, in which he is the odd, mild presence at the edge of the frame. Then Weeds, from 2005 to 2012, which is the part that used him best, and later Man with a Plan (2016–2020), stand-up and podcasting.
The deadpan is the whole instrument, and it has a limit. Some observers found his Weekend Update delivery mushy, and they had a point: the flatness that makes a stoned councilman funny can read, when the job is to land a joke about the news, as not quite having decided where the joke is. He is at his best when someone else supplies the energy and he declines to match it. On Weeds Jenji Kohan gave him a script that let him be flawed and self-interested and still likeable, and Mary-Louise Parker and Elizabeth Perkins carried the weight, so that Doug could drift through the middle of scenes and be forgiven for it. Nealon himself put it plainly: "It was fun playing him because he was such a ne’er do well, he loves to do what’s right for himself instead of what’s right."
On Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000) he turns up as Kevin Nealon, and the show does not need him to do anything much, which is a kind of compliment. He is a supporting player by temperament, not by accident, and the right use of him is third or fourth on the call sheet in a comedy with a sharper centre. Start with the first three seasons of Weeds, where the show is at its most unkind and Doug is at his most useless, and count the blinks.
Biography
Kevin Nealon is an American actor and comedian. He joined the cast of the NBC sketch series Saturday Night Live in 1986 and remained until 1995, anchoring the Weekend Update segment for several seasons.
Nealon is known for his recurring role as Doug Wilson on the Showtime series Weeds (2005–2012) and for appearances in films including Happy Gilmore (1996), You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008) and Just Go with It (2011). He provided the voice of the title character on the animated series Glenn Martin, DDS (2009–2011) and has made guest appearances on series such as Curb Your Enthusiasm (2005). He received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination and two Screen Actors Guild Award nominations.
