John Roarke as himself.
Maybe you wonder how John Roarke, a Westerly native, ended up on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and in Naked Gun 2 .
Well, it s not divine intervention.
But Roarke s story did start in church.
He prayed. He also practiced making faces, voices and gestures.
Roarke, a seminarian turned comic impersonator who appears in this weekend s fourth annual Rhode Island Comedy Festival, began his training early, decades ago, at the Immaculate Conception Church in Westerly.
He lived directly across the street from the church, and served as an altar boy. He became accustomed to performing before crowds, relieving others on the job.
I was like the Jonathan Papelbon of altar boys, Roarke says. I was the closer altar boy.
When an assigned altar boy didn t show up for a Sunday service, Roarke was the go-to-guy.
They got on the phone to the bullpen. I was over there in a shot.
As he speaks, Roarke, now 55, and back living in Rhode Island after a 26-year stay in California, is sitting in a coffee shop.
Wait. Check that. He s not sitting anymore.
Roarke s standing up, kneeling down, genuflecting by his chair. And he s tapping his forehead, chest and shoulders with his right hand, like a third-base coach signaling a batter: bunt?
I would loosen up on my way over to the church.
So this is a reenactment. It would explain why Roarke is suddenly putting on his jacket and covering only his right arm, the one he used to use to swing incense.
It would also explain something else: Roarke s dual nature irreverent, yet religious.
Something had to give. But that took time.
In the meantime, both aspects of Roarke coexisted: theology and comedy.
As a young boy, Roarke recorded celebrities voices off the television, and practiced mimicking them. He bought a comedy album, The First Family, which featured Vaughn Meader imitating President Kennedy, and impersonated the impersonator.
I came home from school every day, went in the den and played this album, Roarke says.
I worshipped at this altar for two years.
This was in addition to an actual altar in church.
After grade school, Roarke decided to become a priest and attended La Salle Academy in Providence in preparation.
The atmosphere in school, Roarke says, was serious, strict and stifling. But during his freshman year, the day before Christmas vacation, when little work gets done, a teacher asked if any students would like to entertain the class.
Roarke stepped forward.
He opened his mouth, manipulated his body and unleashed pent-up impersonations of La Salle s faculty.
I had a very Bob Newhart type of style. But I was doing a very gutsy, anarchist type of thing.
I was pulling all their pants down. These people, all they did in life, was shore up their pants.
Everyone roared.
Word spread. Roarke toured the school.
An underground railroad developed among the teachers that were cool, Roarke says.
Teachers invited Roarke into their classrooms to perform for a few minutes at the outset of class, writing him bogus passes excusing him for being late to his own class.
Every week for three years, I was smuggled around, he says.
After graduating in 1970, Roarke attended Our Lady of Providence Seminary in Warwick.
He lasted two humorous years, impersonating the resident priests.
I knew it wasn t for me. But I got huge laughs along the way.
Roarke entered Boston College, and graduated in 1974 with a degree in psychology. I knew I wanted to be a comedian in the back of my mind, but I had no idea how to do it. There were no clubs in Boston in those days.
So he got a job in a home for adolescents with schizophrenia.
I was going broke. I was hardly making any money.
Wrestling schizophrenic kids in those days was $4 an hour.
In his off hours, Roarke and some friends, including guys who would later write for the TV shows Mork Mindy and Seinfeld, created comic sketches, which they performed wherever they could. Roarke did this for about a year, until a producer approached him and asked if he could create a full-length show.
At the time, Roarke had left his group-home job to take a higher-paying job at a 7-Eleven.
The producer offered him $2,000 a night. He stopped serving Slurpees.
That started the whole thing, Roarke says.
Roarke created a show of impersonations: Groucho Marx, Tom Snyder, Johnny Carson and the entire cast of Star Trek. One thing led to another and another.
Roarke got hired by ABC for its show Fridays, designed to compete with Saturday Night Live. He also worked for the puppet satire D.C.
Follies, put in a few appearances on The Tonight Show, and landed a role in the 1991 movie The Naked Gun 2 : The Smell of Fear, where he impersonated then-President George H.W. Bush to his ultimate regret.
The problem was that the night before his shoot for the film, Roarke second-guessed himself.
I panicked. I went out and rented a video by Michael Caine on film acting.
He said the screen is 40 feet wide; everything you do on film must be very small.
The next day, Roarke restrained the gestures and facial expressions of his Bush impersonation. I said to myself, Leslie Nielsen is the clown.
You re the set-up man. You re Stan Laurel to him. I decided I couldn t do the full-blown Bush impersonation.
I d steal his fire.
Those who see the movie tell Roarke he did well, but he knows he could have done better.
President Reagan taught him that.
Roarke s impersonation of Bush s predecessor was his performance breakthrough, where he mastered not just the person but the art of impersonation.
An acting teacher asked me to think not about what Reagan is saying, but what he is doing. Answer that question, Grasshopper.
That was the master speaking.
Starting sentences and not completing them before starting another and another, yet seeming charming all the while, Roarke says that s what Reagan was doing. You felt for the guy when you saw him struggle.
But you gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe because he had nice hair. I don t know.
What Roarke knows is that a successful impersonation reflects the inner nature of a person his essence, not just his voice, facial expressions and body gestures. And while each aspect must be mastered, he says, they must all be rehearsed, and rehearsed at the same time.
It starts off mechanistic, but it can t be mechanistic, he says.
It all starts to work as a whole. It s less in your head, and coming out organically.
These days, Roarke has returned to Rhode Island to be with family.
He had played out California, he says. If you re not going out for film and television anymore, there s no reason to be out there.
Roarke plays the corporate circuit now, making company meetings amusing, by doing impersonations.
But he still does stage work, as he will for the festival.
It looks easy and it s not, he says. It s a craft, and there s a lot to learn.
The trick is to make the lessons learned disappear, so audience members can t see them. They just see the result.
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