{"id":241643,"date":"2025-10-26T08:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T08:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/241643\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T08:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T08:43:08","slug":"snls-jim-downey-and-jack-handeys-have-been-sending-each-other-fake-angry-lawyer-letters-for-40-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/241643\/","title":{"rendered":"SNL’s Jim Downey and Jack Handey’s have been sending each other “fake angry lawyer” letters for 40 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jim Downey is having a lovely little career renaissance at the moment, with the veteran Saturday Night Live\u00a0and\u00a0Late Night\u00a0writer the subject of a new Peacock documentary, Downey Wrote That, focused on his multi-decade contributions to TV comedy. But also, he\u2019s just kind of been popping up all over the place lately, and always in welcome ways: As one of the whitebread villains in\u00a0One Battle After Another<\/a>, as the bubble-blowing Douglas in\u00a0The Chair Company<\/a>, or just the guy asking, incredulously, \u201cJeff Epstein? The New York financier?!\u201d<\/a> in a recent viral clip from Conan O\u2019Brien\u2019s podcast. In celebration of Downey\u2019s sudden ubiquity, he did a fresh interview with\u00a0Variety\u00a0this week<\/a> that touched on many aspects of his career\u2014none of which we can bring ourselves to care about half as much as the revelation that he and fellow SNL\u00a0legend Jack Handey still communicate, at length and apparently almost exclusively, in the form of two extremely angry lawyer characters who are threatening to sue each other.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Downey, fielding a question about what outlets he has for his comedy energies since leaving\u00a0SNL\u00a0about a decade back:<\/p>\n

I have outside interests, personal things. What a lot of people like me do now is send goofy emails or texts to old friends, often other writers. I\u2019m constantly texting back and forth with George Meyer, who wrote for The Simpsons and worked with me at Letterman 45 years ago. Jack Handey, another great writer, and I have had this running joke for more than 40 years where we write each other emails or call each other as attorneys threatening to sue one another. It involves this mix of performance and writing\u2014we create these fake legal documents and send them back and forth. It actually takes up a fair amount of time. Sometimes Jack will call, and when I see his name on the caller ID, I won\u2019t pick up because I can\u2019t think of anything to say as my angry attorney character screaming at him. So a lot of my comedy energy gets burned up in those ways.<\/p>\n

Surely we cannot be alone in dearly wishing we could get our hands on some of those emails, voicemails, and fake legal documents, yes? (From the minds that brought you \u201cColon Blow\u201d and\u00a0\u201cTales Of Fraud And Malfeasance In Railroad Hiring Practices\u201d!)<\/p>\n

Sabrina Carpenter makes Saturday Night Live her own<\/a>Amy Poehler jolts Saturday Night Live with her trademark energy<\/a><\/p>\n

Even beyond this apparent treasure trove of angry lawyer comedy, Downey\u2019s interview is full of great tidbits: He talks about working on\u00a0One Battle\u2014noting cheerfully that his instantly iconic line \u201cA semen demon?\u201d was in the script, not an ad-lib\u2014and delivers his full condemnation of actors who break during Saturday Night Live\u00a0sketches. (\u201cPhil Hartman, for instance, may have been in more sketches than any cast member in history, and he broke exactly once, in a piece Jack Handey and I wrote. The set started to collapse around him. All hell broke loose. Everyone else in the cast was breaking, and Phil held out for as long as he could, but eventually he lost it. Then you had guys like Horatio Sanz, who I don\u2019t recall ever\u00a0not breaking. It always seemed cheap to me.\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jim Downey is having a lovely little career renaissance at the moment, with the veteran Saturday Night Live\u00a0and\u00a0Late…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-241643","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}