Harry Shearer for President

Harry Shearerhas been involved in some of the greatest comic innovations of his generation, like This Is Spinal Tap, Spy Magazine, and The Simpsons. On that show, he plays a surprising range of characters: Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner, Smithers and Montgomery Burns among them. But his latest role is too strange to be fiction. In Nixon’s the One, Shearer acts out scenes from Richard Nixon’s infamous White House tapes, without embellishment, capturing the delightfully weird awkwardness of the 37^th President in his own words.

“In our lifetimes I think there hasn’t been a person this odd and uncomfortable with himself in American politics,” Shearer tells Kurt Andersen, with whom he worked on Spy. When Nixon was in office, Shearer wasn’t a fan of the President’s policies. “I was a draft-age person in that era, and Nixon was the guy who promised he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War,” Shearer says. “The secret plan was, ‘Let’s stretch it out until my reelection campaign is over.’ There was a lot of anger in the air.”

In Nixon’s the One, Shearer and his co-stars re-enact conversations straight off the tapes, staying as true as possible to the recordings. “We’re not doing a joke version of this,” he says. “We’re not doing a caricature.” To his surprise, it gave Shearer a deeper appreciation of Nixon. “You can’t spend that much time with a character like Nixon and not get more insight than you have on the outside, laughing at him. As repellent as I found his foreign policy, his domestic policy was startlingly to the left of the current President.”

Shearer started acting as a child. At age 13, he played Eddie Haskell in the pilot for Leave It to Beaver, but his parents dissuaded him from sticking with the part. “They said, ‘We want you to have a normal childhood.'” Shearer was a successful comedian of 40 when he co-created This Is Spinal Tap. At the time, he didn’t think he was making comic history. “It felt like we were having fun,” he says. “We know it would resonate with some part of the audience.” But they had no idea it would remain a cultural touchstone thirty years later.

He put in two stints at Saturday Night Live, and he hated it both times. “I thought it was like Jonestown. It was a mind-control experiment,” he explains. “The schedule there is different every day. By the end of the week, your body clock has been screwed with in a really serious way.” He also had aesthetic differences with the show. “I was always trying to tone it down a little bit. I was always trying to be realer than I thought the show wanted.”

A regular on The Simpsons since the beginning, Shearer’s favorite character to play is Montgomery Burns. “For the evil,” he says. “A lot of people try to dilute the evil, and that’s a mistake. Go with it.”