You may know John Ratzenberger for voicing many of your favorite Disney characters over the years, giving life to fan-favorites like Hamm in Toy Story, Mack in Cars, and reprising those roles as well as many others in a total of 28 Disney films! But before he made his voice a Disney staple, he created the character Cliff Clavin in the hit series Cheers, which ran on NBC for 11 seasons, from 1982 to 1993. Ratzenberger says he wasn’t a shoe-in for the role at first though, and he explains how he turned his failed audition into the role of a lifetime.
In an old 1993 interview with Deseret News, the actor talked about his lukewarm audition, and how he turned it around when inspiration struck:
“I was actually walking out the door after they’d said, `Well, thanks anyway,’ and I turned around and said, `Do you have a bar know-it-all?’ They asked what I was talking about, and I improvised a bar know-it-all. All I really wanted to do was leave with my dignity. That’s all I really wanted to do, get a couple laughs out of them and get out of there.”
The strategy worked! He went on to say, “A few days later they called and said, `We’d like to try that character out for a couple of episodes.'”
Ratzenberger was actually headed back to England, where he’d been performing in comedy improv groups for a decade, when the call came. He was originally signed for just seven episodes, but ended up appearing in all but one that first season – and appeared in every episode in the subsequent 10 years. Not that he was immediately secure in the job. “I didn’t give up my flat in London for three years,” he said.
It also took the producers a couple of years to learn to trust Ratzenberger to improvise on the show. That’s right – those long-winded, bizarre tangents that Cliff is forever taking off on are made up on the spot by the actor who plays him.
“Over the years, they’ve let me improvise a lot of that. It’s kind of like being in a jazz combo and the leader points to you and says, `Take it!’ After a couple of years on the show they realized they could trust me not to mess it up. So little by little they’ve let me just sort of run off. Because I know when to stop. It’s easy to improvise comedy. It really is. But the art is knowing when to shut up and let other people talk. That’s a hard thing to learn.”
Among Ratzenberger’s biggest fans are employees of the United State Postal Service. “I did for the mailbag what Art Carney did for the sewers,” he said. The actor said he constantly received requests for autographed pictures for various post offices around the country.
“That’s what my guidance counselor said in high school. She said, `You’re going to have your picture hanging in a lot of post offices.’ She was right, it turns out.”
Ratzenberger followed his comedic instincts, and created a timeless, hilarious character that will go down as one of the best of all time.
