Revivifying John Roarke

Boy, I hate it when people I admire hide their light under a bushel. If I look up to them as stars and then they drop out, what’s that make me, a chump? That’s how I feel about comedian and impressionist John Roarke (b. 1952).

Roarke was one of the key cast members on ABC’s Fridays(1980-82), of which I was a big-time devotee. As the most gifted impressionist on the show there was something for Roarke to do in practically every sketch. He played Ronald Reagan, Johnny Carson, Phil Donahue,Bob Hope, Woody Allen, Curly from the Three Stooges. Everyone always speaks of Fridays in terms of being an Saturday Night Live rip-off, but I assure you, the original SNL had no one in the cast remotely up to Roarke’s standards as an impersonator (and yes, I include Aykroyd, a genius at some things, but whose impressions, most of them, were pretty half-assed). The only SNL cast member I would compare him to is Phil Hartman, who came later. (SCTV, which overlapped Fridays in the time scale, was a different story. EVERY cast member of that show was roughly up to Roarke’s standard.)

About three years after Fridays went off the air, I opened for Roarke at a comedy club in Warwick, Rhode Island. He seemed pretty aloof, and I was pretty intimidated, so we didn’t exchange more than a polite “hello”. What was he doing playing a tiny club in my tiny state when he’d had that huge national TV gig just months before? I think he was doing a friend (the booker) a favor. Roarke was, it emerges, a local. He went to Catholic school in the town where I was born (Westerly), and later studied for the priesthood in Providence (did he know Charlie Rocket, I wonder?) and then he switched to psychology at Boston College. Boston’s a great comedy town and Roarke clearly gotten bitten by the bug there in the early to mid 1970s. I see that he is a veteran of the Comedy Store. I’ll assume he was scouted for Fridays while performing there.

A couple of years after I met him Roarke would go on to be one of the voice-over cast members on D.C. Follies (1987-89), but that was a puppet show, so I’m sure that did nothing for his fame. He seemed to get cast mostly as Presidents: Reagan on The Dave Thomas Comedy Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and a PBS special with the Gross National Product comedy troupe; Bush I in the movies The Naked Gun 2 1/2 (1991) andThe Silence of the Hams (1994), Nixon on the Robert Urich–Carol Kane sit-com American Dreamer, and generic fictional Presidents in the movie Courage Under Fire (1996) with Denzel Washington and on the kid’s show Kenan and Kel. He was Oliver North on a Harry Shearer special. He played Clint Eastwood on The Weird Al Show, and had a recurring character on the Donna Pescow sit-com Out of This World. He did guest shots on Charles in Charge and the revived Columbo, and that was about it.

TV and night club work seems to have evolved into corporate gigs by the late ’90s. He then went back to school and got a degree in mental health counseling and drama therapy. Given the fact that he originally set out to be a priest, I’m going to deduce that Roarke is probably not the kind of driven narcissist you need to be to get to the top of the heap in show business. He probably wasn’t, you know, doing coke with the other comedians before and after shows, and sabotaging rival acts, and stuff like that that makes you one of the fellahs. Anyway, I have little doubt that the work he does now is important and rewarding and valuable. BUT! A guy that talented deserves a better monument than the scattered, buried references one finds online. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry! Sure, sure, Vanity is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, so it’s not on him. But, hell, I’ll toot that horn! Not just here — I also plugged him big time in my recent interview in the upcoming Josh Greenbaum doc Playing POTUS!

At this writing there are lots of Fridays clips available on Youtube, and you can also see lots of later stuff Roarke did for corporate groups represented there as well. His most recent public appearance was a Fridays cast reunion taped for the 2013 release of a Shout Factory DVD.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.