Bill Hader imitates Lorne Michaels

When I started working at the Federal Reserve Bank Denver it was on the night shift. 

The supervisor was old school, nose to the grindstone type just a few months from retirement. He had worked there his whole life. Everything by the book. Everything was of utmost importance. Nothing could go wrong. Organizing the personal checks that sorted on high speed through the night were bundled with their computer readout and sacked up and returned to the banks they were drawn on in perfect order and like clockwork.  

There was a row of long low cabinets each with a large metal bookcase on top with vertical dividers forming cubby holes of various sizes that represented some four hundred banks. The bundles of checks were sorted into the bins, very much like mail sorting. The array of shelving formed an ugly metal wall. On the the far side of the wall with the open bins, another row of tables and chairs for people making the bundles of check and printout from trays of checks delivered from the high speed sorting room. 

A few people walked back and forth between the tables and the tall row of bins picking up bundles of checks and tossing them into the bins. 

Fifteen or so young males and one female with a learning handicap who I never saw wear the same thing twice. That job was her life. 

The males were all punks. 

They all worked hard but they all punked hard too. 

The leaders were intellectual punks and the rest were regular punks. 

The old school supervisor's name was Clyle Gilbert. Very old. Sixty four, Smoked a pipe, smelled of smoke. Coffee-tobacco breath. Clothes three days unwashed. Dull worn out cowboy boots. He stank. When he pulled the pipe out of his mouth a string of saliva connected his lip to the pipe tip. He'd put the pipe slobbered up in his pants pocket still burning.We considered him disgusting. He told the most boring stories repeatedly.

I had only just started. This particular group was a hard nut to crack. And as AF brat I was expert at social clique nut-cracking but I was just so over it. 

Clyle had just finished an incredibly boring story involving a holiday apple pie in a Denny's restaurant. He ended his story on a non sequitur. After a pause I asked "Then what happened?"

The entire room of young males went, "O-o-o-o-o-o-h" (Why did you ask him that? Now he's going to continue.) 

I laughed. At Clyle's expanded ending and at everyone being disgusted with me encouraging  Clyle to continue by showing an interest in what he was saying. 

He told us how he got hit on the head with a sack of nickels. 

He told how his Diamond match sticks in his pocket were ignited by brushing against a bumper in the parking lot. 

Clyle told us how he performed an emergency trichotomy on a man using a pen.

He hustled around in his cowboy boots and slipped on a wet floor falling backward straight as a board and hitting his head squarely on the polished terrazzo floors. The maintenance man, also an old guy, also disgusting, hustled up to Clyle in the same manner that Clyle hustled, with Clyle laying on the floor on his back and standing directly over the knocked out Clyle, yelled at him, "Can't you read the sign?" 

Then one day Clyle was late returning from lunch early in the morning about 2:00 am. 

I stood on the outside of the bins hidden from sight and imitated Clyle's voice approaching. I said the usual things that Clyle would say, but then I added extreme swears that Clyle would never say. Then showed my face. 

Psych!

It was a pretty good imitation up to the swears. All the men nearly died laughing. For some reason it never occurred to them to imitate Clyle's distinct voice, his disgusting manner of speaking that involved slobbering his sibilant phonemes and his very low, "o-o-o-o-h" place setters throughout. 

Immediately imitating Clyle became a thing. Each male took a stab at their own version of imitating Clyle. Even the learning handicapped woman. We each picked up on his patterns, his habits, his manner of speaking, his moods, his inflections, his ticks. 

The other men all made improvements that each accepted and incorporated into their own Clyle routines. Everyone was imitating Clyle's speech, and I mean everyone, it was actually rather cruel and horribly disrespectful by inserting blasphemous swears and inappropriate thoughts throughout to hilarious effect.

Finally, listening to the real Clyle became a joy for picking up new ideas about how to improve our imitations of him and it became ordinary that each of us had our own imitation of him. We were all experts at imitating Clyle. We each honed all of our styles.

And we could not listen to the real Clyle without stifling our laughter. The prototype was simply too funny in every way. Every detail was funny. We simply could no longer take him seriously. All the things he said we incorporated into our routines, we shared the best parts of each other's stylings; hitting people with a sack of nickels, performing emergency surgeries, Denny's apple pies, slipping on terrazzo floors, accidentally igniting ourselves with stick matches, and every other ridiculous Clyle-like thing we could think of involving slobbering smoking pipes and blasted out cowboy boots and belts older than we were. 

We performed Longfellow's poem Hiawatha in Clyle's low slobbering voice, "O-o-o-h, by the shore of Gitche Gumee, by the o-o-o-h shining big sea water, at the o-o-o-h doorway of his wigwam, in the pleasant summer morning Hiawatha o-o-o-h stood and waited."

It made ordinary communication with Clyle nearly unbearably hilarious for all the authentic Clyleisms that he continued to deliver, and all of that personal ridicule, but harmless and good natured, but still very punk, lasted long past his actual retirement, so well deserved. Faithful employee. Truly faithful. We loved Clyle. And we kind of hated him too. We were glad he was gone.

And the bank being his life, Clyle died shortly after retiring. All that pipe-smoking caught up with him. He had only two years in retirement.