Sketch o’the Week- Laraine Newman!

I’m still doing my “Saturday Night Live” character series and am working on the original cast. Since this past Saturday was “International Women’s Day” I thought I’d wrap up the last of the ladies of the first “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” with the wonderful Laraine Newman!

It was tough to decide what character to draw her doing, as she didn’t really have a single, signature character that she played multiple times that was instantly identifiable with her. Reportedly this was in part because Laraine resisted doing the same characters over and over, preferring to create new and different ones. “Connie Conehead” was one she played many times, but I already drew Jane Curtin as a Conehead. “Christy Christina” was another she played on sketches with Dan Ackroyd, but Laraine herself wrote on her website that she never understood why anyone found that character funny. I decided on “Sherry the Valley Girl”, who she played a few times in the first season, once in season two, and reprised on the SNL 40th anniversary show. In researching this I learned this was a character Laraine created when she was a member of “The Groundlings” comedy troupe. Laraine and “Sherry” are credited as introducing the “valley girl” accent and vernacular into pop culture via those skits on SNL. She was doing it way before Frank and Moon Unit Zappa did the hit song in 1982, and of course before the 1983 movie no one but hard core Nicholas Cage fans remember.