The ‘Saturday Night Live' Fandom Mourns the Late Loni Anderson, Mother to the Roxbury Guys
Following the news that long-time television star Loni Anderson passed this past weekend at the age of 79, the Saturday Night Live and Night at the Roxbury fandoms are coming together to show the late actress some love — whatever that is.
To most comedy fans, Anderson is best known for her role as the perceptive and savvy “bombshell” Jennifer Marlowe on the acclaimed sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati from 1978 to 1982. Anderson’s performance on WKRP in Cincinnati netted her three nominations at the Golden Globe Awards and two at the Emmys, which is a hell of a lot more than any actor, writer, director or douchey-costume designer can say about their time working on the reviled, 1998 Saturday Night Live sketch-to-film adaptation A Night at the Roxbury.
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In the widely panned comedy movie featuring the two “beloved” SNL “characters” known as The Roxbury Guys, portrayed by Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan, Anderson played the clubbers’ beautiful, plastic-surgery-obsessed mother Barbara Butabi. Over in the Saturday Night Live subreddit, the few fans of the show who suffered through A Night at the Roxbury gathered to pay their respects and make their apologies.
“I just did an in memoriam watch of this last night for her. RIP Loni Anderson,” one user wrote of how their grief drove them to madness.
Another quoted Anderson’s best line in the borderline unwatchable A Night at the Roxbury, “Honey, if you’re gonna hit your peak, do it in your room.”
“In my mind this also made her Cher Horowitz’s step mom,” one more fan added, referencing how A Night at the Roxbury actor Dan Hedaya played a similar role to his rich, overbearing father character in the far-superior Clueless just a couple years prior to the release of the SNL-inspired disaster.
Anderson’s career would survive the shit-show that was A Night at the Roxbury, and she would continue to book roles on TV comedies throughout the 2000s and 2010s — however, sadly, A Night at the Roxbury would be the final theatrically released feature film in which Anderson would ever star. Nevertheless, Anderson’s impact on the medium of comedy and her legacy as a whole remain untarnished by one of perennial flop-maker Lorne Michaels’ worst films, and, hilariously, the SNL dud wasn’t even the worst comedy of Anderson’s career.
That honor belongs to the 1983 sports comedy movie Stroker Ace, which introduced Anderson to her future husband Burt Reynolds. All A Night at the Roxbury did for Anderson was doom her to a few years of aggressive head-bobs from annoying strangers.
