'SNL' star Armisen drums up a career in comedy

NEW YORK -- Fred Armisen's face is glowing the same shade of orange as a Boca Raton sunset, despite a windchill of 17 below. His massive, dark-rimmed glasses appear even bigger in person than on television, where they are already quite large to begin with. The unruly spectacles have conquered the top half of his face, but you suspect they won't be satisfied until they've reached Carrie Donovan or Jiminy Glick proportions.

Still, the orange face and the glasses can be ignored -- at least for the moment. The personality, however, cannot. If there is a hypothetical rule that stars of "Saturday Night Live" are supposed to be hyperactive, attention-starved jokers with egos bigger than 12-time host John Goodman, then Armisen is in violation. Big time.

As he breezes into a Rockefeller Center sushi and seafood restaurant, approximately two hours late, Armisen can't stop apologizing. And he really means it. In fact, he apologizes about 20 more times before the night is over. The orange face, it turns out, is makeup from a fake commercial shoot ("Tylenol Extreme," he explains). There is no explanation offered for the monstrous glasses.

But if Armisen, who performs tonight at the Middle East, doesn't fit the "Saturday Night Live" stereotype of a wisecracking comic, it's because he's really not a comic at all. "The fact that I'm here at all surprises me more than anyone," he says between gulps of San Pellegrino. "I never really did stand-up."

Even though he debuted on "Saturday Night Live" last season with a bang, introducing the break-out characters of Fericito, the slick Venezuelan nightclub entertainer; Gabe Fisher, the Upper West Side adult education junkie; and Mackey, the hard-of-hearing Vegas drummer, Armisen never went through the training that most "Saturday Night Live" performers endure.

"He's got this strange confidence and this natural gift," says Bob Odenkirk, who is best known for his work on HBO's "Mr. Show" and who frequently collaborates with Armisen. "Fred didn't get into comedy until he was 30 or 31, but he instinctively picked it up. He also has this amazing humanity and likability at the same time."

There's no Groundlings or Second City on Armisen's resume. While his "Saturday Night Live" costars spent their 20s honing their improv skills, Armisen was on the road with a band called Trenchmouth. For eight years he played drums while touring North America and Europe. The band put out five albums of percussive, atonal punk, even signing with a major label at one point.

"It just came to a point where we didn't feel like doing it anymore," he says. "The reality is that we reached a certain level and it was clear we weren't going any further."

After Trenchmouth, he landed a job in the band backing the Blue Man Group in Chicago. But it was a trip to the South by Southwest music festival in 1998 that ushered in the transformation from music to comedy. Armisen went to the festival with the intention of playing drums with the Waco Brothers, but he ended up spending more time playing with his video camera.

"I read in this booklet that they had all these seminars about learning how to make it in the music world," he says. "It sounded so comic and so silly to me that you could attach a science to it. So I thought I'd bring a video camera and tape some of these seminars and ask some ridiculous questions."

Not only did Armisen ask some ridiculous questions, he did so as characters ranging from a German journalist to a blind man. He used his prank footage to create a short film called "Fred Armisen's Guide to Music and South by Southwest." The film was so well received by music industry insiders that Armisen began touring the country with it.

"This one videotape became more valuable than anything I ever did in music," he says.

The film caught the attention of executives at HBO, who hired Armisen to be a correspondent on the music show "Reverb," which led to a 1999 hidden camera show called "Fred."

When Odenkirk was putting together a sketch comedy show for Fox called "Next!" he asked Armisen to join the cast. And though the show was not picked up by the network, Armisen's work on the program was shown to "Saturday Night Live" producer Lorne Michaels, who invited Armisen to join the cast in the fall of 2002.

"He has a very original brain for sketch comedy," says "SNL" colleague Rachel Dratch. "I remember the first thing he did when he came on was Fericito, and everyone immediately wanted to work with him. He just channels these characters in such a fearless way."

Armisen's characters are a mix of people he encountered from his years on the road, plus snippets from his Long Island upbringing. The son of a Venezuelan mother and a Japanese-German father, Armisen also uses his own heritage to make larger-than-life personalities such as Fericito more authentic.

Although he has thoroughly made the transition from musician to comedic performer, Armisen remains more comfortable in rock clubs than comedy clubs. For tonight's show at the Middle East, he'll perform sketches in between sets from bands, perhaps emerging as Niles Covington, jazz musicologist and pretentious bore, or Jimmy Smith, the Native American stand-up comic.

It might seem like an unusual path from drummer to "Saturday Night Live" star, but the 37-year-old Armisen admits that his one goal in life, as far back as he could remember, was to appear on TV.

"In 2000 I was on Conan O'Brien," he says. "It was a total dream come true. When the red light came on that camera, I remember thinking, `I love this. This feels completely right.' I'll never forget that moment. It was the best."

The goal might have been TV, but now Armisen is branching into movies. He appeared in Odenkirk's 2002 indie film "Melvin Goes to Dinner" and the recent Sundance short "The Frank International Film Festival." In releases later this year, Armisen has small parts in Will Ferrell's "Anchorman" and "Seinfeld" writer Alec Berg's movie "Eurotrip."

"I know this gets said all the time," says Odenkirk, "but he's a new Peter Sellers. Fred has those same amazing qualities. He really transforms himself into every role."

Armisen admits that he wants to have the same impact as the British actor who was best known for his "Pink Panther" films. "When you look back at all the work Sellers has done with these characters, you don't see much of the actual guy. That's what I'd like to do."

So is Armisen hiding behind his characters the same way he hides behind his mammoth glasses?

"I'm just devoid of personality," he says. "It's not a way to hide. Simply put, it's a way to goof around. It's just me having fun. I know that sounds light, but that's really all it is. There's nothing deep about it. I'm shallow. I'm as shallow as they come. You've figured me out, now get out of here already."

Christopher Muther can be reached at muther@globe.com.