If You Loved ‘Love, Gilda,’ Then You’ll Fall For Alyssa Limperis, Too

Chevy Chase was Saturday Night Live‘s first breakout performer. John Belushi was its first really big star; a supernova who, unlike Chevy, did not leave the original cast. Amid all of that, Gilda Radner was the show’s shooting star. A once-in-a-lifetime talent, her space dust enrapturing everyone in her path.
Watching Love, Gilda, the new documentary about her, you fall in love with her all over again (or for the first time, if you were born after she died in 1989, 30 years ago, at the age of 42 from ovarian cancer). As Radner said in her own words on the doc: “When I think back on my life, I always felt that my comedy was just to make things be alright. I love the naiveté, that the soul can believe what it wants to believe. I could be prettier than I was. I could be people that I really wasn’t. I would use comedy to be in control of my situation.”
Radner’s free spirit and full commitment made her characters (Emily Litella, Roseanne Roseannadanna, Baba Wawa) the first to break through and achieving recurring status. But, sadly, she struggled with her weight and her looks (though mostly due to how people viewed her, and not how she viewed herself), and her father died when she was only 14. But so many loved Gilda. Gene Wilder. Bill Murray. G.E. Smith. Martin Short, one of the first, co-starring with Radner in the Toronto production of “Godspell” in 1972, said of her: “Everyone adores you, every guy falls in love with you and every girl wants you to be her best friend.”
Radner’s star rose from “Godspell” and The Second City to National Lampoon, from SNL (where she won an Emmy) to Broadway, where she put on a one-woman show that was later turned into a concert film.

We’ve gone 30 years wondering when we might ever see such a free-spirited silly ball of joy onstage again.
But then I saw Alyssa Limperis.
Of any comedian I’ve ever seen, none imbues the spirit of Gilda more than Alyssa. In looks and in charisma. In the way that Martin Short spoke of Gilda. Perhaps some of you discovered Limperis last year on social media, thanks to her viral Mom videos. This one got me hooked.

That video has 1.5 million views on Twitter, another 238,000 on Facebook.
But get a load of her backstory. Limperis lost her father, too, when she was young. He died of brain cancer, and Limperis traveled back to Massachusetts to help take of him in his final year, then somehow built a one-woman show about the whole experience, called “No Bad Days.” Then, to bond with her mother, they started making these videos. Yes. They.
Limperis’s mother is behind the camera for each of her Mom medleys; you can watch them all here.
Limperis had served on a Upright Citizens Brigade house sketch team in New York City, and still performs with another bi-coastal group called All Female Reboot. She has plenty of other web series experience, though, not only solo character and group sketches, but also paid work through companies such as Conde Nast. Conde Nast’s Iris brand for millennial women has showcased Limperis a bunch, including this medley of “Customers Every Retail Worker Knows.”

And Limperis has more characters, to boot. In fact, she already has auditioned for SNL, and could’ve (perhaps should’ve) gotten the call. The character reel she had last summer included the Boston cultural coach for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, Jonathan Van Ness, disappointed wife of Queer Eye contestant, suburban dad out to eat, Teresa Giudice in A Quiet Place, Greek grandma after Bushwick brunch, and some more of her mom.

Perhaps 2018 wasn’t the year for Limperis to join SNL. So she has moved to Los Angeles just in time for pilot season.
Casting directors and showrunners owe it to themselves and to us to take a look at Limperis so they can share in our comedy crush on her. If not the networks, then perhaps Netflix could find a special place for her in their algorithm. Heck, you could even make her the living embodiment of the algorithm.

This kind of joyful spirit only comes to us once in a lifetime. So don’t blow it, show business.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Love, Gilda on Hulu