No Fault Of His Own: ‘Cracked Up: The Darrell Hammond Story’ On Netflix

The mythology of the sad clown dates back to the 1800s. A classic joke, incorporating the British star Joseph Grimaldi (modernized in the Watchmen graphic novel and movie to reference Pagliacci), the myth has become a hardened cliche of a stereotype we use to rationalize the offstage downfall of a beloved comedian or comedic actor.
But as we learn once more, or perhaps for the first time, in a new documentary about Saturday Night Live star Darrell Hammond, sometimes the clown is not to blame for his internal sadness.
Cracked Up: The Darrell Hammond Story joined Netflix in May after a theatrical debut last September.
A cast member on SNL from 1995 to 2009, Hammond attempted suicide the following year, and after another institutionalization, he emerged to write his memoir in 2011, God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem. Cracked Up catches up with him years later, when he adapted his book into a one-man stage production and began speaking about his childhood trauma to anyone who would listen.

You probably remember Hammond best for portraying former President Bill Clinton on SNL, or any of more than 100 celebrities and characters on TV. He kicked off the revival of Colonel Sanders in KFC commercials in 2015, and that same year was back on SNL playing Donald Trump (before Alec Baldwin took over that role). That’s where we see Hammond in the first scene after the documentary’s title sequence, showing us behind the scenes inside 30 Rock as he preps for another Trump appearance with hair and makeup department head Louie Zakarian, who quips that he’s been doling out “21 years of torture” to Hammond in what amounts to a whopper of an understatement.
Hammond plays it off, however, choosing self-deprecation instead. “Louie told me that you can make me look like anybody because my face is so bland,” he says, as we see a montage of his SNL impersonations flash by. “Just a boring guy. Thank God he can talk like other people.”
Where do the voices come from?
From the stage of Caroline’s comedy club in Times Square, he recalls first impressing and irritating his parents with impersonations of Popeye and Porky Pig, and revealing that his process includes color-coding each of his “117 or something” different voices. Popeye got blue; Porky Pig, yellow. Nobody ever got coded red. Hammond, who started doing voices professionally on the radio in his late 20s, didn’t join SNL until he was 40, and didn’t realize why he was avoiding red until after rehearsing for a Mother’s Day episode of SNL years later. Upon seeing himself in the mirror dressed as his mom, Hammond threw up and was hospitalized due to a suspected heart attack. He’d already been self-medicating with alcohol, and when booze and drugs failed to numb the pain, he cut himself. The cuts on his arm were even visible onscreen during at least one SNL sketch, if you knew to look.
Lorne Michaels tells the filmmaker that Hammond was “a big-game player” he could count on in the clutch of live TV. Whenever Hammond went to a dark place, “it always happened offstage.” But he also disclosed: “The part of Darrell that’s fragile, is sort of my job to protect.”
Not wanting another sad SNL death (see: John Belushi, Chris Farley) on his hands, Michaels arranged for Hammond to get help. Multiple times.
It wouldn’t be until Hammond met Dr. Nabil Kotbi at a rehab in Westchester that he received an accurate diagnosis for what ailed him. Other shrinks tagged him as manic depressive, schizophrenic, or suffering from borderline personality disorder, in addition to his addictions. But Kotbi helped Hammond unlock the childhood trauma that had triggered everything that followed Hammond into adulthood. Kotbi provided for Hammond what Robin Williams’s Dr. Sean Maguire had served for Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting, showing him that his trauma was not, in fact, his fault.
Only then could Hammond flash back to his childhood on Wisteria Drive in Melbourne, Fla., and the home where his mother beat him, stabbed him and perhaps even worse when he was a small child. He had repressed those memories some 40 years. Only now could he recall that he truly got his mimicry instincts from his mother, hearing her imitate a Christmas album in their home, and then Darrell, at 7, repeating the lines back to her later. He learned that in an effort to earn her love.
The documentary is not all sad. Naturally. It’s about his recovery, and also about his great comedic talents as a mimic. So we’re reminded of how much Clinton, former NBC talking head Chris Matthews and others loved Hammond’s renditions of them. And Hammond dishes a revealing backstory to an all-time classic SNL sketch, the Celebrity Jeopardy in which he as Sean Connery mocks Will Ferrell’s Alex Trebek. Hammond: “It wasn’t supposed to be funny, because who would believe that Sean Connery is stupid? And why does he hate Alex Trebek?”
With hindsight, it now made perfect sense, both in timing and in compassion, for Michaels to bring Hammond back into the SNL fold as the show’s live announcer in 2014 after the death of Don Pardo.

Hindsight also now allows me to realize that when I spoke to Hammond on the phone in 2018, I shouldn’t have paid too much attention to Audible’s desires to restrict my questions to the audio project he was starring in for them then. He really would much rather have talked more in-depth with me than he did about child abuse. Cracked Up allows him to do just that.
Hammond and Cracked Up director Michelle Esrick first screened the documentary for Congress in 2018, as part of a lobbying effort which led to new legislation signed just weeks after I’d spoken to Hammond. They’ve continued to spread the word via a series of online panels on Zoom for Mental Health Awareness Month called “Cracked Up: An Evolving Conversation.” The third session with Esrick and Hammond took place May 21.
As he eagerly said throughout his initial book tour as well as for the documentary, “Hey, if you write this book and you might help one person, would you do it? And I’m like…yeah. I mean, wouldn’t you?”

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 Cracked Up: The Darrell Hammond Story on Netflix