Every now and then I have wondered what became of Bruno Kirby. The last time I saw him was in Donnie Brasco (1997), and the last time I heard his voice was in Stuart Little (1999; my comments), where he played one of the other mice.
But before that, I had grown rather fond of him, since he seemed to be in every other movie that I discovered during my college years, whether playing the young Clemenza in The Godfather Part II (1974), a limo driver in This Is Spinal Tap (1984), the idiot lieutenant in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Marlon Brando’s nephew in The Freshman (1990), or Billy Crystal’s best friend in When Harry Met Sally… (1989) and City Slickers (1991).
Along the way, he uttered a number of immortal lines; the ones from Good Morning, Vietnam especially stick in my memory: “In my heart, I know I’m funny.” “Reader’s Digest is considering publishing two of my jokes.” “I would like to leave the room now.” “And if you doooo– And if you doooo–” (My sister and I still love to quote that last one; I also like the Robin Williams line which begins “Since the former VP is such a VIP…”, which is basically Williams’s character spoofing Kirby’s character to his face.)
Alas, today the Associated Press reports that Kirby passed away Monday from complications related to leukemia. He was 57.
I figured a blog post was in order. And while the image above may not be all that snazzy, I’m posting it here because it comes from one of my all-time favorite films — the film that gave him the line “You made a woman meow?” — and because, in this scene, he plays a writer who is surprised and elated when Meg Ryan’s best friend, played by Carrie Fisher, quotes a line from one of his articles without realizing that he’s the one who wrote it. Nothing quite like that has happened to me, yet, but I keep thinking it might, and I smile whenever I watch the scene and it ends with a smitten Kirby saying, “Nobody has ever quoted me back to me before.”
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