Chris Kattan’s choreographed eccentricities

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No one moves on television quite the way Chris Kattan does. The actor, who can currently be seen on IFC’s ‘Bollywood Hero,’ plays a D-list actor named Chris Kattan who travels to India to shoot a Bollywood movie. The three-part TV series is itself filmed in the Bollywood style, which means we get to see a lot of Kattan dancing -- or trying to dance.

The first episode, which aired last night, isn’t the best showcase for Kattan’s brand of physical eccentricity. There’s a rather tasteless dance involving India’s untouchable class. Somewhat better is an elaborate club sequence that riffs on the Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty controversy.

So far, the dance numbers in the miniseries seem under-imagined and rather mechanically filmed. That might change as the series continues in the weeks to come.

But what makes Kattan watchable (no matter what dreck he happens to be starring in) is the seemingly choreographed way in which he moves through a scene. Every step or sexualized...

...thrust of the hip seems to be calculated for comic exaggeration. Like Jim Carrey (and Jerry Lewis before him), he has a rubbery way of physical self-expression -- a double-jointed dexterity deployed for clownish effect.

On TV, Kattan always seems to be preening or posing apropos of nothing, as if he were starring in a fashion shoot of his own imagination. It’s a feigned form of physical egotism that lampoons itself to ambiguous degrees. There’s a discernible self-awareness to Kattan’s hyperactive on-camera moves -- but not enough to tip his act over into winking self-congratulation. The element of unpredictability is still there and that’s what makes a magnetic dancer.

Still, the best way to experience Kattan in all of his physical weirdness remains the old Saturday Night Live episodes -- namely, the Mango skits and the Roxbury dancing brothers.

As Mango, Kattan played a simian-human hybrid of ambiguous sexuality who had the power to seduce straight men. Kattan’s Mango moved in a highly ostentatious way -- a cross between a gay man and a meerkat. As one half of the Roxbury duo -- a pair of bridge-and-tunnel New York clubbers -- Kattan would break out into painfully strenuous moves, usually aborted mid-dance floor, in failed efforts to score babes.

In terms of unhinged, choreographed physical comedy, these skits remain tough to beat.

-- David Ng

Photo: Chris Kattan in ‘Bollywood Hero.’ Credit: IFC