Sir Patrick Stewart: The name of the English actor, who died Wednesday at 86, was pretty much always synonymous with elegance and dignity. His stately baritone immediately lent gravitas to every character he played. There was a courtly polish, an Old English classicism, to not only his performances but his persona as an actor of the small screen, the big screen and the stage alike. But for all his refinement — or perhaps because of all his refinement — Stewart also developed a reputation for a loony, deadpan, often self-mocking sense of humor.
What’s the opposite of an august elder who’s been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II? A weird, dirty old man with some inappropriate kinks. That’s a type Stewart played a few times throughout his career. There was a memorable “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which he played the owner of an erotic bakery obsessed with decorating cakes depicting women peeing.
On “Extras,” he played an exaggerated version of himself who writes a screenplay about a man who uses mind powers to strip off women’s clothes. (“I still can’t believe he agreed to do this scene,” Ricky Gervais wrote in a tribute Thursday.)
For more than 100 episodes, Stewart also voiced the “American Dad!” character Avery Bullock, the viciously unhinged deputy director of the C.I.A. In one episode, he offered this caustic response to someone’s attempt at a “Star Trek” reference: “Some of us spent the late ’80s and early ’90s getting laid.”
Many of his voice-over roles similarly took comic advantage of his signature regal manner of speaking. As the narrator of the Seth MacFarlane movies “Ted” and “Ted 2,” and as the voice of a decapitated pig head in the Amazon series “Bait” earlier this year, Stewart rolled out strings of exquisite expletives and strange non sequiturs purposely, humorously, at odds with his formal intonation. There was nobody better at using over-the-top English pomposity in the service of unrelenting wryness.
After all, to Stewart even his noble name and title was something to be occasionally poked fun at and undermined for the sake of a joke. On X, his handle was the playful @SirPatStew, and once on “The Graham Norton Show” he joked how his favorite fan-dubbed nickname was “Beef Stew.” Stewart wasn’t just interested in voicing or playing the absurd character but playing caricatures of himself that were nods to his venerated title or career. In 1996, the Shakespearean great appeared on “Sesame Street” in full Elizabethan garb to recite a parody of the famous “Hamlet” soliloquy. “‘B’ or not a ‘B’: That is the question,” he intones, holding out the letter “B” as though it’s poor Yorick’s skull.
In 2015, as the host of the Just for Laughs festival, Stewart walked onstage to grand courtly fanfare while wearing “Monty Python”-style knight armor and later recited an advance eulogy that included jokes about his “unwashed genitals” and his sexual penchant for janitorial equipment and stage props. A couple of years later, the man who once played Hamlet, King Lear and Othello found a very different role: the voice of Poop in “The Emoji Movie.”
In a 2017 appearance on “Conan,” Stewart shared that his sense of humor was something he learned to adopt early into his run on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” The disciplined actor, who by his own admission was “boring and tiresome” when he began the role of Jean-Luc Picard, thanked his castmates for quickly teaching him how to embrace his silliness. “I think they made me live longer,” Stewart said. “I think maybe I wouldn’t be here if they had not taught me how to laugh more.”
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