After decades of exclusively dedicating his career to comedy, Bob Odenkirk surprised everyone with his dramatic turn as Saul Goodman in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Then five years ago, in March 2021, Odenkirk made another unexpected career turn by starring in the action thriller Nobody, where he plays retired assassin Hutch Mansell, aka “Nobody,” who must return to his former life when his family is in danger.
Like everyone else, I was impressed by Odenkirk’s action-star turn, yet I can’t say it surprised me. This is not only because Odenkirk has incredible range, but because I was a dedicated viewer of his 1995 HBO sketch-comedy series Mr. Show with Bob and David, where he and David Cross co-starred in hilarious, loosely connected sketches with a wide array of outrageous characters, many of them badasses in their own right.
In fact, many of them were even bigger badasses than his Nobody character. Here are just five of them.
5
The Kidnapper
In the fourth season of Mr. Show, a sketch begins at the home of a father whose son was recently kidnapped, then returned without a demand for ransom. With the police still at the home, the kidnapper calls and asks the father whether he found the package left for him in the park: his son’s severed toe. When the father says he has his son back already, the kidnapper realizes he still has the toe, and that he accidentally dropped off the boy and held onto the toe by mistake.
While the kidnapper is trying to convince the father to return the boy to him, the father reveals that his son still has all his toes. Confused, the kidnapper checks his own feet and realizes he severed his own toe, not the boy’s.
While Hutch “Nobody” Mansell is a lot smarter than Odenkirk’s kidnapper character, Hutch does still have all his fingers and toes. It takes a pretty tough dude to cut off his own toe, even accidentally.
4
Don Tirelli
One of the funniest sketches in season 3 of Mr. Show features Odenkirk as a tough-guy mobster character named Don Tirelli. In the sketch, Tirelli is reading a racing form in a pizzeria as four of his goons have a hilarious debate over whether there are any numbers higher than 24. Tirelli quickly gets annoyed by their squabbling, and he tells them, “24 is the highest number, and that’s it! Let it go!”
Suddenly, some cannoli are delivered, and the bill comes to $25. Tirelli gives the delivery boy $30 and tells him to keep the change. This blows the minds of Tirelli’s goons, who suddenly realize there are many numbers higher than 24. Fed up, Tirelli ends up shooting three of his men and sending the fourth one out into the world with a gun to tell everyone that 24 is the highest number there is.
Because we only see a few minutes of Tirelli’s life, it’s impossible to know whether he’s deadlier than Hutch, but he is a killer so ruthless and intimidating that he seeks to control how math works, which is irrationally badass.
3
The Job Interviewee
Another season 3 sketch sees Odenkirk as a potential employee going through a rigorous job interview where he is subjected to a lie-detector test. Throughout the interrogation, the interviewee admits that he’s tried several illegal drugs, including cocaine, heroin, angel dust, and crack. He’s also stolen secret space plans from NASA, and killed a man with his mind. Most badass of all, when one of his interviewers asks if he’s ever eaten a train piece by piece after derailing it with his penis, the interviewee truthfully answers, “Yes.”
While it turns out he’s interviewing for a simple shoe-salesman job, there’s no telling how many wild things Odenkirk’s character has done. But it’s a safe bet that it’s more than his Nobody character.
2
Todd Benley
Many of Mr. Show’s sketches parody broadcast news, including the season 4 episode where Davis Cross plays a news correspondent at the site of a plane crash. Cross explains that Peruvian Airways Flight 78 went missing a month earlier, the wreckage and a single survivor have just been located. Played by Odenkirk in a tremendous fat suit, the survivor is Todd Benley, an erudite slob who managed to survive by consuming his fellow passengers — all 234 of them.
This kill count is considerably higher than Hutch’s — even the most generous online estimates put his body count at 78. Even if that doesn’t include the corpses Hutch racked up during his assassin years, he certainly didn’t eat any of his victims.
1
Edmund Premington
Odenkirk’s “great white hunter” character Edmund Premington has far more balls than Hutch Mansell — literally. This season 4 sketch features Premington giving a speech to socialites recounting his adventures. While describing the roar of a lion, he begins by saying you feel its effects in your scrotum. From there, he makes a number of bizarre anatomical references, mentioning the hairs on the tip of his penis and the nipples on his ass. He also mentions his scrotum more than half a dozen times.
When the uptight audience becomes fed up with his vulgarity, one of them asks why he’s so obsessed with referencing his scrotum. Premington then clarifies that he was never referring to the same one. He opens his coat, revealing that he has scrotums all over his body — far, far more than the number of scrotums on the body of the so-called “Nobody.”