A Comic Reflects: Jon Lovitz Three Years After
Interview by Carl Kozlowski

Most people know Jon Lovitz as a fast-talking wiseguy, a persona he's adopted to great success for nearly two decades since his hugely popular five-year run on Saturday Night Live. He has often portrayed characters who, at best, could be characterized as shifty.

Yet Lovitz is actually a thoughtful, soft-spoken man beneath his brash public exterior. And like millions of other Americans, he learned a profound lesson from the tragic events surrounding September 11 - a morning he slept through while on business in New York:

JL: I was there in New York when it happened, and it was horribly frightening. It's funny how different circumstances add up to put you in a certain place at a certain time. I had come to New York to check out Henry Winkler in the Broadway show The Dinner Party because I was going to take the role over soon, then I decided to stay and watch Nathan Lane in The Producers on the Friday night before. Nathan was sick, though, so I stuck around until Tuesday to see him - and that was September 11.

I was startled to hear the desk say [my] mother was calling after 9 a.m.

They said she wants to know if you're fine because of the plane hitting the World Trade Center, and I said 'Tell her I'm fine, I'm at Trump Tower.' I had heard that back in World War II a small plane had hit the Empire State Building but it wasn't a huge deal. At 11 a.m. I woke up and asked if they asked if they knew about the WTC's and they said 'they're gone.' I said 'WHAT?' and wound up on the phone for a half-hour with an operator. It wiped away all barriers, because you were all together as New Yorkers and Americans.

It didn't matter anymore whether you're at the top or the bottom, a star or [an] operator. I walked down Broadway and it was empty - no cars, and six people on a block. Normally thousands of people were out on a single block, but everything was closed except McDonalds. I went to a friend's apartment because I didn't want to be alone.

The next day I went to another hotel to get lunch at a bar. I'm at a table with a lady from Canada, a waiter from Israel, and a busboy from Cuba. We're all watching the [WTC news] coverage, saying I can't believe it, and then we're all talking about it and it hit me that it wiped out all social barriers.

I thought when's the last time I had a conversation with a busboy? Never. Just to say thank you when they're clearing plates, that's how anyone is, regardless of celebrity. That's what 9/11 did, bringing us together, and for that I thought it was kind of nice. It was like being on a sinking boat, all on the same boat, and thinking what are we gonna do? It wiped out all class distinctions and barriers.

A_P: Do you feel differently about life in America now, and do you feel the war on terror will ever be over?

JL: I think never. It's been going on all over the world for years. I think our response has been overkill, frankly, and there hasn't been anything else. I don't think the threat is as large as they're saying. What the terrorists wanted to do, they've done it, and the fact they used our own planes in my opinion [is because] they didn't have any weapons. I don't think Saddam Hussein had any weapons of mass destruction because he would have used them to save his country.

I went to Israel in 1978 and asked a cousin how they live with terrorism, because they lived with it all the time. I asked do they think about it and they said 'no, you can't, you don't stop living. Life doesn't stop.' People are upset when a bus blows up there, but two days later it's back to normal. Obviously it's sad. If you lived in New York, everyone knew somebody in the World Trade Center. It affected everybody. The guy who ran the garage in the hotel, the next day, said 'I'm sorry I'm very upset. I lost a lot of my friends who worked in the Trade Center restaurant.

I had friends who worked downtown and saw jumpers. I just said a little prayer for the people that died and those who lost friends and relatives there. You pray for them because you move on but it's horrible how people got murdered. People can say you're just an actor, who cares how you feel, but I'm a citizen just like you.