Hung’s” Ray Drecker is no Fred Garvin”

HBO’s gigolo show “Hung” inspires a flashback to “Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute”

Someone in James Franco’s Saturday Night documentary speculates that your favorite “Saturday Night Live” ensemble corresponds to whoever was on the show when you were in middle school. Busted! I always felt the show’s golden age began with the addition of Bill Murray, but maybe that’s because I was tween at the time. 1970s-era “Saturday Night Live” came up as a topic of office discussion because one of my co-workers didn’t recognize the reference to “Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute” in my review of HBO’s “Hung.” Fortunately the original sketch is on Hulu, and it still tickles me more than 30 years later. Partly it demonstrates the time-tested “SNL” formula of repeating a catch-phrase until it burrows into the viewer’s subconscious. What I love about the sketch, though, is that Fred Garvin’s such a specific, with his Midwestern accent, football coach’s wardrobe and the detail that he’s been sent by “Great Lakes Feed & Grain” to service Margot Kidder’s “vice president in charge of loans from the Franklin National Bank of Chicago.” I don’t recall Fred Garvin ever making a follow-up appearance, whereas these days, he’d probably be a weekly fixture on the show. I wish “Hung” had a little more of Fred’s humor.