John Ratzenberger explains how he turned a failed audition into his role as Cliff Clavin on CHEERS for 11 seasons

You might know Giovanni Ratzenberger for giving voice to many of your favorite Disney characters over the years, bringing fan-favorite characters like Hamm to life in History of the toyMack Automobiles, and reprising those roles and many more in a total of 28 Disney films! But before making his voice a Disney staple, he created the character of Cliff Clavin on the hit series Greetingsaired on NBC for 11 seasons, from 1982 to 1993. Ratzenberger says he wasn’t right for the role at first, and explains how he turned his failed audition into the role of a lifetime.

In an old 1993 interview with the Deseret News, the actor talked about his lukewarm audition and how he turned the tables when inspiration struck:

“I was actually walking out the door after they said, ‘Well, thanks anyway,’ and I turned around and said, ‘Do you have a know-it-all bar?’ They asked me what I was talking about and I improvised a know-it-all bar. All I wanted to do was walk away with my dignity. That’s all I wanted to do, give them a couple of laughs and get out of there.”

The strategy worked! She continued, “A few days later they called and said, ‘We’d like to try that character for a couple of episodes.'”

Ratzenberger was actually returning to England, where he had been performing in improv comedy groups for a decade, when the call came. He was initially signed on for only seven episodes, but eventually appeared in all but one of the first season – and appeared in every episode for the next 10 years. Not that he was immediately sure of the job. “I haven’t left my flat in London for three years,” he said.

It also took the producers a couple of years to learn to trust Ratzenberger to improvise on the show. That’s right: those long-winded, bizarre tangents that Cliff forever goes off on are made up on the spot by the actor who plays him.

“Over the years, they’ve let me improvise a lot. It’s kind of like being in a jazz combo and the leader points at you and says, ‘Take it!’ After a couple of years on the show they realized they could trust me not to screw it up. So, little by little, they let me escape. Because I know when to stop. It’s easy to improvise a comedy. It really is. But the art is knowing when to shut up and let others let’s talk. That’s a hard thing to learn.”

Among Ratzenberger’s biggest fans are employees of the United States Postal Service. “I did for the mailbag what Art Carney did for the sewer,” he said, she said. The actor said he constantly received requests for autographed photos from various post offices in the country.

“That’s what my guidance counselor said in high school. She said, ‘You’ll have your picture hanging in a lot of post offices.’ She was right, apparently.”

Ratzenberger followed his comedic instincts and created a hilarious and timeless character that will go down as one of the best of all time.