This is a list of characters in the animated television series The Critic.
Character | Voiced by | The Critic | The Simpsons crossover | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Season 1 | Season 2 | Season 3 | "A Star Is Burns" | |||||
Main characters< | --PLEASE NOTE: if editing this individually by section, the preview function will not show what the table will look like, because the opening and closing parameters to the table are outside of the section. If you're unfamiliar with table markup, it's probably best to use the overall edit this page. Section editing is best for small mistakes, like spelling, or if you're familiar with table markup.--> | |||||||
Jay Sherman | Jon Lovitz | colspan="4" | ||||||
Martin "Marty" Sherman | Christine Cavanaugh | colspan="4" | ||||||
Ardeth | colspan="4" | |||||||
Margo Sherman | Nancy Cartwright | colspan="4" | ||||||
Franklin Sherman | Gerrit Graham | colspan="4" | ||||||
Duke Phillips (né Scabies) | Charles Napier | colspan="4" | ||||||
Jeremy Hawke | Maurice LaMarche | colspan="4" | ||||||
Doris Grossman | Doris Grau | colspan="4" | ||||||
Eleanor Sherman (née Wigglesworth) | Judith Ivey | colspan="4" | ||||||
Alice Tompkins | Park Overall | colspan="4" | ||||||
Vlada Veramirovich | Nick Jameson | colspan="3" | ||||||
Jennifer | Valerie Levitt | colspan="3" | ||||||
Recurring characters< | --PLEASE NOTE: if editing this individually by section, the preview function will not show what the table will look like, because the opening and closing parameters to the table are outside of the section. If you're unfamiliar with table markup, it's probably best to use the overall edit this page. Section editing is best for small mistakes, like spelling, or if you're familiar with table markup.--> | |||||||
Principal Mangosuthu | Maurice LaMarche | colspan="4" | ||||||
Shackleford | colspan="4" | |||||||
Penny Tompkins | Russi Taylor | colspan="4" | ||||||
Zoltan Veramirovich | Nick Jameson | colspan="4" | ||||||
Humphrey the Hippo | Tress MacNeille | colspan="4" | ||||||
Guest stars< | --PLEASE NOTE: if editing this individually by section, the preview function will not show what the table will look like, because the opening and closing parameters to the table are outside of the section. If you're unfamiliar with table markup, it's probably best to use the overall edit this page. Section editing is best for small mistakes, like spelling, or if you're familiar with table markup.--> | |||||||
Gene Shalit | colspan="4" | |||||||
Jimmy Breslin | colspan="4" | |||||||
Rex Reed | colspan="4" | |||||||
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | colspan="4" | |||||||
Steve Allen | colspan="5" | |||||||
Bob Costas | colspan="5" | |||||||
Rod McKuen | colspan="5" | |||||||
Geraldo Rivera | colspan="5" | |||||||
Rod Steiger | colspan="5" | |||||||
Adam West | colspan="5" | |||||||
Margaret Cho | colspan="5" | |||||||
Chauffeur | Michael Carrington | colspan="5" | ||||||
Gary Grossman | Billy Crystal | colspan="5" | ||||||
Valerie Fox | Jennifer Lien | colspan="5" | ||||||
Jay's No. 1 Fan | Pamela Reed | colspan="5" | ||||||
Adolph Hitmaker | Phil Hartman | colspan="5" | ||||||
Homer Simpson | Dan Castellaneta | colspan="3" | ||||||
Bart Simpson | Nancy Cartwright | colspan="3" | ||||||
June Lockhart | colspan="4" | |||||||
Milton Berle | colspan="4" | |||||||
Gene Siskel | colspan="4" | |||||||
Roger Ebert | colspan="4" | |||||||
Ricki Lake | colspan="4" | |||||||
Queen Latifah | colspan="4" | |||||||
Jay Leno | Judd Apatow | colspan="4" | ||||||
Olivia Hawke | Morwenna Banks | colspan="4" | ||||||
Johnny Wrath | Todd Louiso | colspan="4" | ||||||
Cyrus Tompkins | Sam McMurray | colspan="4" | ||||||
Arnold Schwarzenegger | Nick Jameson | colspan="3" | ||||||
Daniel Radcliffe | colspan="3" | |||||||
Nick Jameson | colspan="3" | |||||||
Mark Wahlberg | colspan="3" | |||||||
Leonardo DiCaprio | colspan="3" | |||||||
Tom Cruise | colspan="3" | |||||||
Russell Crowe | colspan="3" | |||||||
Hugh Jackman | colspan="3" | |||||||
Patrick Stewart | colspan="3" | |||||||
Ian McKellen | colspan="3" | |||||||
Pikachu | Tress MacNeille | colspan="3" | ||||||
Kathleen Turner | colspan="3" | |||||||
Emma Watson | colspan="3" | |||||||
Jodie Foster | colspan="3" | |||||||
Kate Winslet |
Jay is the adopted son of wealthy New-England socialites Franklin and Eleanor Sherman, who originally thought he was a monkey. He is ethnically Jewish, but did not have a religious upbringing. His date of birth is shown on his driver's license as January 26, 1957. In preschool, he was given LSD-laced Kool-Aid by guest speaker Timothy Leary (he claimed afterwards, he "was down at the hungry i, jamming with Dylan"), and was mistakenly sent to Attica Prison instead of summer camp as a child in the summer of 1972. He has a teenage sister named Margo and a 13-year-old son named Marty who visits often when not staying with Jay's ex-wife Ardeth.
Jay has also held several other jobs in his time, including a truck driver, speech writer for Duke's presidential campaign and a writer for the film Ghostchasers III (renamed Ghostbusters III during the final episode clip show).
Jay has won a string of prestigious awards for his career: two Pulitzer Prizes for criticism, a People's Choice Award, five Golden Globes, an Emmy Award, a PhD in film, and a B'nai B'rith Award.
Jay blames his weight problem on the fictional disorder "vitilardo", a wordplay on the skin pigmentation disorder vitiligo. His weight is suggested to be greater than a tank, as a helicopter that was originally designed to lift tanks was unable to even get him off the ground. He was also shown in a file photo on a news report as "weighing more than the entire band Los Lobos", in which he is sitting on a see-saw, lifting the entire band into the air. When he exercises, Duke often uses Jay in place of a set of dumbbells when lifting weights. His weight led to the death of a horse when he was a child, crushing it to death when Jay lied to the horse trainer about his weight so he could sit on it. Jay's stomach seems to have a mind of its own, often giving him commands that he obeys out of fear, going so far as to call it "Master". Acting on the advice of a quack public-relations expert, Jay once gained so much weight that he had to have several years worth of liposuction.
Jay is a heterosexual whose sexual and romantic relationships with women are the subject of most plotlines on the series. However, his artistic interests and effeminate mannerisms often make Jay the target of anti-gay insults from others, especially Duke; despite mainly being a parody of the liberal Ted Turner, Duke often stands in for a stereotypical "Southern redneck" personality and is depicted as bigoted against minorities and bullying in his choice of words.
It is strongly hinted in the episode "Eyes on the Prize" that Jay is bipolar, when he tells a class of cab drivers that the only thing that gets him through the day is lithium, as well as in the episode "Sherman, Woman and Child" when his daily schedule reads "7:00 MANIC 8:00 DEPRESSIVE 9:00 MANIC 10:00 DEPRESSIVE."
He also has an alter-ego in "Ethel"; Ethel is an elderly woman, whom he often pretends is his assistant/secretary, and therefore assumes her persona when answering the phone. "Ethel" only appears in the first season.
In the second first-season episode "Marty's First Date", in desperation to retrieve his son from Cuba, Jay goes to Mexico City's "Linda Ronstadt International Airport" and marries a Mexican woman in order to travel there. She then admits to him that she is only marrying him "for citizenship" and then openly states "I plan to divorce him and take half his money." It is a possibility that this may be the "second divorce" Jay mentioned in the first webisode, but was never made clear. (see below).
In the second season, Jay's character was given a renovation. He received a rounder head, bigger pupils for his eyes and a warmer personality. He also begins a long-term relationship with Alice Tompkins, a Tennessee woman living in New York whom Jay meets on the street and later hires as his personal assistant.
In the opening sequence for every episode, Jay is awakened by a disquieting phone call or radio news brief. At the end, he is seen sitting in a movie theater, eating popcorn and drinking soda as the closing credits are shown on the screen. When the credits end, an usher approaches and says, "Excuse me sir, the show's over." Jay then delivers one of the following four responses:
Additionally, Jay shares a fifth response with Alice in the second season:
Usher: Excuse me, the show's over.
Alice: Get away, pipsqueak!
Jay: (to the camera) That's why I love her!
In the internet Web-Episode series that occurred after the show's cancellation, he is divorced (presumably from Alice) and is involved with his new make-up lady, Jennifer.
Ardeth is 35 years old and spends most of the series insulting Jay or demanding more alimony. At one point, when he greets her at a school athletic competition, she tells him he has to pay her $100 every time he talks to her. Handing her a wad of cash, he replies, "Fine. Here's two hundred. Get bent!" It is implied that Ardeth cheated on Jay with the judge who presided over their divorce case when, during the hearing, they make suggestive comments and flirtatious purring sounds to each other in front of Jay. She once attempted put a voodoo hex on Jay's girlfriend Alice, despite the divorce settlement specifically forbidding such actions. Despite her dislike of Jay, she shares Jay's affection for their only son Marty and even goes so far as to admit, "We raised a great kid." She is often seen when Marty is in a show or event. She has a handsome rich personal trainer and boyfriend named Alberto.
He is a former governor of New York, as well as a former ambassador, Cabinet member, a Rhodes scholar and a heavy contributor to the Republican Party. He was also U.S. Secretary of Balloon Doggies. When told by President George Bush that the position is a ridiculous figment of his imagination that Congress will no longer provide funding for, Sherman vehemently claims, "I didn't ask to be Secretary of Balloon Doggies, the balloon doggies demanded it." Franklin was Duke's running mate when he ran for president, though Duke tried to remove Franklin after a disastrous vice presidential debate, in which, among other gaffes, he claimed to be the first black female head of the Ku Klux Klan and that "America stinks!"
Despite his behavior, Franklin proves to be competent in some cases. In the episode "Marathon Mensch", he trains Jay to run in the New York marathon. Also in the episode "Frankie and Ellie Get Lost", much to his wife's surprise, Franklin proves that he can be a problem-solver and an apt handyman by building a shelter, a signal fire (to demand more rum from passing pilots), and training an ape as a butler. In "Sherman of Arabia", he manages to get the president to lead a rescue mission for Jay due to his support for the Republicans. In the episode "Lady Hawke", it is revealed that gin is to Franklin what spinach is to Popeye the Sailor.
It was also revealed during a period newsreel from "Frankie and Ellie Get Lost" that he was completely sane and had never had a drop to drink in his life until Ted Kennedy spiked the punch at his wedding.
Jay's adoptive mother and Franklin's wife, Eleanor is very prim and proper. She can be unscrupulous however, when it suits her purposes, such as willing to shoot her daughter's horse to force her to go to a debutante ball. She is often embarrassed by her family and its eccentricities, and is 63 years old. She seeks to have all poor people shot into space, and when she wrote a children's book about Jay called The Fat Little Pig, she promised to put all the profits toward that goal. She loves Jay but often shows humiliating photos of him. She is a little too concerned with her outward appearance, despite her lack of tear ducts and having the ability to cry bred out of her family, although in one episode she was seen crying after Jay yelled at her, so the lack of tear ducts may be a lie on her part. This is brought to light when she is asked how her skin is so smooth, and she replied that she scrubs her face rigorously with steel wool, and then soaks her face in boiling hot water for two minutes exactly. Eleanor's voice and many of her mannerisms were inspired by Katharine Hepburn.
Alice was originally an artist and is capable of perfectly replicating art masterworks on the walls of her apartment (such as Michelangelo‘s The Creation of Adam and Georges-Pierre Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte). She pepper-sprayed Jay upon first meeting him on the street, an act he shrugged off (even enjoyed). She then accepted Jay's offer to work as his personal assistant. It is in the episode "Lady Hawke" that she realizes she has fallen in love with Jay, and the two become a couple at the end of the episode.
Despite hitting him when she first met him for not liking The Lion King, Penny quickly takes a liking to Jay, initially calling him "funny man" due to the comically painful mishaps that repeatedly befall him when he is around her. Later in the season, she begins to call him "Uncle Jay." When he and Alice are unable to get her admitted into any of the top preschools in New York, Duke Phillips founds one exclusively for her, staffed by Jimmy Breslin, Sean Young, and Prince Charles.
A fifth tagline for the closing credits was created to go with the original four (see Jay above). Here, Jay and Alice are seen kissing in the theater seats as the credits roll. At the end, they are interrupted by an usher (a different one for this scene) who says, "Excuse me, the show's over." Alice responds, "Get away, pipsqueak!" and Jay says to the camera, "That's why I love her!"
In the first Critic webisode, Jay's makeup artist Jennifer asks him what happened to his self-esteem, to which Jay replies that he lost it in the second divorce settlement. Although Alice is not mentioned by name, this led many fans to believe that Jay and Alice had married and eventually ended up in a bitter divorce.
Voiced by Maurice LaMarche
Appearing in several episodes, Jay blames him for many of Hollywood's problems (such as unnecessary sequels and Cher winning an Oscar, although he's only the reason Marisa Tomei won). He was once contacted by the cast of Wings, who wanted to stay on the air for another year (his response was "Tell them there are limits to even my powers!"). He also disguised himself as a potential replacement for Roger Ebert. After hearing his positive reviews of Disney movies, Gene Siskel replied, "You're Satan, aren't you?"
Throughout the show's run, other famous critics also guest-voiced as themselves. Gene Shalit and Rex Reed appeared in multiple episodes. Shalit even appeared in a webisode. The duo Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert also appeared in a special second-season episode "Siskel & Ebert & Jay & Alice."[1] [2]
Other famous media personalities voicing themselves included Geraldo Rivera, Adam West, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jimmy Breslin, Bob Costas, Rod Steiger, Steve Allen, Ricki Lake, Queen Latifah, June Lockhart, and Milton Berle.
The following celebrities that are impersonated are listed in alphabetical order by last name: