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With endurance and serendipity, he might have starred in the kind of breakout dramatic role that comedic actors have been pulling off ever since Billy Wilder had the genius to cast Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (1944). Phil Hartman's understanding of pompous pretentiousness came mostly from deduction and observation, but he understood it all the same. And so, in one of the greatest of all SNL commercial parodies—of Calvin Klein's late-80s Obsession ads—he must have known he was dabbling in autobiography when he stared deeply into the camera, haughty and vain, and said with all the contrived portent he could muster from that European accent: "I wonder which was the greater transgression: loving her, or abiding her immaculate madness… Poor frightened creature. What was it we could not give her, or she understand?"You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman is out in hardcover from St. Martin's Press.Follow Lary Wallace on Twitter.