LENNY AND SQUIGGY: ‘IN A WORLD OF THEIR OWN’

Michael McKean and David L. Lander, who played Laverne and Shirley’s oddball pals Lenny and Squiggy, were friends who met as drama majors at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech (now called Carnegie Mellon).

“One of the things we did right from the beginning was those two characters,” Lander says. “We only did them for our friends.”

Lenny and Squiggy were based on other people both of them knew. “Mine was kind of drawn from two or three different sources,” says McKean, who now appears on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and HBO’s “Dream On.”

“The voices kind of evolved as David and I did them together--just two guys speaking their own language,” McKean says.

But the language Lenny and Squiggy originally spoke was pretty blue. “They were filthy,” Lander says. “They were really [Martin] Scorsese comedy.”

The two were performing together with the Credibility Gap comedy troupe in L.A. when Marshall asked them to perform Lenny and Squiggy at a party celebrating the start of the series.

“We did a bit we never did before and everybody laughed,” Lander says. “The next day Garry Marshall called up and said, ‘We would like to hire you as apprentice writers to write yourselves into the show with those two funny guys.”’

At the outset, McKean and Lander usually wrote all of their characters’ lines. But as the seasons progressed, writers began to comprehend Lenny and Squiggy’s incomprehensible language.

“It wasn’t just a bunch of dumb jokes,” McKean says. “They were in a world of their own. They had their own logical system. They were dumb from the outside only. “

McKean and Lander, who own the rights to the characters, reprised Lenny and Squiggy for a 1993 NBC ‘70s special, as well as for a “Saturday Night Live” sketch last year. Both times they brought the house down.

“There’s talk that we may do a movie next,” Lander says.