One thing's for sure: Donal Logue has the gift of gab. With little prodding he launches into a two-hour riff on everything from his role on Fox's Medicine Ball to Eugene Ionesco to his Gaelic heritage: ''Irish people have a naturally nasty, good sense of humor,'' he says.
Logue, 29, can thank that humor for his most famous character: Jimmy McBride, the Vaseline-haired cabdriver in MTV promos, who yammers on and on about music videos as passengers cower in the backseat. (''The building's shaking, ya know, what the hell is it? Ya know, is it a UFO? Oh no, it's Mick Jagger!'') It's a character Logue forged in Boston, where he attended Harvard. ''There's something so endearingly retarded about Boston rednecks,'' he says.
But it's not the only time his Irish blood has come in handy. Last year Logue's agents sent him to audition for a role on the hospital drama Medicine Ball. The part? Frank Martelli, an Italian-American M.D. ''I went in and began doing this jig about making [the character] Irish and calling him Seamus O'Shaunessy -- because I look so obviously Irish.''
Among those watching Logue was Marilu Henner, the Taxi actress-turned-Medicine Ball executive producer. She pointed out that the boxer on Taxi was intended to be Irish, but the show's creators liked Tony Danza enough to make the role Italian. So Martelli became Logue's Dr. Danny Macklin -- an overearnest, Ivy League-educated son of Dubliners.
It was fated, says Henner: ''Everything's been karmically paid back.'' Or was it just the luck of the Irish?
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