Almost Interesting (12 page)

The next host up was Alec Baldwin, who turned out to be one of the all-time great
SNL
hosts. This was his first time hosting, and the episode that earned him an Emmy nomination. I remember seeing him in that first Monday meeting. He had just come off of
The Hunt for Red October
and he had this jet-black, slick-backed hair, and he just looked like a stud. I thought, This dude’s a movie star.

I met over a hundred hosts during my time on the show, and there were definitely moments when I thought, This person has no charisma, little to no talent, and nothing special about them. They are just really lucky. And then there were a handful where I just said to myself, This person is a fucking star. I didn’t know what to expect from Baldwin, to be honest, but he was a very upbeat, very fun guy, and he gave all the writers respect, including myself. He could do tons of different voices and a lot of accents. He was and still is exactly what you want in an
SNL
host. Talented and up for anything. Those are the hosts that score the most on the show.

The show was very good that night. On a live show, you get one take. Usually, on an average
SNL,
you get one or two awesome sketches and then a bunch of C-pluses. Movie stars come into the show and they are used to multiple tries to get something nailed. It doesn’t work that way on
SNL
. The worst is when a sketch is killing in rehearsals all week, but on Saturday, something trips and it falls apart. Maybe a cast member misses a cue because something happened in wardrobe, or the whole thing just starts wrong and then the cast spends the rest of the time trying to recapture the magic they had in rehearsals but it just isn’t there. But Baldwin, he was great in every sketch. He made me see how it’s supposed to be done. Meanwhile, this was the second show in a row where I didn’t get anything on. And I was starting to feel like I was legitimately in over my head.

Andrew Dice Clay was the host for my third show. His episode was the one that got the most attention of the entire season, but the wrong kind. Clay was the biggest comedian in the country at that time. He had just sold out two nights at Madison Square Garden, which was a remarkable coincidence because I had just done a gig in the back room at T.G.I. Friday’s . . . and it looked pretty full. Dice had gained a reputation for being a homophobic, sexist pig. His career was peaking and everyone was after him. His exaggerated character always made me laugh, but some people took his act very seriously. One of those people was Nora Dunn, a longtime and very valuable cast member on
SNL
. Nora made it clear she would not perform with Dice, making a crazy situation even crazier. Dice had so much pressure on him, I could tell he was sort of freaking out. He had this buddy with him named Hot Tub Johnny West, who had long hair that I swear was a wig and who was a dead ringer for Steve Perry from Journey. I’m not sure what his job was other than being Dice’s friend, but I have a lot of guys in my life who have that job now, so I didn’t have a problem with it. I don’t know why they called him Hot Tub. All I could think about was a lot of hair in the filter. Anyway, I could tell Dice was getting more tense as the week went on. As a comedian, I couldn’t imagine hosting the show, let alone having every person in America watching and hoping you fuck it up. There were definitely a lot of folks out there who hated this guy. I would have killed to have appeared in a sketch in this show, but with no pull, there was no chance. There was no demand for me from the audience, the writers, or Lorne. Once again I was stuck punching up.

Dice got heckled by protesters during his monologue, and his big comeback was something along the lines of “This is the kind of guy that goes into a public bathroom to smell other people’s crap.” I don’t recall the exact quote, but that was the sentiment. It wasn’t a great comeback and that stumble set the whole show off on the wrong foot. It wasn’t the worst show in my run, but with so many people watching, we needed a home run and we probably hit a double. We weren’t helped by the fact that our musical guest that night was Julee Cruise and the Spanic Boys. I like to look back at the musical guests and see who blew up after the show and who disappeared. I feel like this week it might have been the latter.

The last show in my four-show trial run before summer hiatus was hosted by Candice Bergen. She was stunningly gorgeous and so sweet. In the Monday meeting, you all start out on the same footing. You are all just faces in the crowd to the host. The host is obliged to treat everyone equally because they don’t know who is important and who is not. As the week went by, most hosts realized that I was pointless, but at that Monday meeting I got a little bit of eye contact and attention. That was fun. But, as per my usual course, I didn’t get anything on that week. I had two shots—one was a sketch I had written with Rob, and one was a bit for Weekend Update. Unfortunately, Rob forgot to put my name on the sketch we wrote together, so when the read-through came along, it looked like I was only writing sketches that I could appear in. I looked like a selfish prick. So I went to Rob and asked him what happened. His response was, “You left at two
A
.
M
. I stayed all night. I was bleary when I handed that thing in.” I had left at 2
A
.
M
. because we finished at 2
A
.
M
. I didn’t need to walk around in my boxer shorts to show everyone how I had stayed up all night writing. It was a little obvious, but it showed Lorne and Shoemaker and Downey that he was there all night. I think that helped.

Our trial run was over. Neither Rob nor I had landed a sketch on
SNL
. It was going to be a long summer of stand-up and waiting to see if I still had a job in the fall. I sure hoped so. I was going to miss that soup at the Omni.

CHAPTER TEN

SNL
1990–1991

A
fter sweating bullets all summer, wondering if I’d get hired back, I finally got the call from
SNL
. Thank God I did, because I hadn’t booked any stand-up gigs for the fall, on the hope that I’d be headed back to New York. Looking back, that was pretty presumptuous of me considering I hadn’t exactly set the world on fire in my trial run the previous season. I would have been doubly fucked if
SNL
hadn’t called. Rob also got picked up again, but we were headed back as writer/performers, which still meant 95 percent writer, 5 percent performer. Rob was still fine with this arrangement. Me, not so much, but this was not a job you turned down.

As a “middle act” on the road (twenty-five to thirty minutes onstage), which meant better than the opener (who gets about a ten-minute set) but not quite headliner (forty-five minutes to an hour) level yet, I had been making $1,000 a week on the road. My workweek on the road was Tuesday through Sunday, with Monday as a travel day. So that meant no break, no real day off. It was a rough ride sometimes, and I’d try not to do so many weeks on the road back-to-back. I’d do an off week in the middle of the month so I could do auditions back in L.A. Here’s the thing about that
SNL
gig. I thought I’d start out making something crazy, like $10,000 a week. I had about $2,500 a month in bills back then, so I needed to cover at least that, which I was able to do by touring constantly. When I got my option picked up by
SNL,
I was offered the same salary I had been given in my trial run. Not $10,000 a week but a measly (what a great word, right?) $900 a week and a bump to $1,500 if I actually “performed” on the show (fat chance). I was grateful, don’t get me wrong. But that $900 came with stress and anxiety from working outside my comfort zone. At least with touring stand-up, I knew what to expect, I knew how to write for myself, I knew how to get laughs. It sucked traveling all the time, but I didn’t go to work every day afraid it would be my last.

I went back to the Omni Berkshire Hotel (cue high-pitched singing-angel music) for two weeks of comfort and joy before I was forced to move into a microscopic dogshit apartment. I kept an apartment in Los Angeles, too, so I could come home on weeks off. This kept my expenses high, but I needed that safety net out in L.A. I had hoped that
SNL
was going to be my ticket to the bank, but that wasn’t going to be the case right out of the gate.

When I got to New York, I learned that
SNL
had hired two new feature players: Chris Rock and Chris Farley. I didn’t know it at the time, but both ended up becoming great friends of mine. (It’s funny, my best friends have come from high school and
SNL
. Nothing from college, where most people get them; #boringtrivia.) I had heard about each of them through the comedy grapevine and the
SNL
scouts. Rock was a young Eddie Murphy protégé with a dirty, hilarious act. Chris Farley was a sketch player out of Chicago that everyone on staff kept saying had superstar breakout potential (talk about nailing it). Rock lived in Brooklyn so he drove into work every day. I didn’t meet him until table read for the first time. Farley was staying at the Omni, so I ran into him in the lobby. I first saw him looking confused there. (I would later realize this was his look 90 percent of the time. Everything confused him . . . ATMs, washing machines, pogo sticks, etc.) I recognized him from his head shot at work and approached him to say hi. I think his response was something along the lines of, “How ya doin’? Chris Farley . . . Gallagher Tent and Awning.” Chris always said his name just a hair louder than necessary, with a dip to the side and flip of his hair. (This is a move I saw repeated maybe five thousand times over the course of our friendship. It was his “go-to” move and always got a laugh.) That immediately put my nerves at ease because I could tell right away he wasn’t a cocky showbiz asshole. He was scared as hell to be working at
SNL,
just like me. We walked to work together that day, like it was the first day of school. We stopped at an ATM machine so Chris could take out some money. This was something he did all the time. He would usually take out twenty dollars, as he did that afternoon. Noticing this, I said to him, “How long is that twenty bucks going to last you? Make it two hundred so you don’t have to hit the ATM again in thirty minutes, man.” But that was just how he was. It was his small-town upbringing. Once he pointed at the McDonald’s and commented that there was also one back home. This kind of naïveté is why I started calling him Wisconsin Dundee. Everything was new to him, and it was just part of his charm. That was the beginning of our dynamic. Every day I would casually analyze what he did and make fun of it. We did this all day long. And the more he laughed the more I would do it. It fell into place right away and never changed. If I thought for one second it hurt his feelings I would stop, but if I slowed down he would say, “Davey, make fun of me.” He knew it wasn’t malicious and it was our thing. This is starting to sound like
The Notebook
so I’ll move on.

At work he outranked me because he was a full feature player and I was a lowly writer/performer, but he wasn’t really aware of that. I had figured out some of the hierarchy in my four-week stint the prior season. It was good that Chris hadn’t been hired as a writer/performer like me because he didn’t write a lot. But he could be plugged into any sketch and make it better, which made him a very valuable commodity.

That first show of the season was like a typical one the year before—I didn’t get jack shit on and I was just always stuck in the writers’ room punching up sketches that I wasn’t in (sour grapes alert). Luckily, that was becoming more fun since I was starting to get to know peeps, and feeling more comfortable. Our host for the premiere episode was Kyle MacLachlan, star of
Twin Peaks
. The challenge, of course, was coming up with a sketch to do about
Twin Peaks,
which was a massive hit. We just couldn’t find the angle. We went in circles for hours and to Rob’s credit he finally cracked the code in the eleventh hour. I think the idea was for Kyle to have solved a murder, but to continue to look for the culprit because he doesn’t want the show to end. Jim Downey was very happy when Rob came up with that idea. This in turn made me super jealous. Rob was getting the full “for he’s a jolly good fellow” treatment while I was getting the “why did we hire you back” stink-eye. I do remember that in that
Twin Peaks
sketch, Chris Farley played a prisoner in handcuffs. He barely had anything to do but he was still extremely watchable. He made his part funnier than it should have been, even when he wasn’t given anything funny to do. I could see right away what everyone had been talking about. This guy had star potential, for sure. He was immediately interesting to watch. Meanwhile I’m off to the side gathering dust.

For the third show that season, George Steinbrenner was the host. I am from Arizona so I didn’t understand or give a shit why this guy was hosting. Everyone around me seemed to understand perfectly well, because they were all Yankees fans. All I cared about was how I was going to plug a sixty-five-year-old guy who can’t act into my “hilarious” sketch ideas. I’m pretty sure I wound up writing a Weekend Update bit for myself again. Dennis Miller was still hosting Weekend Update, and he was a fan of my writing and would always encourage me to write something for that bit. That was nice, in a place where no one gave a fuck. It wasn’t like anyone was outright mean, it was just that the other writers and performers had their own shit to worry about and they didn’t want to get fired, either. So when you didn’t get a sketch on, folks weren’t sad for you. They were quietly doing mental cartwheels because of the schadenfreude festival around the seventeenth floor. Not super great for the old ego. I was quickly starting to understand where Lovitz had been coming from that first time we met. It was amazing how fast I turned into that same guy.

My Weekend Update that week was about the looming war in the Persian Gulf, since Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait in August 1990. It involved two dolls, and I used them to explain the war in simple terms. One doll was my brother Bryan, and he represented Iraq. He was a big bully. The other doll was me, and represented Kuwait. I acted out Bryan/Iraq punching me, holding me/Kuwait down, spitting and sucking it back up. The United States was my mom coming in to break it up. It was a pretty funny bit but nothing special; still, at least I had gotten something on. I was on the show. Now people in Arizona might believe me when I said I was on
Saturday Night Live
.