Gasping for Airtime (4 page)

My approach was simple. The last time they saw me, I was doing my act. This time I figured I would be less structured and show them a lot of different impressions. I can either do an impression right away or can’t do it at all. If I have to work on it, it ain’t comin’. I also can’t look at myself in the mirror and do an impression. Some guys who do impressions will rehearse them in front of a mirror. They contort their faces and examine the changes they’ve made. If I look in the mirror to watch one of my own impressions, I can’t really see myself. It’s useless. I’ve tried it, and for me, it just complicates everything. I can never figure out how you can tell if you’re doing a good impression if you’re watching it as someone else.

I took the stage with my three-beer buzz and had one of the best times in my life. I truly did not give a shit. I did Andrew McCarthy, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Arsenio Hall, and Harvey Keitel. When I ran out of impressions, I simply had them all talking to each other. I was improvising nearly everything and the crowd, thankfully, was with me.

The entire time I directed all my energy to the back right-hand side of the room, where I thought I saw Marci Klein and the
SNL
people sitting. I stared them down with all my power. As important as it was for me to show them how funny I was, for some reason it was equally important to me to demonstrate that I wasn’t afraid of them. After practically every sentence I would look to the back right-hand corner with an expression that said I found them mildly intriguing. It wasn’t until I had been offstage for a few minutes that I discovered that half of the
SNL
cast, along with executive producer Lorne Michaels, was sitting with Marci Klein in the back
left-hand
corner of the room. Nice going. I had just spent the most important twenty minutes of my life staring down a real estate agent from Long Island.

I returned to the bar, perched myself on a stool, and figured that was that. Either they liked me or they didn’t. I had a few more beers with the gang and decided to call it a night. When I stepped out onto the sidewalk, there was an enormous white stretch limousine parked at the curb. Marci Klein stood next to it talking to the man, Lorne Michaels. Not wanting to look like a guy hanging around and begging for some validation, I looked away. As I began walking toward Broadway for a cab, Marci called me over. Oh, shit, I thought, I’m drunk!

I walked very carefully toward the two of them. When I was still about ten feet away from them, Lorne extended his hand and said, “That was really excellent.” I reached for his hand, thanked him, and tried for a quick getaway. Basically, I was real happy with my set and didn’t want to say anything to blow it. After Lorne stepped into the limo, Marci pulled me aside. “You don’t understand, Jay, he doesn’t say that to anybody!” I thought to myself, Then where the fuck is he going?

Anthony and I flew together from New York to Charlotte, which was about an hour’s drive from the campus. The school put us up in a motel adjacent to the highway. There aren’t too many Four Seasons in Salisbury. We both arrived hungry, so after checking in, we made a plan to meet back in the lobby in about an hour to score some local grub. I was going to my room to take a nap; Anthony was going to go for a swim.

The pool at the motel was by no means filthy, but the cleaning net lying beside it was a welcome sight. Anthony grabbed the net and began the process of ridding the pool of every leaf and insect that had fallen into it.

Once in my room, I undressed and crawled under the blankets for my nap. I found a Cubs baseball game on the television and turned the sound low so I could be lulled to sleep by the voice of Harry Caray. As I was drifting off, the telephone rang. My first thought was that someone in my family must have died. What else could have such importance that I had to be told immediately while lying in bed in a roadside motel in the woods of rural North Carolina?

I answered the phone warily and was relieved that it was my manager, Barry. On the phone with Barry was my agent at the time, Ruthanne Secunda. Barry asked me if they had caught me at a bad time. I told him no and asked him what was up.

Ruthanne spoke next. “You got it,” she said, plain and simple as that. I froze. Got what? I knew what she meant, but I needed more description. Barry clarified the situation. “You, my friend,” he said, drawing out each word, “are a new cast member of
Saturday Night Live
.”

Strangely, I was not immediately elated. Instead, I felt like a school bus had rolled on top of me. I was dazed. I felt as if something very serious had happened, but I couldn’t quite quantify it. I asked them if I could call them back so I could phone my parents. When I told my mother and father the news, I cried. But oddly, no real joy. I was absolutely dumbstruck.

I pulled on my jeans and went down to the pool to tell Anthony. I had to tell somebody in person. Anybody. Everybody. When I reached the pool’s concrete deck, I saw Anthony, now shirtless, still skimming the pool with the long net. I stood next to him and watched for a while. He didn’t say anything, he just kept waving that stupid pole around. At this point, it looked like he was removing molecules because the pool was spotless. But he just kept going. Finally I blurted out, “I just got
Saturday Night Live
.” Anthony stopped with the pole and looked up at me for the first time. He was stunned. A minute passed, and he smiled. “Well, there goes that nap,” he deadpanned.

Anthony was genuinely happy for me. I was lucky that I wasn’t doing the gig with some dickhead who would be jealous. That night, in the most beautiful theater I had ever seen, in front of 2,000 students, I was introduced as the newest cast member of
Saturday Night Live
. Since I had done a show there the prior year, they were juiced. I could feel how happy they were for me. What a show.

I
DIDN’T
have a single idea in my head. It was my first week on
Saturday Night Live
and Charles Barkley was the host. This wasn’t bad; it was terrible. The seemingly impossible had happened: I was actually working on
Saturday Night Live,
filing into executive producer Lorne Michaels’s office on Monday, preparing to pitch ideas for sketches for Sir Charles to perform on Saturday. I had none, but I did have a plan.

I noticed a semicircle forming around Lorne’s desk and guessed that the pitches would start on one side of the desk and then work their way around the room. To act on my own prediction, I had to quickly decide which side of the desk to stand on. I wanted to be dead last to pitch so I could listen to everyone else’s ideas and hope for the light fantastic to strike. It was my only hope.

I picked the right side of Lorne’s desk, on the far side of the office. After some aggressive maneuvering, I managed to wedge myself into a position where I would be either second or second to last. Dave Mandel, a writer from Harvard, was on my left, and across the room, leaning against the wall, was David Spade. If Lorne said
David
, I was safe; if it was
Dave
, I was probably going to be axed before I saw any airtime. The office door swung closed and Lorne looked up from his desk. One glance generated instant quiet from the rowdy crowd. After a few seconds of silence, Lorne said, “David…”

Whew! With the exception of Dave Mandel, everyone would pitch before me. Think, damn it! I prodded my brain. Concentrating was particularly hard because as I was trying to come up with an idea, people like Al Franken and Adam Sandler were telling the host what they had in mind. That’s some pretty difficult stuff to tune out. Even more difficult to ignore was a pitch from Tom Davis, a writer from the highly regarded comedy team of Franken and Davis.

Tom excitedly pitched Charles Barkley doing a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial. Before he had gone far, Charles interrupted with a frosty “What?” But Tom pressed on about how Charles could tap-dance for spicy chicken, slowing only to refer to his notes. Soon Sandler began laughing, followed closely by Farley. The rest of us were staring at Tom, horrified that he was standing by his idea of Sir Charles peddling chicken. I thought I was off the hook. Even if my idea—the one I had not yet conceived—sucked, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as Charles Barkley tap-dancing for chicken.

I overheard someone on the floor talking about Barney the Dinosaur’s new kids’ album. I thought of Barney the Dinosaur. I thought about Charles Barkley. I pictured Barney the Dinosaur and Charles Barkley. The ideas were creeping through the semicircle and looping toward me. Sooner than was comfortable, I was next. Life all comes down to a few moments, and this was one of them. If I didn’t pitch something decent, I was a dead man. Then it hit me. Charles Barkley had a Nike commercial out at the time where he played one-on-one basketball with Godzilla. What if Charles Barkley played one-on-one basketball with Barney the Dinosaur!

“Jay?” Lorne said.

I steeled myself and pitched “Barkley vs. Barney,” a one-on-one pickup basketball game to the death. Everyone in the room smiled. Sometimes it’s just a roll of the dice. All those clubs I worked in all of those cities in all those cornfields, and my entire career seemed to have been determined by which side of the room I was on. No matter now, I had delivered big-time. “Barkley vs. Barney” was chosen as the opening monologue of the show that week—the first show of the nineteenth year of
Saturday Night Live
.

It turned out that the producers had assigned Al Franken to “oversee” the sketch. No one told me this, I gleaned it from his body language. I had naïvely assumed that if I wrote a sketch, my role during filming would be to explain how everything should go creatively. After all, they told me that’s why I needed to be there. That’s why I went. But I quickly became a spectator to my own sketch.

Putting Al in charge wasn’t a bad idea, but I felt that someone should have filled me in on the protocol. Al was from an entirely different generation than most of the cast members. He was a grumpy fellow with a constantly furrowed brow who was fast approaching fifty. Despite the fact that Al was going into his eleventh year on the show, he was still a featured player and not a full cast member. He clearly didn’t want a rookie’s input on the “Barkley vs. Barney” sketch. From the get-go, Al took over the entire production. I can’t say I blame him. I had no idea how to produce a sketch with an entire camera crew and sound guys. Whenever I offered a suggestion, Al would look at me like I just farted.

The first thing I discovered was that my sketch had been rewritten. When I asked Franken why several of the jokes had been removed, he replied that I had gone home and someone had to do the rewrite. True, the night before I had left around midnight, about the time it was clear that “Barkley vs. Barney” wasn’t going to be discussed for a few more hours. What was there to talk about, anyway? It’s Charles Barkley kicking the shit out of Barney in basketball. The most baffling change was that I had Barkley first charging into Barney, then elbowing the dinosaur in the face, and finally kicking him in the balls. I asked Franken what happened to the progression of basketball violence leading to the knee in the groin. “A knee in the groin isn’t funny,” Franken told me.

Weeks later, when Emma Thompson hosted the show and Smashing Pumpkins was the musical guest, Al and I had another dustup. Emma Thompson had just broken through in American film, and though I knew who she was, I made the mistake of wandering through the writers’ room, a blank on ideas that was causing me to blank on everything, and bothering Franken about it. He was sitting at the writers’ table chewing on a pencil. He would go through about three pencils a night with his mouth. I asked Al, “Who is Emma Thompson?” He went ballistic. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He threw his chewed pencil across the room. “She was nominated for a fucking Academy Award!”

I thought he was remarkably angry for such an innocuous question. Most of the writers were seated at the table with Al and had seen and heard the entire exchange. I was being screamed at like I was a child in front of my coworkers. I looked around to see if anyone was going to tell Al to calm down, but they didn’t. I was on my own. I looked at Franken and asked, “Hey, Al, who are Smashing Pumpkins?” Franken turned red and then bluish red. Getting up from the table and storming out of the room, he yelled over his shoulder: “I don’t know. But they didn’t get nominated for a fucking Academy Award!” Uh, touché, I guess.

Someone from the school brought out several basketballs and Al, Charles, and I all instinctively started shooting baskets. Now it was officially a great day. I was pulling down rebounds for Charles Barkley and he was getting them for me. I really stink at basketball, but, damn it, I was gonna fake it. I bounced a couple shots off the iron and then moved in for some layups. Charles called for the ball and I dished it to him with a beautiful bounce pass. He threw up a brick. He retrieved the ball, shot, and missed again. And again. And again.

I began counting. Shot after shot, from wherever he was on the floor, he couldn’t buy a basket. It made me uncomfortable. Should I be witnessing this? After shot number eight clanged off the back of the rim, Charles explained himself. “I haven’t picked up a basketball since the horn sounded in the finals,” he said.

Ten shots and still nothing. Eleven went in and out. Twelve was an air ball. Thirteen bounced off the side of the rim. Finally he nailed his fourteenth shot from about twenty feet straight in front of the basket. “Let’s go,” he said. And with that, Charles didn’t miss more than five out of a hundred the rest of the day.

There was a stunt coordinator on the set to make sure the guy in the Barney suit wasn’t injured, which was a good thing. I had written the sketch so that Charles beat the snot out of Barney. The action began with Barney guarding Charles one-on-one and Charles cracking the cuddly, lard-ass dinosaur in the face with an elbow. In take after take, Barkley was murdering this poor guy. The stunt coordinator assured Charles that there was a professional stuntman in full padding under that Barney suit. At one point, Charles elbowed the stuntman in the face so hard that the entire Barney head popped off. The thing probably weighed five pounds, and Charles knocked it clean off a guy’s head with one shot. Nice.

For the next couple of hours, it was more of the same. Barney getting punched, kicked, cracked in the head—you name it. When we finished, the stuntman peeled off the suit. As he emerged from the costume I could see that he was indeed in full padding. Every inch of his body had some sort of pad on it. He looked like he had just fallen off a motorcycle. He was drenched in sweat and his entire face was covered in scratches and abrasions. He looked like he might start crying. Mental note: Never piss off Charles Barkley.

After we finished shooting the sketch, we all had to go to the offices for the rewrites and rehearsal. Charles was nice enough to invite Al and me to ride with him in his limo back to 30 Rock. He talked about golf the entire trip. The only thing I could have contributed was that I once caddied and had enjoyed
Caddyshack,
so I kept my mouth shut. Besides, because I was the new, unfamiliar face on the show, there was always a pregnant pause after I spoke. The guest host would look at me as if to say, “Sorry, who are you again?”

Though I wasn’t going to be performing in any sketches that week, I didn’t care. A sketch that I wrote was going on the air, and I was cruising through Manhattan in a stretch limo with Sir Charles. Baby steps.

The night of the show, I felt fantastic. It was actually happening. Worst-case scenario, I had written the opening monologue/sketch for the season premiere of
Saturday Night Live
. For the first time since I walked into 30 Rock, I felt like I had really contributed something. With “Barkley vs. Barney” as the monologue, no one would have to sit through a host reading cue cards written an hour before showtime.

As the countdown to the show began, I didn’t know where to stand. I figured I should be on the floor watching over my sketch like a parent. That’s what I had seen the other writers do during rehearsals. When the show is in progress, there’s an organized chaos in the studio. It’s an electricity unlike any that I have experienced anywhere else, on any other project. Cameras are flying around the room. Actors are running across the studio to their next setup. All of this is happening around the eighty audience members sitting in chairs on the stage floor. The camera and cable guys have worked there for years and know exactly what they’re doing. Intermittently throughout the show, audience members would be asked to stand up from their seats to let a crane or a piece of a wall pass by. I certainly didn’t want to be standing someplace where I was responsible for any mishaps, especially since there is no correcting an error in a live show.