Rubber Balls and Liquor (12 page)

In the end, I didn't get the part, but
Mr. Smith
did send over a nice note and promised to call me.

Other actors and comedians, their careers seem to move on a kind of upward trajectory. Me, I just grabbed whatever I could, in my hit-or-miss way, and hoped for the best. The one thing I had going for me, people always said, was that I was funny. I've said this already, I know, but I'm of the opinion that you can never say enough nice things about yourself, and that some of these nice things are worth repeating. I suppose it's possible that some of these people might have meant that I was
funny-looking
or
funny-sounding
. It's possible, too, that I might have given off a funny smell, but what the hell did I care? Funny was funny.

Eventually,
funny
took me all the way to the
Saturday Night Live
audition I wrote about earlier. I probably should have looked at this as my big break, but I didn't know enough to be nervous. I just went in and told a few jokes and did a few voices and hoped the people would like me well enough to call me back.

It was quite a scene at the audition. There were no orangutans, as far as I could tell, so I figured I had a shot. Every young comic seemed to show up for it. And here I thought I'd been singled out because I was special, or uniquely talented. (I would have even settled for funny-smelling, because at least it would have been distinctive.) Some of the people auditioning weren't even comics. There were a number of black actors, for example, and I remember thinking the odds were against them. I mean, there was probably only one African-American spot in the cast, so you figure it out. And yet everywhere you turned backstage there were all these black actors rehearsing monologues from
Raisin in the Sun,
and hoping for the best.

I don't know that I killed when my turn finally came around, but I like to think I maimed. At the very least, I was abrasive enough to cause a rash, or a mild discoloration. I must have left some sort of mark because the producers called me back a time or two, and eventually I got the job. It's like they were reluctant to give it to me, the way they kept calling me back, like they wanted to be double-sure they weren't about to make a horrible mistake.

People are always asking me about my one season on
Saturday Night Live,
but only after they read my bio or my Wikipedia page, because nobody remembers the season itself. My own asshole agent, even. (The first one, not the new-and-improved one.) No, she's not my agent anymore, but she certainly was at the time. She once called me very excitedly, before the agency people got around to firing her, to tell me she got me an audition for
Saturday Night Live,
and I had to explain to her that I had already been on the show, and that I'd already been fired.

This was news to her.

Last I heard of her, my asshole agent was working as a real estate agent, which may explain the homeless problem.

My asshole agents aside—a transitional phrase that works doubly well for me and my asides—I became known in certain circles as the untalented guy with the irritating voice from the worst season of
Saturday Night Live.
It's not exactly the best nickname in the world, and it's difficult to imagine it fitting on a T-shirt. This was just as well, I always thought, because it's nice to be known in certain circles, especially concentric ones. In truth, most people had no idea I was on the show, and the ones who did have a vague recollection of my hardly memorable contribution couldn't seem to keep track of all the different incarnations of the show and its cast.

This was understandable. By this point, after so many years and so many cast members, looking back at the history of
Saturday Night Live
is like watching one of those prehistoric movies where cavemen are battling dinosaurs. There is a little time lapse of several million years between cavemen and dinosaurs, but that never got in the way of a good story. It's the same thing with
Saturday Night Live.
Pointing to one bad season is a little like referring to the issue of
Playboy
with the naked girl in it, so I sometimes mess with people's heads when the subject comes up, just to see if they're paying attention. They'll ask me about the show, and I'll tell them about the cast. I'll mention some people from the original cast, some people from the current cast, some people from the cast of
Bridget Loves Bernie
 … whatever comes to mind. They'll nod politely, and smile knowingly, and tell me they remember it like it was yesterday. I'll say, “My favorite was the recurring character I played on those Leeping Skeet-shooter sketches.” And they'll say it was their favorite, too.

Now, here's another point of pause, for another show business observation: do you know how people are always saying you should go out of your way to be nice to the people you meet on your way up, because they're the same people you're going to meet on the way down? It's such a cliché, and you hear it all the time—not just in show business, but everywhere. But I learned early on that it's a load of crap. Here's my feeling on the matter: be as big a creep as you want to be to people you meet on your way up, because if you're on your way up people want to be your friend no matter what. If you're on your way down, nobody cares how nice you used to be.

Words to live by, don't you think?

Once again, I return you to our regularly scheduled story …

I started at
Saturday Night Live
with Joe Piscopo, Eddie Murphy, and a whole bunch of people you've probably never even heard of. Most of us were fired midway through our one and only season—the show's sixth, if you're keeping score—although Joe and Eddie were allowed to hang around for a while, which worked out well for me because as Eddie became more famous he was in a better position to hire me in
Beverly Hills Cop II
. And, as Joe became more famous, he was in a better position to hire me to rub body oil on him for one of his muscle magazine photo shoots.

As it happened, that
Beverly Hills Cop II
gig had nothing to do with Eddie Murphy. I got hired the regular way—by auditioning and whining and crossing my fingers. There was no nod or nudge from my old pal Eddie. In fact, when I turned up on set for my scenes, Eddie came over and told me how surprised he was to see me there. He said, “We used to work together, right? You seem vaguely familiar.”

People still come up to me on the street to talk about
Beverly Hills Cop II
. They do my scenes, word-for-word, which I always find interesting because those word-for-words weren't in the script. We improvised the whole thing. I played an accountant. The way it was written, it was a very straightforward scene—and by
straightforward
I mean straight. For some reason, I ended up playing it gay. To this day, I don't know why. Also, I don't know that anyone noticed, except me.

(If you want to know the truth, neither one of us wanted to play it straight. We talked about this, me and Eddie Murphy. We thought gay would be so much better, but unfortunately we didn't have the budget for a lavish musical number.)

In the original scene, Eddie Murphy's character went to the accountant to take care of some traffic tickets. One of my lines was, “Is there some way we can avoid this unpleasantness?” It wasn't a very funny line, even though it seemed to sum up my approach to life and work, so we went another way with it. At the end of the scene, in the part that always gets the biggest laugh, my accountant character yells “Bitch!” into the phone, only now when the movie is shown on television the word has been edited out. Apparently, you can show the crack of someone's ass, or make hardly veiled references to sexual activity or bodily functions, but you can't scream “Bitch!” into a telephone.

I knew Joe Piscopo from the comedy clubs, but I don't remember meeting Eddie before
Saturday Night Live.
Looking back, I suppose it's possible that I might have seen Eddie at some of the clubs, but I might have him confused with one of the busboys. It's not politically correct, and I'm ashamed to admit it, but black people and Asians do all look alike to me. In all fairness to me, and to Eddie, it might have been Sidney Poitier.

Somewhere along the way,
Saturday Night Live
went beyond funny or unfunny. Now it's just a restaurant in a good location. Back when I signed on, it was considered an outrage that a group of unknowns was trying to replace the original cast of “Not Ready for Prime-Time Players,” a moniker that might have been wryly amusing for a while but seemed to lose its relevance over the years. Nowadays, the cast changes between commercial breaks, but at the time it was considered a call to war. It was as if in the middle of Beatlemania someone announced that John, Paul, George and Ringo were being replaced by four new guys, and that one of them would be an impish Jew with an irritating voice who would hardly appear onstage—like Ringo, I guess, without the Jewish part.

The silver lining to my cometlike appearance on
Saturday Night Live
was that I now had a track record. It wasn't a particularly good track record, and it certainly wasn't a long one, but this didn't seem to bother casting agents and producers. At least, it didn't bother them after a while. I didn't work a whole lot right after I was fired, and I drifted back to the New York comedy club scene, where I resumed my role as the guy in the back of the room the emcee kept failing to notice when he was searching for another few comics to put on before closing. But then a certain amount of time passed and people in a position to hire me conveniently forgot that there had been a stigma attached to me, following that disastrous
Saturday Night Live
season. Or maybe the topical ointment my doctor had prescribed to relieve the stigma had finally started to work. However it happened, and however long it took, I came to realize that casting agents and producers liked that I had been on television, that's all. This way, if I screwed up mightily, they could at least point to my résumé and say, “Hey, he was on
Saturday Night Live.
How the hell was I supposed to know he works with a drool cup?”

After
Saturday Night Live,
I went from being a complete unknown to a famous failure. The standard line of rejection I used to hear went from, “I'm not hiring Gilbert Gottfried, I don't know who he is” to “I know all too well who Gilbert Gottfried is and I'm not hiring him.”

In Hollywood, work leads to work. Maybe not right away, but eventually. And maybe not by design, but it just kind of happens. A role in one film leads to a role in another, which was how
Beverly Hills Cop II
led to
Look Who's Talking Too
and
Problem Child 2
. (I was big in sequels, although I somehow managed to sneak into the cast of the first
Problem Child
movie, which many critics believed was a pale imitation of the sequel.) Sometimes, you can get hired and rehired simply because the director remembers working with you before and that you were not too objectionable.

Sometimes, too, you can get hired and rehired simply because you're the right size. You don't even have to look especially appealing or right for the part. For
Problem Child
, for example, I had to do a scene in an orphanage with a group of nuns. As so often happens, when we have to do a scene in an orphanage with a group of nuns, there was a lot of blocking and staging and a whole bunch of other nonsense going on before we could actually start shooting. This meant that because of the child labor laws in Hollywood the kid who'd been hired to play the title role couldn't be on the set for all that blocking and staging, so the producers hired a dwarf to play the part, since the cameras weren't rolling anyway. The stand-in dwarf was the same height as the child actor playing the lead, so the lighting would be right.

Well, this was by no means a cute dwarf. He was simply the right size. That was his main qualification. The cute, good-looking dwarfs worked in the A pictures. We had this guy. He was so ugly, he'd scare an Oompa Loompa—one of those dwarfs you'd only find in a nightmare sequence in a pretentious art film. He was bowlegged, with an enormous head, a twisted spine and a mouth that didn't really close. And that was when you looked at him from his good side. So this ugly dwarf was our stand-in Problem Child, and we all went about our business—because, after all, we were consummate professionals. Not just mere professionals, mind you, but consummate professionals, which I think has something to do with soup.

The assistant director on
Problem Child
was a very proper Brit, with a clipped, cultured accent. He always sounded like he was reciting Shakespeare. He'd announce, “Stand close by. We're taking a five-minute break, and then we'll be doing Scene 27, in the cafeteria.” Whatever he had to say, all the actors and technicians would sit listening to him like he was Laurence Olivier and we were at some play at the Old Vic.

One afternoon, the assistant director was going on and on about some important matter. Whatever it was, he made it sound so lovely. I happened to be standing near the terrifically ugly dwarf, who at one point threw up his hands in despair and said, “Boy, if I had that guy's voice, I could get all the pussy I want.”

I heard that and thought,
Only in Hollywood
. Then I went back to my dressing room to work on my British accent.

Oh, wait, I just remembered another
Problem Child
anecdote. This one might even be funnier than the one I just told you, so try to put that one out of your mind. This one is from the sequel,
Problem Child 2
, not to be confused with
Look Who's Talking Too
, in which I danced with John Travolta. (He stills calls me. He just won't accept that it's over between us.) I guess that makes this the sequel to my first
Problem Child
anecdote. Anyway, in
Problem Child 2
, there's a big food fight scene in a restaurant. Maybe you remember it. Maybe you don't. But trust me, it's in there somewhere. John Ritter's character is in the scene with his son, Junior, the Problem Child. My character, Mr. Peabody, shows up with an impossibly hot-looking, six-foot-tall model/actress-type. The girl is wearing an outfit to show off her quite magnificent cleavage. (I was going to say
majestic
cleavage, but I wasn't sure how to spell it. Plus, I thought it would be overstating.) However you choose to describe her breasts (I called them Abbott and Costello, if you must know), I gave them much more attention than I gave the script.