The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (12 page)

When you’re lined up to direct a show at Second City, you just go in and watch the performers. You make notes, jot down inspirations. Night after night, I would go there to work and make notes, and every time I saw him onstage, he transformed me from a director into an audience member; I forgot to take notes. I would just sit back and laugh and laugh and laugh. That’s never happened to me before or since.

I’ve worked with a lot of great people over the years, from Jack Black to Steve Carell, and this is something I can only say about Chris: From the moment he stepped onstage, the audience was completely invested in him. There was just a sense of “He’s gonna cause trouble, and I want to be here when it happens.”

When I arrived, he was doing the Motivational Speaker guy, but it wasn’t as a motivational speaker yet, because that idea didn’t exist. It was just
that guy,
in a million different contexts, usually a coach, or maybe an angry dad. It would destroy the audience every night. I said to Odenkirk, “We cannot open the show without that character.”

And that’s when Bob came back with a sketch about a family with pot-smoking kids who hire this Motivational Speaker, a guy who lives in a van down by the river, is thrice divorced, and uses the complete disaster of his life as an example of what not to become.

I sat down to write it, and the sketch came out pretty much whole the way it was done. I handed it to Chris, and watching where he took it was insane.

Chris could never remember his lines during rehearsal. He’d get so amped up with the energy of that character, doing the hips and the arm-pumping thing. He screwed it up every night for eight weeks. Odenkirk and Pasquesi sat down with him and went over and over his lines. He was like, “This is hard. This is like learning the Our Father.”

Then, on opening night, we were all worried he was going to screw it up—and he nailed it. When he came offstage, I said, “Why the hell did you finally get it tonight?”

“Big game,” he said. “Coach is here.” Del was in the audience.

I was in the audience that night. When he said, “My name is Matt Foley, and I am a motivational speaker!” I was probably as red as a beet. I smiled and slid down a little further in my chair.

After the show we went and hung out in a bar for a time. Chris told me that he was never going to change the name, that it was always going to be Matt Foley. I’m honored by it still.

To this day, it’s got to be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. It never stopped making me laugh, and that’s rare.

Chris was never captured in either movies or TV as good as he was onstage. He was too explosive. He just seems flat in all those movies. It’s like watching a large wild animal in a cage.

The Matt Foley sketch was basically the same every night, but he was always on the edge of that character, forgetting his lines, making up new ones, changing the blocking. He was never content to mimic last night’s performance, which a lot of actors do. Sometimes, you try to make the performance fun and surprising again for the people onstage, who might be a little tired of it. Chris was doing a great show for the audience, but he was doing a completely different show for the rest of the cast. I can picture it in my head right now like it was yesterday. Night after night I’d stand there, four feet away from him, and just watch in complete awe.

I used to have to hold my cheeks with my hands because my face hurt from trying so hard not to laugh.

Just watching him adjust his tie, or hitch up his pants, was enough to make you lose it. He’d get closer and closer to your face every night when he was saying his lines. I played the son. He started picking me up and tossing me up in the air, flipping me around. Then out of nowhere he’d kiss me. He just had a ball doing it.

He was so into the character that he’d be swinging his head around and his glasses would go flying off. Then he’d proceed to act like he couldn’t see for five minutes, stumbling around looking for his glasses, and that would become the scene. Funny things would just happen organically. Even if he did the script word for word, it felt new every night.

I just remember thinking, no one else in the world will ever be able to do this character.

After Farley left for
SNL
, Ian Gomez filled in for him. Every night he tried to do a different character to make that scene work, and he could never do it. Finally we said, “We gotta cut it.”

The night that
SNL
came to scout him, he was nervous but confident. I remember saying to the cast, “The set’s yours. You can put up whatever you want tonight.” I wanted Chris’s strongest pieces to go up so he’d have a good shot at it.

We had a great show that night. And it was great for me. Chris and I worked so well together. That helped me get noticed, and I got hired at
SNL
about six months later.

He was nervous about
SNL
. He went back and forth with everyone. “What should I do?” He called his parents, his priest, the entire cast. We were all like, “What do you mean, ‘What should I do?’ You take it.”

But he went round and round on it. Chris had his apartment, his bars, his church, and Second City right in this little four-block radius. That was his world, and I don’t know that he ever really left it. He was scared to leave that behind, to leave his family, to leave everything he’d ever known.

I was at the airport when Chris left. Chris was crying, and Dad was crying. It was sad to watch. When you’re from the Midwest, you don’t really ask for the spotlight. You just have your Sunday Packers game and that’s about as exciting as it gets. But I think Dad knew, we all knew, that after this nothing would ever be the same.

I got married the Saturday of Chris’s first night on the show, and he was all bummed out that he wasn’t going to get to be in the wedding. He called me early in the week and was just apologizing profusely because he had to miss it. “Maybe I can make it,” he said. “Get them to put me on next week.”

“No! You’re doin’ the show!” I said.

“I know. I sorta got to. I mean, I shouldn’t ask if I could skip it, right?”

“Chris. C’mon. It’s
Saturday Night Live
!”

“No, but it’s your wedding.”

And that’s the great thing about Chris:
SNL
was his dream, but if he could have skipped that first show to make my wedding, he would have.

The night of the ceremony, we were all at the Hilton. At ten-thirty, with everyone out on the dance floor and the wedding in full swing, about ten of us, including me in my tux and my wife in her wedding dress, snuck out and went over to the bar in the hotel and watched Chris make his debut on
Saturday Night Live
. It was so strange, so surreal. We’d all grown up with this show, and Chris was the first one we’d ever known to join those ranks. Just a few weeks before, he’d been hanging out in our apartments, and now he’d made it.

CHAPTER 6

Super Fan

When Chris first got to the show, I met him hanging out in the conference room outside Lorne’s office. He was dressed kind of like a kid going to a job interview. We chatted for a bit. I liked him right away.

I came in and out of that conference room several times during the day, and Chris was still waiting. Lorne would do that to you, make you wait a long time. At the end of the day, I was feeling bad for him, so I said, “Hey, kid. I’ll show you around the studio," and I led him on kind of a mock tour where I pretended to be in charge of everyone. Chris fell in and started playing along with me. After that I left and went home. I came back to work the next day, and Chris was still waiting outside Lorne’s office.

He had this energy, even when he was sitting there waiting for his meeting, rocking back and forth in his ill-fitting sports jacket with his tie all pulled off to the side. He seemed really earnest about doing the show. You just had the feeling that he was going to be a lot of fun and he belonged here. It was like the show—and I don’t mean this to sound condescending—but it was like the show had been given this new golden retriever puppy.

From the day he arrived at
Saturday Night Live
, Chris Farley was already suffering comparisons to the other outrageous, larger-than-life figure in
SNL
history: John Belushi. When Chris died seven years later, eerily, at the same age as Belushi, those comparisons became gospel. In truth the two men shared far more differences than similarities. Still, in life and in death, Chris has borne the accusation of trying too hard to follow in Belushi’s footsteps—an accusation with varying shades of truth. Yes, Chris looked up to and admired his predecessor, but whatever influence Belushi’s ghost had on a young Chris Farley paled in comparison to the truly dominant forces in his life: his father, his family, and his faith. As far as drugs and alcohol went, Chris’s bad habits were very much his own, seeded in his DNA and showing up at keg parties long before Belushi’s demise. And if Chris followed Belushi in more positive ways, he was hardly alone.

In the comedy epidemic of the twentieth century, John Belushi was Patient Zero. The twin blockbuster successes of
Saturday Night Live
and
National Lampoon’s Animal House
fundamentally changed the landscape of being funny. Movie studios began churning out huge blockbuster comedies like
Ghostbusters
and
Beverly Hills Cop
. Stars like Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, and Jim Carrey beat a well-trod path from sketch-comedy cult status to Hollywood fame and fortune. Second City and ImprovOlympic grew from regional theaters into multiheaded corporate enterprises, churning out hundreds of aspiring comedians every year and spawning scores of other schools and venues across the country. Chris Farley and his friends were the first generation born into and weaned on that era. Their reverence for it and obsession with it was the common denominator that bound them together.

It all began in 1975 when producer Lorne Michaels assembled the original cast of
SNL
and took to the air live from New York every Saturday night. Following his departure in 1980, producer Dick Ebersol took over the show. Ebersol presided over some difficult years but also cultivated the stardom of Eddie Murphy and assembled the all-star cast of Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Martin Short.

In 1985, Lorne Michaels returned. The show needed new direction, and he needed a job. After a rocky start, he went back to the drawing board in 1986 and assembled the cast—Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz, Kevin Nealon, Victoria Jackson, and Weekend Update anchor Dennis Miller—that would breathe new life into the show. Mike Myers came aboard in ’89, but otherwise no visible changes where made, or needed, for the rest of the eighties.

Then, in the fall of 1990, a slow transition began to take place. Nora Dunn and Jon Lovitz left; Chris Farley and Chris Rock entered. Far younger than the established cast, the two became fast friends and soon found themselves sharing an office. Farley and Rock were the only performers added that fall. Tim Meadows, Chris’s Second City cast mate, would come on board at midseason.

Back in the writers’ room, Jim Downey, a freshman writer in
SNL
’s early years, had assumed the reins of head writer and producer. At the core of the writing staff was a group that had led the resurgence from the show’s mid-eighties nadir: Robert Smigel, Jack Handey, Bob Odenkirk, and Conan O’Brien. Meanwhile, Tom Schiller, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and Marilyn Suzanne Miller—also veterans of the show’s original writing staff—had all come back for an additional go-round. Added to that was a very young team of stand-up comedians—Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Rob Schneider—whose age and sense of humor would ultimately bring about a generational shift at the show. Both on camera and off,
SNL
found itself with a varsity squad and a junior-varsity squad. It was an odd mix of talent, but it worked well. For a while.

Chris arrived in New York in October. His older brother, Tom, had lived in the city for many years, and together they found an apartment for Chris on Seventh Avenue, just north of Times Square and right around the corner from the show’s Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center. The canyons of midtown Manhattan were a striking contrast to the cozy comforts of Chicago’s Old Town, but Chris soon discovered the Carnegie Deli, St. Malachy’s Church on West Forty-ninth Street, and a fine Irish pub called The Fiddler’s Green, all within a small walking radius. He had made his home again, scarcely able to believe what that new home was. As many latter-day
SNL
writers and performers have said, anyone who works at the show is a fan of the show, first and foremost. And Chris was surely that.

I was a coproducer as well as a writer, and so I got to go with Lorne to Chicago to scout the Second City show. Hiring Chris was probably the easiest casting decision Lorne’s ever had to make. In all the shows I scouted before or after, I’d never seen anybody leap out at you from the stage the way Chris did. Lorne hired him the next day.

There was so much buzz about Farley that our checking him out was almost pro forma. It was kind of automatic.

I’d had something of a concern that maybe he was too big, personality-wise, to play on television. Theatrically, he was sort of playing to the back of the house. But after we saw him, there really wasn’t much doubt.