The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (7 page)

Chris didn’t smoke pot freshman or sophomore year, didn’t do any drugs at all, other than drinking. Then all of a sudden that year it clicked. I have this vivid memory of him in his room one day. While everybody else was going to class, he sat in this chair with a big red bong. He sat there doing bong hits and chugging Robitussin cough syrup. Back and forth. One after another.

At that point you could see where it was going. I’d try to explain to him, you know, that you can only get so high. It’s like pouring water into a glass. You can pour in all you want. After a while, it’s all just spilling over the sides. But it was the same thing no matter what he did. It was the same when he tried pot, or when he tried mushrooms, or when he tried comedy.

The first place Chris and I ever got up and performed together was during our senior year in a skinny bar in a bad neighborhood in downtown Milwaukee. It was called Wimpy’s Hunt Club, and it had an open-mike night at midnight. The stage was literally twelve milk crates turned over in the corner. There were about nine people in the audience, all factory workers on break from the brewery. Tough crowd.

Chris and I went up there, and it was like when you’re in middle school and you go on a date and you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. It was that awkward, and that bad. We
bombed.
We signed up to do it again the next week. Then we found out that a bunch of Marquette students were going to be there. We chickened out and didn’t go. Everyone got real mad at us.

Finally we signed up for the Follies, the school talent show. We got an actress, and we decided we’d do a parody of
The Dating Game
. Jim Murphy was the host, and another friend of ours, Seamus, was the third bachelor. We kept on meaning to get together and work, and we’d talk about it every once in a while, but we never had any idea what we were doing. Then about a week before the show the girl quit school and moved to Chicago, and we figured we’d just blow the thing off.

But the night of the Follies, I was over at Chris’s house and we were hanging out. About fifteen, twenty minutes into it, and we get a phone call from the stage manager. “Where the hell are you guys? You better get down here. People are pretty pissed. They want to see you—and they’re screaming for Farley.”

We hopped on our bikes and rode over. It was way bigger than we thought it was going to be. There were at least a couple thousand people there. The show had three more acts to go before it ended. “You’re goin’ after this singer,” the stage manager told us.

Chris just goes, “All right, Jim, you’re the emcee.” He looked over at Seamus, who had overalls on. “Seamus, you’re farmer guy.” Then he flicked my collar up on my shirt, unbuttoned a button, and said, “And Finner, you’re cool guy.”

“Okay. What about you?” I asked.

He pulled out these nerdy glasses and said, “I’ll be nerdy guy. Let’s go.”

Jim went out, made up some intro, brought out Seamus, and they did a funny little Q&A. Then I went out, doing this “cool guy” walk, hopped on my stool, and answered some questions. There was no girl, mind you, just the host and three male contestants, but that became part of the gag.

Then Jim said, “All right, let’s bring out the next guy.” The spotlight hit Chris coming out of the curtain. He ran as fast as he could and then tripped and slid across the entire length of the stage. The place went berserk. Then he went over to his stool, clumsily knocking it over. He finally clambered on and then fell right off. It was insane. The audience loved it.

As soon as it was over, Chris and I ran backstage, and I remember he just grabbed me by the shirt and he looked right in my eyes and said, “We’re gonna be doing this for the rest of our lives. That was the greatest high I’ve ever felt in my life.”

In the spring of Chris’s senior year, we got one of those rare days when you can open windows, be outside, and throw a ball around. There was this white house on Kilborn Avenue where all these girls lived. Chris had a cherry smoke bomb. He lit it and put it on the open windowsill, thinking the smoke would drive everyone out and it’d be a good prank. But he forgot that when you light those things they twirl around and spin out of control. Well, it spun off and landed on their couch. And it burned. I mean, it really burned. Pretty soon the house was on fire, and it was spreading to the second floor. Chris figured he’d better get the heck out of there. So he took off with a friend, and they went down to Illinois, just across the border.

The next morning I got to work about seven, my phone rang and it was the police department. They were wondering if Chris was around. I called the Red House, and they said Chris wasn’t there. I hung up, and then, about fifteen minutes later, two of the Red House guys showed up at my office. They said they couldn’t talk to me on the phone because their line had been tapped. I said, “Oh, come on. You guys are outta your mind.”

They told me where he was. I called him in Illinois. I talked to him and told him to come back. Then I called his folks in Madison. They asked me to give them the name of a lawyer in Milwaukee, so I did. Between the lawyer and his parents it was decided that Chris would come to my office, we would all meet there, and then he would go and turn himself in.

I called the police department, and I told them what the lawyer told me to say, that I knew where Chris was and he would come down there on his own the next day. Chris came back. The attorney took care of things. And after many weeks of delayed hearings and so on, Chris came away from it with a “dangerous use of firearms” charge, or something like that. He ended up with about thirty hours of community service, but he couldn’t get his diploma.

In
Tommy Boy
, Chris’s partying, rugby-playing alter ego graduated from Marquette in seven years. In the real world, Chris squeaked out in four and a half. As a result of the smoke-bomb incident, he was put on probation, and university policy did not allow students on probation to graduate. However, he was allowed to walk in the graduation ceremony with his classmates, complete his course work at the University of Wisconsin in the fall, and receive a Marquette diploma the following December.

Forced to return to Madison for school, Chris moved into an apartment downtown, close to many of his high school friends who had never left. Between finishing his classes and performing wherever and whenever he could, Chris took the only job offer he had. He went to work for his father.

To understand Chris you have to understand something about Madison. Madisonians tend to be very educated, very literate, and upwardly mobile, but I would say that seventy-five percent of them have never seen the ocean. And I’m not kidding. Madison’s got everything you need—that’s the default mentality here. And Chris came back in large part because the family discouraged him from doing anything else.

Dad always wanted all of us home. It was almost like, “You can’t make it out east, and so you don’t need to try it.” Kevin bought into that at first, and Chris did for a while, too. Dad had tried it with me. After I left Georgetown, I said, “Hey, all my buddies are going up to New York. That’s where I want to go.”

Dad sat me down and said, “You’ll never make it.”

“Watch me,” I said. And I left.

Dad and I butted heads throughout our lives. If he said something was blue, I said it was red. Chris was the opposite. Everything he did was to please Dad. At that point, he had done the plays at Marquette, but he really had no idea of how to go about making that into a possible career. Dad just said flat out, “No one’s going to offer you a job. You’d better come work for me.” So Chris went to work for Dad, but it wasn’t a two-man job, so there wasn’t a whole lot for him to do. The job was really a joke.

When Chris finally left and I came in to take over the job, we opened up the drawers of his desk and there was nothing in it but
Cracked
and
Mad
magazines.

What did Chris do for my dad? Hell, what did my dad do? No one really knew. He’d take people to dinner, entertain them, and they’d buy stuff from him. That was our notion of work. Dad didn’t really have to sell his product. He was selling roads. Everyone needs roads, and all roads are basically the same. Oil plus gravel equals road. The funniest, nicest, coolest guy was going to get the bid from the county, and there was no better guy to hang out with than my dad. Add Chris to the mix and they could sell anybody anything.

My grandfather was a salesman, and some days he had to go on four breakfasts, going town to town to town. Then he’d have to go to all these lunches, and then come home and have a dinner. It was the same for my dad. My dad knew every restaurant, every bar in Wisconsin. You’d drive by some place way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, and Dad would be like, “They can sauté a mushroom like nobody’s business. Good cheese-burgers. ”

My dad’s clients were these farmers, these down-home guys from rural towns who just happened to sit on the county highway commission handing out multimillion-dollar contracts to pave roads. The big thrill of their month was when Tom Farley would drive out from Madison and take them out for a schmooze and a steak dinner. You know those square pats of butter they keep on the table? Farmers in Wisconsin eat those like appetizers, like a predinner mint. Just open ’em up and eat ’em. Sweet Jesus that’s insane, but it’s a very Wisconsin thing.

Sit. Eat. Talk. Drink. That was the business. It was about putting on a show, buying the round of scotches, prime rib for everyone. That’s the key to who the Farleys are. We’d rather see a smile on someone’s face, even if it meant hurting ourselves. I don’t know why we did, but we did.

Chris was a great entertainer of clients, but for Dad to keep paying him twenty grand a year just to go to lunch was a bit much. So Chris started doing these open mikes at the student union. He bombed, failed miserably. He was getting up at the liberal, progressive University of Wisconsin and telling crude lesbian jokes. That went over like a fart in church. He’d get heckled and booed. Then he found improv at the Ark.

Chris, Greg Meyer, and me all lived near each other downtown. And one night Chris said, “Guys, we gotta go to this thing, the Ark.”

All through our childhood we always knew that Chris was going to do something. We just didn’t know what. That night they were doing some skit and they needed audience participation. Chris started to get into it, and he completely stole the show from the performers. That was the start of the whole thing.

Chris always spoke fondly of his days at the Ark, and I was always very appreciative of that. We sort of took him in off the street—quite literally—and gave him a home. He showed up at the theater one night after a show and stumbled in through the door. He was so drunk he could barely even form coherent sentences. He was just going on, like, “Wanna do . . . comedy . . . improv, I wanna—gotta do this . . .”

I could barely understand him. To be honest, I thought he might be retarded. I didn’t think he’d remember anything that I told him, so I said, “Look, we’re having a rehearsal tomorrow. Why don’t you come by and join us then?” Then I showed him out the door, thinking that was the end of the whole episode.

The next day I got a call from my wife, who was at the theater. “Did you tell some big guy that he could come to our rehearsal today?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I didn’t think he’d actually show up.”

“Well, he’s here. And he brought a case of beer.”

CHAPTER 4

Attacking the Stage

BRIAN STACK,
cast member, Ark Improvisational Theater:

Keith Richards said that the first time he heard rock and roll it was like the whole world went from black-and-white to Technicolor. That’s how Chris always seemed to describe finding comedy.

As a city, Madison, Wisconsin, has something of a split personality. On the one hand, it’s a typical Midwestern town with no shortage of beer, football, and competitive bratwurst eating. On the other hand, thanks largely to the University of Wisconsin, Madison carries with it a long history of liberal, even radical, politics. Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator Robert LaFollette launched his left-wing Progressive Party in Madison. And in the late sixties and early seventies, the university itself saw some of the country’s most violent antiwar protests, culminating in the bombing of the school’s Army Mathematics Research Center at Sterling Hall.

In such a hothouse political environment, a small but vibrant arts community was bound to spring up as well. It would still be a few years before enterprising UW students hatched the
Onion
, the satirical newspaper that eventually found its way to Internet fame and glory. In Chris’s day, if you lived in Madison and had a notion to seek a career in comedy, you went to the Ark.

Dennis and Elaine Kern founded the Ark Improvisational Theater in Madison in 1982. Both professional actors and directors, they had left New York City determined to do theater on their own terms and, God forbid, actually make a living at it. For its first two years, the Ark staged weekly shows at a local bar, Club de Wash, and offered classes in improv and acting. It quickly became recognized as a stepping-stone for those on their way to greater opportunities in neighboring Chicago. Joan Cusack, who had joined the cast of
Saturday Night Live
in 1985, was among the Ark’s alumni.

As the theater grew more established, the Kerns purchased a defunct downtown building that had once housed a Brinks truck garage. They gutted it and installed a small one-hundred-seat theater. It was that converted garage that Chris Farley stumbled into late one night in August of 1986. For over twenty years, he had been a performer in search of a stage. He had finally found it.