Almost Interesting (16 page)

I found out between dress and air that the sketch did make the cut, but it would be the last sketch of the show, at five minutes to 1
A
.
M
. I couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t bother calling anyone at home to say stay up, because the issue with the “5 to 1” sketch is that the show expands or contracts according to how big the laughs are with a particular audience. If the crowd is great and the other sketches get major laughs, the final sketch of the night usually gets cut during the show. That is why that last sketch is also referred to as “cut bait” (lingo!). You never want your sketch to be referred to as cut bait. Well, luck was on my side. We made it on. Hammer was great and the sketch made an impact. We got laughs. This was the days before Twitter and Instagram so it was literally word of mouth. I got good feedback from friends and people I ran into, but as Lorne says, that kind of thing doesn’t count. One of the many wise things Lorne tells each cast member early on is that “people will tell you you’re the funniest person on the show. You’re not.” That kind of cold reality really takes your legs out from under you right out of the gate, even though it is completely true.

But even Lorne gave good feedback on the sketch. I heard from other writers and cast members. I felt so relieved to finally have a sketch under my belt that worked. I finally felt like I was part of the show and not just an observer. Naturally I wanted to do that sketch again, as soon as possible. But I had to give it a little breathing room.

Five weeks later, Roseanne Barr was hosting, and lucky for me she was game. Phil Hartman also joined her, playing Jesus, and the one-two punch of those two made the sketch crush pretty well in read-through. The sketch did so well at dress rehearsal that it got moved to the very first sketch after the monologue, the point in the show when there are the most viewers. Anything on before Weekend Update is solid because that’s when we have a big tune-out problem. This was my best week on the show to that point. The sketch got better every time it ran. It did so great on air that I felt like I might actually spend the summer not worried about getting fired.

Well, that feeling didn’t last long. By the end of my third year, I was again on the chopping block. Nothing I did after my second receptionist sketch landed on air. The stress was getting to me. My neck hurt, my jaw hurt from grinding my teeth at night. I wasn’t sleeping well and was very thin because of my lousy diet of pizza and pussy. (I say pussy because it sounds funny but I wasn’t getting any action. Stressed writers/barely performers aren’t as sexy as they sound.) I’m pretty sure I didn’t eat a single vegetable my entire
Saturday Night Live
career and I’m sure I had some level of malnourishment. My hair turned brown from being in New York for so long. I never knew my hair could be anything but really blond and fluffy, in that beautiful Farrah Fawcett way I had always known. I had spent my whole life in the sunshine of Arizona and then L.A. But six months out of the year in dreary, sunless, creaky midtown Manhattan buildings made my blond hair brown. It sounds like a Crystal Gayle song, but it’s true.

I wondered if I should just pack it in. This was too fucking brutal.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SNL
1992–1993

T
he summer of 1992, I was still on thin ice. All my pals were killing it. Schneider had scored with the Copy Guy skit. Adam was creating one awesome character after another. Chris was just on fuego. We were all doing gigs to make extra cash, but that year, Adam’s road price shot through the roof. Your road price was another way to know how you were doing on
SNL
. Adam, Rob, and I had always made the same price for stand-up gigs the first year we were all together on the show. But then Adam’s started to creep up on mine. Eventually he started to get double my rate. We would still go out on the road together but he now closed the shows. Adam was clearly the bigger draw. It was slightly humiliating, but I chose to look at it from the perspective that I had never made so much money on the road before in my life. I knew there were tons of comics out there who made a lot less than I was making. I was fucking lucky.

But it’s hard to keep that attitude while you are on
Saturday Night Live.
It is very much a culture of comparison—you look at what your peers have and what you have and you are constantly doing the math to see who is on top. It is almost impossible to avoid, but you have to try if you want to stay sane. (Take my advice, young
SNL
wannabes.) I’m just as competitive as the next guy, but if you handle competition like a dick, you’ll end up ruining your career and your friendships. At the time, though, it was a bitter pill to watch my pals doing so well while I was having such a hard time. I can admit that.

By late summer, I still didn’t know if I was going to be invited back to the show. The only thing I’d done of note the previous season had been my receptionist sketch, but that didn’t seem like enough to get me picked up. That and “being fun around the office” was about all I had going for me. And even that I wasn’t always sure about. Chris, Rob, Adam, they had already gotten their calls. Once again I had to sweat it out longer than anyone. At some point in early August, one of my managers talked to Lorne and told me, “He’s bringing you back. But I really had to work hard. And, you’re still going to be a writer/feature player.” This was disappointing to me. I was now the only chump in my “class” left slaving away at those rewrite meetings. Sandler was now a full cast member, and Rob, and Farley had been one basically since the day he started (deservedly so). What this also meant was that none of the new writers would feel any responsibility to put me into their sketches. Why would they? I had been treading water with minimal talent for a long time and didn’t know how long it was gonna last.

The host for our first show that season was Nicolas Cage. I came out swinging hard . . . and whiffed three times. I got nothing on the show at all, so I was off to my typical strong start of being invisible. (This helped me later when I played the Invisible Man in
Hotel Transylvania
. I drew from my real feelings.) Next up was Tim Robbins, and this show was a very important and memorable one for me for several reasons. The first, and most important, reason is that it was the show where I finally saved my ass on
SNL
. I was sitting at the writers’ table on Monday, bored as usual. I was reading
People
magazine out loud and basically shitting on every celebrity featured. Bob Odenkirk, bless his heart, was sitting near me and said, “You have to write that up.” And so the Hollywood Minute sketch was born. During that read-through, Lorne said to me, “You’ve found your voice.” And that was the best fucking thing I could possibly hear. I could tell by the way he said it that he was happy, and that I was actively saving my job in the process. The first Hollywood Minute bit went off without a hitch. The audience bought into it right away. A young loser nobody from Arizona, taking out major celebrities at the knees—well, it just clicked from the first burn. A new segment had been born for me, one that would become my best move at that place. This was a time when there was only
People
magazine. It was always fawning over these guys and no one was saying what people really thought. That was my great timing award, because after that came
Entertainment Weekly
and blogs where everyone got super-snarky on celebs. So I got lucky there.

But that show is also memorable for other, more unfortunate reasons. You see, Tim Robbins is a pretty political guy. He was hosting
SNL
and he wanted to make a statement. In the Monday meeting he explained to us: “I want to go after everybody in my monologue . . . all these big corporations, even GE.” (As in General Electric, then NBC’s parent company.) Everyone sort of nodded along and pretended that we thought that was hilarious, and then we went about our business writing sketches that did not shit on GE. Well, during his monologue on Saturday night, Tim Robbins went for it. He made some political statements. He made some jokes. I recall him quietly singing the GE ad slogan but changing the last bit to “GE, we bring good things to . . . death.” The cast and the audience awkwardly laughed because honestly, it was more of a comment than a joke. But he had done what he set out to do and he was happy, I guess.

I think he was hoping some of the media would pick up on his statement and run with it, which may have happened . . . EEEEEEEEXCEEEPPPPPT . . . about twenty minutes later, Sinéad O’Connor came on to sing one of her dopey songs. (If it wasn’t “Nothing Compares 2 U,” I wasn’t listening.) I remember I was standing behind Lorne watching the monitor and sort of basking in the glory of my Hollywood Minute sketch doing well, waiting for him to put his arm around my shoulders and say, “Good job, son.” And while I was there quietly begging for a Snausage from Lorne, I saw something odd on the screen. At the end of her snoozer tune, Sinéad held up a picture of Pope John Paul and said, “Fight the real enemy,” and ripped it up into ten pieces. The room fell silent.

“Oh snap . . . no she di-int.” (I wish I made that phrase up, because that moment was the perfect place to bust it out.) I wondered the same thing everyone else on the cast probably did:
Is this part of the show?
And then she dropped the pieces on the stage and nervously scurried away. The crowd was dead silent. It’s the first time in
SNL
musical history that the guest did not get applause after their song. No one knew what the fuck was going on. Lorne turned back to me after sipping his glass of Amstel Light, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Irish.” I had to laugh. During the commercial, I walked out to the stage, looked down at what was left of the pope there on the floor, and grabbed a piece. As I stuffed it in my pocket I thought, This will be a nice memento if anyone ever remembers this happening.

Cut to the next day. This shit is world news. People are freaking the fuck out. I don’t know much about religion. It wasn’t part of our family culture at all. My mom didn’t have much time for church. She had to work and fight my dad for child support that never came. So I didn’t really get what the big deal was. All I knew was that Sinéad O’Connor was kind of sexy when she got to the studio that week, and I sort of flirted with her. Then I decided that I wouldn’t try to sleep with her since she was now a worldwide pariah, which is a major boner killer.

That Sunday night while I was doing my piles of laundry in the basement of my dogshit apartment building, I watched
Inside Edition.
As my flannel shirts were drying, there was Deborah Norville yammering on about
Saturday Night Live.
I pushed my two-foot stack of quarters to the side to get a better look, and saw that they were actually reporting on how Sinéad O’Connor had ripped up a picture of the pope on camera! Then they put the torn pieces back together to make the photo whole again. Well, almost whole . . . because there was one piece missing. My eyes slowly drifted over past the laundry machine quarters to that little slice of pope I had snagged the night before. I held it up to the television screen, and it fit perfectly.
Inside Edition
clearly had the ACTUAL photo that this Sinéad chick had shredded!! How did that happen?? I had told Adam and a few others that night that I had taken a little piece of the pope pic with me, and sure enough the next day I got hauled into
SNL
producer Kenny Aymong’s office. (I love Kenny Aymong. He was always very cool to me during my
SNL
years. Even when I was a nobody, which was most of my time there.) Kenny sat me down with two security guards and said, “You might have something that belongs to us.” And, ever the smart-ass, I popped back with, “Oh, I don’t think so unless you’re talking about a pile of bad sketches that never got on the air.” I chuckled. No one else did. One of the security guys then said, “Do you have a piece of the pope picture?” And I said, “Oh that . . . uh yeah, I guess I do. Who ratted me out?” (I still thought the situation was funny. I was clearly not reading the room very well.) Then the security guard asked, “Do you have it with you?” Of course I did, because I wanted to show off and talk about anything but Joe Pesci sketch ideas that day. It quickly became clear to me that I needed to hand that piece of the pope over, and quick. These security dudes weren’t messing around.

I learned soon after that a member of the crew had stolen the ripped-up photo off the floor and sold it to
Inside Edition
for ten thousand dollars. He was fired, but security thought that I might be in on it. Kenny knew I wasn’t, but he had to follow protocol. We laughed about it later, even though we agreed I could have used part of that 10K. The rest of the season I peppered in a few Hollywood Minutes sketches, and I felt I was officially on the radar. It took me way too long, let’s be honest, but by midseason I had the audacity to believe that I might be able to enjoy summer without worrying about getting canned. We had a solid lineup of hosts that year, and ratings were good. I remember during February sweeps the musical guests were Bon Jovi, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and Sting. That’s a pretty solid lineup. But in the nineteenth show of the year, I was part of the most memorable sketch of my
SNL
career.

I had heard about the Motivational Speaker character here and there throughout the year. Farley and Bob Odenkirk used to talk about it a lot in the office. They discussed that and a sketch called Whale Boy—two ideas that they had worked up at Second City and were trying to bring to
SNL
. Well, the week that Christina Applegate was the host was the week that they decided to put it out there, with Chris in the lead. (I almost said “and the rest is history” but it’s too corny, even though it’s kind of true.) Christina and I were cast as the two kids the speaker had been brought in to motivate. Phil Hartman played our nerdy dad, clearly at his wits’ end with his troublemaker kids and making a last-ditch effort. This was the most tailor-made Chris Farley sketch ever, a fastball right down the middle that he could knock out of the park. It was physical, it was hilarious, and with his scratchy-hoarse voice, Chris made it even funnier. He slicked his hair back after seeing Christian Slater do it when he hosted the year before. He had already started wearing these massive Dan Aykroyd–style reading glasses every day, so those became part of the costume. It all came together with that horrible plaid blazer. Matt Foley was born. This was one of those bits where everybody on the floor was laughing every rehearsal. It was pretty bulletproof. There was no way it could go south because the more Chris stumbled, stammered, and squinted at the cue cards, the funnier it was.