God, if You're Not Up There . . . (2 page)

“How old are you?” he asked.

I told him I was thirty-four. He didn’t flinch.

He pointed to pictures on the wall of comedians who had worked there. “Look at these faces. They’re stars. That’s what we’re about here. Stars.”

Lucien was smiling at me.

“They have
it
.”

Could my luck be changing?

“And I don’t think you have
it
,” he said.

Apparently my luck wasn’t changing in any way whatsoever.

“I don’t see any reason why you should come back here or call here again.” He stood up and walked away without so much as a “Good-bye, thanks for coming.”

I went home with absolutely no reason to believe that I was ever going to make it. I had only enough money for a subway token. It was one of those horribly cold February New York nights, and I took the train back to my hovel in Brooklyn. I even slipped on the ice on the sidewalk outside my apartment. It was perfect, going home without hope. I sat in the dark, smoking cigarettes. If I’d had any money, I’d have gotten drunk.

It was kismet that, five years later, Lorne would have me go there for part of my audition, unwittingly giving me a dose of cosmic payback. With Lorne watching and Lucien Hold hovering nearby, I got onstage and, once again, I killed, although with so many performances and impressions since then, I no longer remember exactly what I did. As much as I would have liked to tell Lucien what I thought of him, I figured that performance for Lorne was as much of a fuck-you as I needed.

The next challenge was dinner with Lorne and his producer, Marci Klein, Calvin Klein’s daughter, who to this day works as a producer on
Saturday Night Live
as well as with Tina Fey on
30 Rock
. Marci had chosen a restaurant over on the West Side near Broadway. It was a casual evening, and we just swapped stories. The problem is, the highlight of one of my stories might be, “And then when we got to the store, they didn’t have any long-handled spoons!” and Lorne’s would be something like, “When I was sitting on the Berlin Wall with Paul McCartney . . .” I was never going to be able to compete with his material, but somehow I made it through the evening without humiliating myself.

A few weeks later, I was lying on my futon on the uneven floor of my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, where the night before a small furry creature had run up the side of my head, stomped on my face, and then run back down the other side. My wife was with me when the phone rang. I don’t know why, but we looked at each in that meaningful way they do in the movies. It was my manager, Barry Katz, and my agent, Ruth Ann Secunda, calling at the same time, which never happened.

I got the job.

Holy shit.

My wife and I decided to celebrate by opening a bottle of champagne and dancing in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel.

Okay, no, we didn’t. What we really did was run like crazy from my apartment on Forty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue down to Forty-fifth Street between Eighth Avenue and Broadway to the Imperial Theatre, where
Les Miz
was playing. I loved that show. I’d seen it about ten times. I couldn’t get enough of it; we bought the most expensive tickets they had left. I reckoned that play is my life story—unjustly treated by life, resolutely angry, but things kind of work out, and along the way there’s a little bit of love and light and, not for nothing, a couple of bucks in it too. That’s my Tenth Avenue synopsis of one of the great literary works of all time.

A few days later, I was having dinner at Umberto’s Clam House down in Little Italy, and I ran into Colin Quinn, whom I’d met years earlier when I’d been hired, then fired, as his warm-up guy on the MTV game show
Remote Control
, which he hosted in the late 1980s.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“I just got
Saturday Night Live
!”

“Me too!”

O
n Monday, September 25, 1995, I reported to work for the twenty-first season of
Saturday Night Live
.

As I walked through those halls and saw those photos on the wall of the greats who had worked there—the late John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Chris Farley; Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Molly Shannon—I couldn’t wrap my lithium-quenched mind around the fact that this was really happening. Two decades of comic genius
and me
? It was tremendous validation, and yet I was certain it was a cosmic joke of some kind. Maybe the antidepressants were making me hallucinate?

I was assigned an office on the seventeenth floor with, who else, Colin Quinn, who had been hired that year as a writer and featured player. We hung out there until an intern knocked on the door and yelled, “Pitch!”

The pitch meeting in Lorne’s office down the hall is a little bit tradition and a little bit meet-and-greet, where whichever legend of stage or screen or music or sports or politics is hosting that week is welcomed by the writers and the cast. Lorne sits behind his desk, the host sits in a chair by the desk, and everyone else sits wherever they can squeeze in, including the floor. Lorne’s office was plenty big, but it’s a shitload of people who crammed in there.

Lorne’s right-hand men in these festivities, alongside Marci Klein, were
SNL
producers Mike Shoemaker and Steve Higgins. These guys had, and still have, to be able to do all the jobs on the show—like a restaurant manager who can cook, wait tables, and make a nice Caesar dressing. They had to know how to write a joke, manage people, craft a sketch, and above all they had to be fucking funny. Higgins is great with impressions and helped me build almost every impression I would do on the show.

Mariel Hemingway was the host of my first show. I remember thinking at the time,
She’s had a conversation with Woody Allen, hell, she’s
kissed
Woody Allen, and I’m sitting just a few feet from her. And she’s more beautiful than anyone has ever been in the history of people.

Do my socks match?

Fuck.

Even major stars are often a little intimidated when they walk into those offices, but Lorne makes sure the
SNL
crew around them is very hands-on in the most unintrusive way possible. Everybody is extremely welcoming, and any thought the host might have, the slightest grievance, the slightest knitted brow, is addressed clearly and immediately. And the host has tremendous say in what the show will be that week.

During the pitch meeting, everybody throws out ideas to the host about what they might like to do for that week’s show. If you don’t have an idea, it’s entirely okay to make up something, even if it’s hideous. The staff laughs, but often the poor host sits there thinking, What? Grecian Formula 44 on toast? What?

I tossed out a crazy idea for a cold open—that’s the sketch at the start of the show that always ends with, “Live from New York, it’s
Saturday Night
!” The show had been receiving a lot of criticism for not being as funny in recent seasons as the nation thought it should be, and Lorne was being battered a little bit in the press for the way the show had gone downhill. So I had this crazy idea of doing a
Wizard of Oz
sketch in which the bad press was just a dream. It was completely ridiculous, although everyone was very kind about it.

I
t was the first of nearly three hundred weeks I would spend at
SNL
, and lithium isn’t exactly
Ginkgo biloba
when it comes to memory, so I’m going to admit the details of that first week are a bit murky all these years later, but here goes.

After the pitch meeting the cast and writers, per custom, spent some time with Mariel, chatting, swapping compliments, and drinking coffee. Some writers started to work on the sketches that got the nod during the pitch meeting, and the rest of us went home.

On Tuesday, people started coming in around noon. Tradition dictates that the host visit with the writers in their offices to talk about proposed sketches. A lot of the writers are Emmy winners, and it’s really an honor for the host as much as anything. Meanwhile, the writing began in earnest, so a lot of people would end up staying all night working, including Lorne. The cast members conferred with the writers, and each one participated in putting together anywhere from five to ten sketches.

My role on the show was a little different from the rest of the cast’s. I wasn’t very good at coming up with sketch ideas, but that’s not why I was there. I was a field-goal kicker. You need a voice? I was the guy who could kick that football. I didn’t know how to punt, pass, or tackle, but I could kick. So I came in on Wednesday mornings around 10:00 a.m. Sometimes I’d have gotten a call Tuesday night that would be a tip-off: “Can you do this guy?” But lots of times they would simply assign a role to me, and I would walk in having never heard the voice. That first week they gave me Ted Koppel in a
Nightline
sketch in which Koppel interviews Republican presidential candidates Colin Powell (Tim Meadows) and Bob Dole (Norm Macdonald). I usually had four or five hours to study videotapes I got from the research department and cobble together some semblance of a voice before read-through with all the cast and crew, which happened Wednesday afternoon.

You know how they open the gate at a rodeo and the bull comes out seething with energy and fury? That’s the kind of mindset you have to have at read-through, because that’s how hard it was. But it was all part of it, and as a performer you wouldn’t have it any other way. A tennis player expects Wimbledon to be tough, and it is. Anywhere from thirty-five to fifty sketches were presented, which is three or four times what we’d end up with. It took a few hours to get through them all.

After read-through, Mariel complimented me on my Koppel impression. I thought, This is all pixie dust.

Right after the meeting, Lorne and the head writer and the producers met with Mariel to make the first cut, based chiefly on how many people laughed at each sketch during read-through. Lorne and the host had the last word on what stayed in and what got tossed.

Between read-through and picks, you might find yourself loitering around with hosts like: Robert De Niro, Senator John McCain, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Sir Ian McKellen, Snoop Dogg, and Derek Jeter. For starters.

Later that night, an intern came by all the offices and yelled, “Picks!” That’s when we found out which ten or twelve sketches had survived. It was always a drastic cut that day, and, per usual, a few people took a hit to the solar plexus, but there was no time to nurse hurt feelings. Costume and makeup started getting designed Wednesday night after picks. On Thursday, the writers revised or reworked the sketches that needed it. “Weekend Update” started to get pulled together based on what was in the news that week. On Thursday and Friday we blocked the show—that’s figuring out the physical part of the performance, where everybody stands and how they move—while the writers oversaw the costuming and set design of their sketches. The writers also worked on Mariel’s monologue.

Saturday afternoon we did a run-through for Lorne, during which the writers made notes for further changes—to dialogue, costume, blocking, and set design. The cast was usually in at least partial costume—wigs and costume, if not full makeup. In the two or three hours between the end of the run-through and the dress rehearsal at 8:00 p.m. (which is done in front of a live studio audience, although not the same one that will be seated for the live show at 11:30), the sketches were tweaked yet again, and new scripts distributed; each version of a script was a different color so everyone knew which was the most current. Sometimes the order of sketches was changed; often, sketches were cut. I went back to my dressing room to refine my Koppel impression and grab some dinner and a nap.

For dress, the cast got into full costume and makeup. The writers paid a lot of attention to how the audience reacted. The show was running at two hours, so when dress was over at ten o’clock, everybody headed up to Lorne’s office on the ninth floor and waited for “Meeting!” to be called. This was when Lorne and the writers made the final cuts to get the material down to ninety minutes, as well further tweaks to the surviving sketches.

When the meeting ended, it was nearly eleven o’clock, so the cast hustled back downstairs to get back into hair and makeup (to make sure we didn’t ruin the costumes or the handmade hairpieces, we would take them off between performances throughout the day). The writers got to work on making the changes. A posse of interns hits the bank of copy machines to churn out the revised scripts.

It’s incredibly confusing, and the frenzy continues all the way until 1:00 a.m. If the show is running long, further sketches might be cut while we’re on air. And adding to the stress, for me at least, was the constant presence of seriously famous people who came by to say hello to Lorne and watch the goings-on from a discreet spot on the floor. Over the years, a who’s who of boldfaced names stopped by, but the audience can’t see that Paul McCartney is standing right in front of you, watching you do your sketch, or that Yankees All-Star A-Rod is there with Kate Hudson, looking at you with an expression that says,
Be spectacular. Be like us.
The audience also doesn’t know that you may not have seen the script before now, that it might have been rewritten on the way downstairs from the ninth-floor meeting to the eighth-floor studio.