I'm Not High (21 page)

I went through the first week with a Shut-up Guy sketch looking like it was going to make the lineup. I flew my mom and dad up from Florida. It was monumental and I wanted them to be a part of it. I was psyched that I already potentially had an original character in play. Before the “real” live show that airs, as you might already know, there’s a dress show, where the whole program is rehearsed to make sure the timings are right and that every sketch is coming together. In the end, there are always a couple of bits from the dress rehearsal that don’t make the final cut, for many different reasons, and that’s just the way it goes. My parents came to the studio for both the dress rehearsal and the live show, and Shut-up Guy got cut between the shows. With that sketch dead, I wasn’t on the show at all. I did warm up the crowd beforehand though, and that was something I’d end up doing a lot, just coming out and doing five minutes of stand-up before anything was televised.

At the end of the show, I met my parents and Dee on the studio floor and we were all going to go to the wrap party. I could see that Dad was especially cantankerous about me getting cut.

“The show sucked!” he said. He was irritated, cranky, and being dramatic. I’m sure he thought by some twist of logic, I’d see his negativity as being supportive.

“Dad,” I said calmly, “there’s going to be so many other shows, I’m not worried about it. I’m happy to be here. It’ll work out.”

“Yeah, but it sucked!” he said insistently.

“No,” my mom said, smiling. “It was great. Don’t listen to him.”

“It was terrible!” my dad said, raising his voice, just in case we weren’t clear on his position.

I hustled them out the door, into our limo—it was shocking to me that I got a free limo for the night—and we went to the cast party, at some fancy restaurant downtown. Dee, my sister Dorene, my friends, Mom and Dad—you name it, they were all there, and when we walked in, the bouncer took a look at the camera Dee was carrying and said, “No pictures.”

“That’s okay,” I told the guy. “I’m on the cast.”

“Okay,” he said. “But we still don’t allow pictures. So can I hang on to your camera until you’re ready to go?”

“What?” I said. “
Really?
Whatever. Sure. Here ya go.”

That’s one of the rules of the
Saturday Night Live
after-party. And as much as you may read about them, or see pictures of cast and stars arriving, you’ll never see pictures from inside the after-party. At least you didn’t for many, many years. I don’t know if they’ve relaxed the rule now or not. At the time, I may have been mad about the bouncer hassling Dee over her camera, but I came to view both the party and the rule as a nice break from the rest of the whole machine.

So we went inside and celebrated. I told my guests they could get whatever they wanted, as I was certain, after learning of the free limo, that NBC was covering the tab. As the night wore on, I introduced my dad to different cast members, like Norm and Molly Shannon, and the host, Mariel Hemingway. The cast and their friends and families all mingled, the vibe was light, and I felt like I was getting off on the right foot.
Saturday Night Live
seemed like a great fit for me. I saw Lorne putting on his coat and wanted to make sure my dad met him before he left.

“Dad,” I said, “come with me, let’s say good-bye to Lorne.”

“What?” he asked. “Who?”

“Lorne, Dad,” I said. I was pretty sure I’d explained to him a couple hundred times in the process of landing the show who Lorne was and what he did.

“Lorne?” Dad said incredulously, pausing to consider it. “
Lorne?
Is that really a name? How would ya spell that?”

“Dad,” I said impatiently. Lorne nearly had one foot out the door. “Let’s just go meet him.”

“Well who the hell is he?”

I quickly reminded Dad that Lorne had created the whole show, then grabbed him by the arm and hustled him over to the doorway.

“Lorne,” I said, smiling. “Before you take off, I wanna introduce you to my dad.”

“Oh,” Lorne turned and smiled warmly. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Breuer. Your son is very talented.”

Dad just screwed up his face, looked at Lorne disgustedly, and said, “Yeah. So, I flew up here all the way from Florida to see the show. What happened to him?” He jabbed his thumb into my chest. “He wasn’t on.”

I immediately started sweating.

“That happens sometimes,” Lorne said calmly and politely. “I can tell you that our host next week, Chevy Chase, inquired about Jim and is excited to work with him.”

“Next week? ” my dad said, grinning. “Who gives a shit about next week? I’m back in Florida then. Why wasn’t he on this week? The show sucked.”

“Nice meeting you,” Lorne said drolly, then just walked out the door.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, certain I’d be given my walking papers on Monday.

Not too long after Dad and I rejoined our group, the waitress came over to the table with a bill for $800. I looked at the bill, and then I looked up at the waitress and said, “I’m sorry, I’m a cast member.”

“Oh, cool,” she said. “Can I take your credit card for this?”

“I don’t think you get it,” I explained. “I’m on the show.”

“I know that,” she said. “And I’m telling you that your bill is eight hundred dollars.”

“But I’m part of the cast. NBC is paying for it.”

“No, no, no, no,” she laughed. I was the one who had something wrong apparently. “The cast pays for their own stuff. You ordered the drinks and the shots,
and
you get to pay for them.”

My guest list got considerably smaller after that night.

I’d done stand-up by myself for so long that being part of a team again—and a dysfunctional one at that—was difficult.
SNL
had the most unusual system I’d ever had to navigate. You worked so hard that it was truly satisfying when you made it to air and killed
,
but getting there was such an effort.

For starters, there just wasn’t enough airtime for the amount of talent on the cast that year. It was discouraging to sit at the pitch table and watch my fellow cast members continually bring in hilarious ideas. At the same time, I admired them, too. These folks were able to knock out everything. Week after week Cheri Oteri would walk in with slam-dunk characters. She had the cheerleaders with Will Ferrell, a little kid, a crazy woman on a porch, Barbara Walters, Debbie Reynolds, you name it. She was a monster. Molly Shannon was the same way, with her awkward Catholic schoolgirl, Mary Katherine Gallagher, blowing up. Mark McKinney had the Chicken Lady. And Will was basically in every single sketch; he was unstoppable. I quickly sized up the competition and concluded there was no way for me to get on the show. These guys were monsters.

Over time, the Shut-up Guy became one of the most popular characters never to appear in a sketch. Lorne liked him, and I worked for three years to get him onto the show, but the closest he ever got was the fifteen- and thirty-second show promos that aired during the week on NBC. In those first couple months, it was a self-perpetuating cycle. The more I worried about not getting on, the less funny I was. I had no confidence. And without confidence, it was impossible to make sketches go. I had a nine-episode contract and was certain I’d be shown the door if I didn’t come up with at least one hit character by then. Later that season, in fact, two of my fellow brand-new cast members, Nancy Walls and David Koechner, were let go, so the pressure I felt was real.

By early November, I’d routinely pace the halls, looking for clues that I was getting fired. One night, I ran into Will Ferrell in the hallway and asked him point-blank if he thought any of us—namely me—were going to get canned.

“I’m just not getting my stuff on,” I said, looking around suspiciously. “I don’t think I’ll be long for the show.”

“No,” Will said innocuously. “I haven’t heard anything. Don’t worry about it.” Then he smartly kept walking. No one wanted to get tangled up in my bad vibe. The cast got along pretty well, but at the end of the day, everyone was fiercely protective of their own material and concerned mainly with their own job security. Being vulnerable or appearing vulnerable was something you wanted to stay as far away from as possible.

Since the show started, I’d gotten on where I could—I had a nanosecond in a fake commercial for A.M. Ale; I fell down the stairs in a Chevy Chase sketch; and I had a couple of beat-myself-up characters—pulled from my stand-up act—in sketches. But the week after Thanksgiving, I was running on empty. Anthony Edwards from
ER
was hosting, and nothing I’d thrown out in Monday’s pitch meeting stuck.

Pitch meetings kicked the week off. It was our first real chance to meet with that week’s host and find out what they were into. We’d all go into a giant room and sit around a table with Lorne and the guest host, and toss out ideas for that week’s show. It was a fun, loose process, but tough, too, because you were just recovering from the last week’s show and you didn’t always know what this week’s host was going to respond to. Anything could happen.

Norm was known for fake pitches in those Monday meetings. He’d purposely pitch the worst stuff. Tom Hanks hosted one year, right around the time he’d won two straight Oscars. We were doing the pitch meeting and it was Norm’s turn. He very energetically stammered to Tom, “I got this great idea where you’re the, ah, ‘shit my pants guy,’ like you just, you know, shit your pants. But you don’t know why! You’re just like, ‘Yeah, I shit my pants.’”

Tom, being superpolite, gave an anticipatory half smile, waiting for Norm to elaborate. Norm continued, completely earnestly, “And everywhere you go, you shit your pants. People stop and say, ‘There’s the guy who shits his pants.’ It’s gonna be funny.”

Total silence. After a beat, Lorne just wrinkled his lips, raised his eyebrows, and said, “Next.” Norm would never bring anything real into a pitch meeting. He had a steady gig—“Weekend Update”—and was the brightest star on the show at that time. He’d do these awkward, uncomfortable joke pitches only with really big guests, which made it even funnier.

Rather than get uptight about not having anything coming out of the pitch meeting, I decided to change my attitude. Good things always happened to me when things looked the worst. My folks moved to Florida—I overcame it and turned it into a positive. As a waiter, I never learned the elaborate drink glass system at TGI Friday’s—I quit and wound up with a bunch of free ice cream. My manager inked me to a bad contract—I still got on a TV show, met Tracy Morgan, and learned a lot of life lessons. My first network sitcom fell apart—but I got to work with and drive around L.A. with Dave Chappelle.

So I came into work on Tuesday and just started winging it, trying to stay loose. Instead of walking around with fear, my goal was just to make people around 30 Rock laugh in their day-to-day existence. Never mind getting on air; I wanted to get back to just being funny for being funny’s sake.

There was this hippie kid interning with the writing staff who was legitimately terrible at easy stuff like taking messages and remembering to give them to you. But he was funny, and I liked to stop and gab with him once in a while. So that Tuesday, with nothing much going on for me work-wise, I bumped into him in the writers’ room and started doing Joe Pesci.

“What are ya, eatin’ lunch? ” I said. “You call dat a roast beef sandwich? Whatsamatta? Whaddaya bustin’ my bawls for, kid? You got some noive.” I went on like this for a few minutes, just riffing and trying to make him laugh.

He loved it. “How come you’ve never tried this on the show?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Pesci’s gold,” he said. “You’ve got him down perfect.” I could see the wheels start to turn in his head, thinking about where this could fit into the lineup. He snapped his fingers and said, “You know, you really should take this onto the ‘Update’ with Norm.”

“Really?” I said. “How would that work?”

“Well,” he explained, “Pesci has a movie coming out.
Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag.
So you’d go on the ‘Update,’ as Pesci, to promote the movie, and ask Norm if he’s seen it yet, and Norm, of course, hasn’t, and that makes you mad and you just go off in a rage.”

“That’s great,” I said, laughing, and started pretending I was Pesci berating Norm. One of the head writers, Steve Koren, walked by, then he stopped and came back.

“What the heck is so funny?” he asked, and looked at me quizzically as a grin spread across his face. “Wait, are you doing Joe Pesci?”

Out of all the writers on staff, Steve would end up being my biggest champion. He was a Queens guy, from near where I grew up. He had long hair and looked like the kind of guy who’d be happier in the woods than in an office. He’d helped Molly with her Mary Katherine Gallagher character, later went on to write for
Seinfeld,
and also wrote a bunch of movies.

“Yeah,” the intern said enthusiastically. “Breuer does the most unbelievable Joe Pesci.”