I'm Not High (22 page)

I kept talking like Pesci, and the intern told him his “Weekend Update” idea. Steve smiled.

“You guys got a few minutes?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said. I had nothing but time.

“Come to my room,” he said. “I’ve actually had an idea for a Pesci sketch for a long time.”

So we went to Steve’s office and sat down. I hadn’t planned on any of this.

“I’ve always wanted to do Pesci as a talk show,” Steve confessed.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “He could even have De Niro as a sidekick.”

Steve agreed. “Sure. And other people he worked with would be guests. My idea is that in making a movie with them, Pesci got mad or felt wronged by them, built up a grudge, and he’s going to handle it like Tommy from
Goodfellas
would.”

“Yeah,” I said. The whole thing was building organically. “He could have a baseball bat at his desk.”

“And one by one,” Steve said, nodding, “he’s going to have them on his show and settle the score by beating the crap out of them. Every single time.”

“Totally,” I said. “He could do that with any big-name star. Whoever our host is that week, he’d have them on, get really impatient with them for trivial crap, and then beat ’em down.”

We worked Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, banging out the shell of a script. Steve had the idea stewing around in his head for a while, and I was fluent in all things Pesci, so it came together pretty fast. My stress disappeared and I felt like I had a renewed purpose. At the same time, I was impressed with Steve’s command over how his words and jokes would come to life onstage. No detail escaped him. He knew what it took to sell a character, even the most comically absurd ones.

“Lock into Pesci completely and lose yourself,” Steve said, bringing up specific scenes from
Raging Bull
and
Goodfellas.
“Remember how Tommy moves when he stuffs Billy Batts in the trunk?” he asked. “Get the body language down, and stay in character, no matter how over-the-top it seems, and Lorne will eat it up.”

We ran the basic concept of the sketch by Anthony Edwards.

“I love it,” he said.

“Do you do any impressions?” I asked. “Who do you think Pesci should beat down?”

“Ugh,” Anthony groaned. “I really suck at impressions.”

Steve pondered this news for a second before a mischievous grin spread across his face. “Macaulay Culkin?”

“Yeah!” I said. “Why not? Joe Pesci got his ass kicked in
Home Alone.
”

“You up for it?” Steve asked Anthony. “Don’t worry about getting Culkin down, all you have to do is act like a little kid. In fact, let’s make you an overgrown Culkin with too-short pants.”

The key to the Pesci sketches was the impressions. The night Jim Carrey played Jimmy Stewart while Mark McKinney played Jim Carrey was surreal. The more twists the better. We wrote Anthony as Macaulay Culkin into the sketch and brought it to the Wednesday read-through, just to see what would happen. Often, some of the funniest stuff on the show wouldn’t come together until late in the week. If there were any holes in the lineup, and you had something funny, you always had a shot. Everyone gathered around a big table, a couple of sketches were read, and then Lorne looked at us and asked, “Whaddaya got?”

“Hey,” I said, looking around the room, going right into my Pesci voice. “I’m Joe Pesci and this is
The Joe Pesci Show
!”

Lorne started laughing immediately, rocking back and forth in his chair. People around the table were howling. We read through the script and Anthony loved it. It made the lineup. I’ll never forget that feeling, knowing I had something locked, loaded, and going onto the show.

The biggest killing I’d seen on the show was Molly doing the hapless, crazy Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher. I couldn’t believe the roar of the live crowd while she was doing that sketch. After hearing that, I didn’t want laughs. I wanted that sound—a huge, all-encompassing white noise. In the dress rehearsal that Saturday, the minute the sketch started and I said, “I’m Joe Pesci!” I heard that noise, and I knew that my contract was saved, at least for the rest of the season.

Shortly after the New Year, Alec Baldwin hosted the show. He had a big, serious movie—
The Juror,
with Demi Moore—coming out in a couple of weeks. Even back then, I marveled at the guy’s versatility. He can take on any role, usually with a heavy display of bravado and masculinity, and knock it out of the park. I also knew, as he consistently proves nowadays with
30 Rock,
that he could be funny, too—darkly funny—and poke fun at himself in the process.

Because the first “Joe Pesci Show” crushed, Steve and I were feeling a little cocky. Walking around the studio, I was way looser. If I ever got canned and all people remembered of me was “The Joe Pesci Show”? I was cool with that. I’d killed on one of the legendary stages in American comedy, and no one could take that away from me.

Steve and I knew that to do the sketch again, and do it right, we had to have someone do a unique and great impression. Sketches get tired fast for many reasons, and doing them repeatedly just because they crushed once is a sure way to bore the hell out of people. Even most of the cast recognized that about their own sketches and would grumble to one another if Lorne or a guest host asked that a dead horse be trotted out to get beaten yet again.

But having Alec Baldwin as a host brought a prime opportunity to put our best stuff on the table and let him go to town on it. “The Joe Pesci Show,” Steve and I figured, was no exception. Not only is he a superb actor, but Alec was one of the only
SNL
hosts besides Tom Hanks who was super approachable 100 percent of the time. Most were nice, undoubtedly, but those two guys just really got it. They dropped their ego and fame at the door and were game for whatever was going to be funny. From the minute he got there, Alec ingratiated himself to everyone, hanging out in the hallways, talking to both producers and custodians or having a sandwich in the writers’ room with whomever was around. He was happy to learn about
you
—your wife, your family, where you grew up. And when he said, “We should all go to dinner Thursday night . . . ,” he actually meant it, and he’d include everybody.

Early in the week, in the writers’ room, Steve and I were BS-ing over lunch and studying Alec, who was sitting nearby, gabbing with a couple producers.

“Look at that mug,” Steve said, nodding in Alec’s direction. “You know what? He’s De Niro.”

“You’re right,” I said, smiling. “Think he’ll do it?”

“Let’s find out.”

We waited until there was a lull in Alec’s conversation and then slid our chairs closer to him.

“Hey,” Steve said. “So we did this ‘Joe Pesci Show’ thing back in December. ...”

“Yeah,” Alec answered, breaking into a grin. “That was funny.”

“We want to try it again this week,” I added.

“Excellent,” Alec said.

“And we were hoping that you would play Robert De Niro,” Steve said. The warmth left Alec’s face quickly as he clammed up and gave us a terse answer.

“Nah,” he said with a shrug and a shake of his head. “I don’t do impressions.”

Both Steve and I started laughing because what Alec had just done, whether he knew it or not, was a spot-on impression of De Niro. It was classic De Niro, tight-lipped, not very forthcoming—he favors using short, compact facial expressions more than words to communicate.

“That’s all you gotta do,” Steve said, smiling. “You don’t even have to speak, you’re already hilarious.”

Once again, Alec said, “Nah, really. That’s not my thing,” in a very De Niro way. “I couldn’t play Bobby.”

I backhanded Steve on the arm. “Did you hear him say ‘Bobby’? ” I turned to Alec. “You must know him,” I said. “Only people who know him call him that.”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I see Bobby from time to time, you know, at parties and events.”

“Well,” I explained, “all you’d have to say is two lines.” In the sketch, a guest would come out and say the most harmless thing, and it would get misinterpreted by Pesci. The guest would be clueless, but then De Niro would remind the guest à la
Raging Bull
that he, too, had “heard some things” or that what the guest said was a “li’l bit” offensive to Pesci—in the same way De Niro’s character Jimmy said it in
Goodfellas.
Naturally, it would all lead to an epic beat-down by Pesci.

“Two lines?” Alec asked with a glint in his eye. “That’s all?” I nodded yes. That got him encouraged enough to start making the famous De Niro mug, where he tucks his chin in, doesn’t say much, and almost looks like he’s smiling. He started looking around the room, mugging, in character, twisting his neck and trying it out.

“See? ” Steve said, reassuring him. “That’s perfect.”

“That’s all you gotta do,” I said. “You come sit next to me out there, and when the guest gets going, and Pesci gets offended, you just say, ‘I heard some things,’ and that will set Pesci off even more.”

“Okay,” Alec said, getting into it. “But I gotta have a glass of scotch in my hand and a cigarette.” He remained in De Niro mode the rest of the day.

The sketch started off with Pesci introducing his old friend De Niro/Alec, who took a seat on the sofa. Then we brought out David Spade, who was playing Brad Pitt. There was a whole exchange where De Niro/Alec stood up from the couch to greet Brad/David and then he didn’t know whether to sit or remain standing out of courtesy, and Brad/David didn’t really know what was going on, which infuriated De Niro/Alec even more.

“What am I doin’?” De Niro/Alec said impatiently, addressing Brad/David. “Am I up? Am I down? What’s the deal here? Sit down already. Just sit down.” The crowd was howling. Then shortly after Brad/David sat down, Pesci/me got all paranoid and freaked out that Brad/David said something about him. Brad/David said, “No, I didn’t say anything.” And then De Niro/Alec said smugly, “I heard some things,” and the whole place erupted, and the beat-down ensued. Alec was brilliant.

Over the next year, my standing on
SNL
solidified. Sure, there was turbulence, but I launched a second character—Goat Boy—that was just as popular as my Pesci. I was reunited with Tracy Morgan when he joined the cast, and we even shared an office. We teamed up to do Wong and Owens, cheesy retired eighties porn stars who were desperately trying to work straight jobs, but every situation would always drag them back to their more hard-core side. They came out of the typical conversations Tracy and I would have every day.

“Can anybody actually retire from porn?” Tracy asked me one afternoon, kicking his feet up on the desk in the office we shared. “’Cause you can’t do it forever. That’s not a physical possibility.”

We pondered the idea, and pretty soon it became hilarious to us and Wong and Owens were born. I thought it would make for a great movie, even though it was probably the most embarrassing sketch I ever did. I was never required to strip down to a thong for any other job.

Anyway, with Pesci as a regular part of the rotation, I got to work with stars like John Goodman, Jim Carrey, and Kevin Spacey. They came to the show wanting to be in a Joe Pesci sketch. I felt pretty good, like I’d cracked the code. Lorne had private dinners on Tuesday nights, where only certain cast members got invited. And if you got an invite, that’s how you knew you were doing well. And eventually I would get those invites, usually when a guest host was feeling a bit uncomfortable and the producers wanted someone to lighten the mood at dinner. I was happy to oblige.

In the late winter or early spring of 1997, an intern told me that both De Niro’s camp and Scorsese’s camp wanted tapes of “The Joe Pesci Show.” That immediately ballooned my head. I was certain I was going to be in
Goodfellas II
or
Taxi Driver II.
My dreams from when I was a kid were all coming true. I was now going to be in movies with Pesci and De Niro, just like I promised Phil all those years ago when we were kids. I’d be the one calling De Niro “Bobby.”

The tapes went out, and no one ever called. No one sent me any scripts. No letters on Scorsese’s stationery ever arrived. But in early April, the head producer, Marci Klein, came into my office. If anyone made sure
SNL
happened, it was her. Marci was short, brunette, and tough, the daughter of Calvin. She’d been around the show for years, running things with a no-nonsense approach. She came in and shut the door quickly behind her, then stood in front of it. “Trouble,” I thought.

“Joe Pesci is coming in next Thursday,” she said, getting right to the point.

I was flabbergasted and asked, “What are you talking about?”

“You’re going to meet with him. He and Robert De Niro want to make a cameo on ‘The Joe Pesci Show’ next week. That’s it. And if this leaks, you get fired. End of story.”

She walked out of my office, closed the door, and then poked her head back in and smiled. “Pretty amazing, huh?”

I had over a week to agonize, freak out, and, most important, keep it to myself. Dee was the only person I told. I was happy to show her that the long struggle was paying off. Now I was back to thinking I was going to be buddies with De Niro and Pesci. I couldn’t wait to just connect on a regular-guy basis with my two heroes. Steve Koren had left the show by then; he was writing for
Seinfeld,
but he was the master behind the Pesci show, so we called him and he came back for a week to help write the script. He was more surprised than I was. De Niro didn’t do television. Lorne told the rest of the cast and made it clear that this was not to be announced.

So Thursday afternoon came. I was anxious that Pesci would be a no-show and the whole plan would come unglued. Then an intern rapped on my office door and told me that the man had arrived with two beautiful female assistants (his and De Niro’s) and wanted to sit down with me before rehearsing. I walked nervously to the greenroom and peeked in to see Pesci decked out in a full-on sharkskin suit. He was wearing a gold pinkie ring, and he had an expensive pair of Italian sunglasses pushed up on his forehead. He was squinting underneath them, looking at pictures and posters from the show that were hanging on the wall.