I'm Not High (24 page)

When the bartender asked me to repeat the order, things would only get worse, with more bleating and rutting. From a few feet behind me one of my friends would look at the bartender and shake his head sympathetically. “Poor bastard has Tourette’s,” he’d say. If the bartender was remotely busy, or working by himself, he’d either give us the drinks for free, give us a discount on them, or tell us to get the hell out of there.

He wasn’t the only character I’d do in bars. A lot of times I’d order drinks with an Australian accent. “G’day,” I’d say. “Me fatha is a whala. He capchas whales and they convert the blubba to oil.” I’d pretend I was a roadie for AC/DC (“a noice buncha blokes”) just passing through, with a few days off.

“I do a lot of the rigging of the lights,” I’d say. “It’s loyk bay-in a stuntman. A real hi-wi-ah act up there. I’ve seen a lot—men falling to their death, glimpses down the shahts of beautiful lassies.”

In the late winter of my first season, with things going well coming off of the Pesci sketch, I decided to pitch Goat Boy to some different writers on staff as a character. Steve Koren didn’t bite. So then I cornered Tom Gianas, Fred Wolf, and Tim Herlihy together in the writers’ room.

“I’ve got this character who has a Tourette’s syndrome-like affliction,” I said enthusiastically. “But instead of cursing, when he gets anxious, he starts making goat noises. Like bleating.”

They all just stared at me blankly.

I decided that making the goat noise loudly a couple of times might help, so I did it and added, “And if he starts drinking at a party? Forget it. He’ll start butting people with his head and eating the curtains.”

That didn’t help. Their lack of confidence made me think that maybe this Goat Boy idea was too out-there for anywhere but a Long Island bar. I shelved it and focused on other sketches. But a couple months later, Tom approached me.

“I was thinking about that goat idea,” he said, smiling. “What do you think about this? He’s a singer and pitchman for a CD of hit songs from the eighties.”

It was pretty cool to have a writer so into one of my characters that he came up with such a far-out backstory. You never knew when you might get your next opportunity, and I trusted Tom, so we went for it. Having Goat Boy star in an infomercial, he thought, would be a simple way to introduce a surreal character and establish him for the next season. People loved it. I was psyched to have two characters—Pesci and Goat Boy—in the rotation after just one year.

Fresh off a string of Oscars, Tom Hanks was the first host of the opener of my second season. He hadn’t seen the episode with Goat Boy from the previous season, so in the Monday pitch meeting, when I said, “He’s just a guy who’s part goat and sort of has Tourette’s syndrome and really loves eighties music,” Tom gave me a curious look.

“Okay?” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I said reassuringly. “It will be funny.”

For the Wednesday read-through, Tom Gianas had created another insane masterpiece. I thought it was too many layers again—Goat Boy was an experiment gone awry who was sold by the military to MTV, where he hosted a talk show and interviewed the “other guy” from Wham!, Andrew Ridgeley (played by Tom Hanks). But it went over like Pesci did. Lorne and Tom were both chortling and my cast members ate it up.

“I don’t understand Goat Boy,” Tom said, “and I don’t think I want to, but I just know it’s funny.”

During the dress rehearsal, Tom couldn’t make it through without cracking up. That would set the crowd off and then he wouldn’t be able to get his lines out.

Later, Mark McKinney even came to me with a great Goat Boy movie premise, once we saw how popular the character was.

“Picture this,” he said one afternoon in the fall of 1996, pulling up a chair in my office. “It’s a little bit
Teen Wolf
meets
The Elephant Man.
” It was one of the weirdest ideas ever. The finale had a heart-rending scene of Goat Boy forced to climb a mountain like a real goat in order to take out a terrorist, after he’d spent the whole movie trying to move away from his goat past. Too bad it didn’t get made.

Hey, dumber movies have been made from
SNL
sketches.

Finding Farley

Chris Farley was returning to
SNL
in the fall of 1997 as a guest host. In the weeks leading up to his arrival, I started to piece together just how much the guy meant to
everyone
in the building. Producers like Marci, cast members like Norm, even the camera guys, grips, and all the other regular working guys were constantly telling stories about Chris. I hadn’t heard such uniform excitement about a host in my time on the show. Even the hairdressers were gushing, “Oh, we miss him so much. He was our favorite. He had the biggest heart, he would always make us laugh. He’d come in and he could tell if we were tired. So he’d just put on a wig and do a character.” That was the biggest audience he needed. A mention of Chris’s name alone put genuine smiles on people’s faces. And not fake smiles, either. These were hundred-thousand-watt, Christmas-morning smiles.

With cast members like me who didn’t know him very well or hadn’t met him yet, there was more of a curiosity. Whenever a big-time former cast member was coming back, you wanted to be taken in by them and learn from them. For me, Chris Farley and Adam Sandler were the two biggies. They’d kept getting more and more successful and it all originated at
SNL.
Chris was on the show, left, and now he was out in the world making movies and getting ten million a pop.

About a week before he was supposed to host, Chris stopped in to catch up with us all. It was a gesture that showed he was going to be in the trenches with us, helping us make the show as funny as possible. As I saw him interacting with the cast members and staff, within about five seconds, I understood why everyone was raving. He popped his head in the office I shared with Tracy Morgan and smiled. “This is a great cast, Jimmy,” he said enthusiastically. “You’re so funny.” He didn’t have to do that, and it made me feel great.

Everyone else in New York was excited, too. Cast members got two tickets per show, and that week I got more phone calls from people I knew asking if they could come to the show than at any other time I remember. Anyone could come by and hang out and sit around outside of the studio, but you got only two seats to give away. And on Saturday night I had at least ten people come to the show when Chris hosted, hanging out in my dressing room hoping to see or meet him. But that was later, after a long week. So let’s backtrack.

Monday was upon us, and Tracy and I hadn’t had a whole lot of time yet to spend thinking about getting Chris into one of our sketches. We did have one thing that we thought he’d think was funny. We’d goofed around and come up with a skit called “Break Time.” Picture three low-key, mild-mannered executives toiling away in a nice office with oak-paneled desks—the works—and one would glance up nonchalantly at the clock, notice it was eleven fifteen A.M., and then quietly say, “It’s break time, guys.” Then the three guys (myself, Tracy, and hopefully Chris) would all mosh their brains out for thirty seconds—very physical, very funny—then we’d sit down again like nothing ever happened.

There’d be a chance to run “Break Time” by Chris later that afternoon in Lorne’s office, but Tracy and I had a scheme to pitch it to Chris
before
the meeting to build some momentum going into it. When Chris wandered past our office, I jumped out and grabbed him, and we ran through it with him and he laughed.

“That’s gonna be great,” he said. “It’s gonna be awesome.” Then he immediately started digging around in our desk drawers looking for pot and whatever else we had. I’m sure he had a pretty good radar for finding illicit substances. I’d met him a few months previous in the men’s room at the Aspen Comedy Festival. As I was peeing, he barged in and shouted, “All right, who’s got the weed?!” I, of course, said, “I do,” hoping to ingratiate myself with him. We never got to smoke together that night, but maybe somewhere deep in the recesses of his brain, he knew I’d be holding.

So, Chris found my weed in a drawer, then rummaged some more and pulled out an old fruit punch bottle Tracy had filled with booze.

“What’s this? ” he asked, then, not waiting for an answer, he opened it and took a swig.

Chris and I walked to the window, took a few hits of weed, and blew the smoke outside. Tracy sat at his desk and finished what was left of his booze after Chris manhandled it.

Before he left our office, Chris handed me back the one-hitter, looked at me, and said, “We’re gonna have a great time this week, Jimmy.”

“Jimmy”! Not “Jimbo,” “Breu,” or “Breuer,” but “Jimmy.” It was like being a little kid again and hearing a pal tell his mom, “I’m going over to Jimmy’s house.”

Tracy and I were psyched that Chris was into “Break Time.” And after Chris wandered out of our office, we started jabbering about it. His liking the skit meant we were going to be on the air that week. Then we’d probably start doing movies with him. We were his new best friends! This was definitely going to be a huge week.

But a little while later at the pitch meeting, Chris was in there, twitching and sweating. It was very awkward. He was losing it, grabbing at his face. Everyone knew something weird was going on.

I looked over at Tracy in disbelief and whispered, “That can’t be from what happened in our room just now, can it?” It was not good. He was a wreck. A hit or two of weed could not have caused that.

After the meeting, Tracy and I went back to our room and Tracy was freaking out.

“Oh, he was on something, for sure!” he said. “More than just pot. What was up with him twisting and squirming around?”

I was stunned. It wasn’t long before Marci Klein paid us a visit. “What the hell did you guys do?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I said.

(Up to that point Tracy and I had been really well behaved. Except for the time we raped Will Ferrell. I should explain.

Will had a habit of walking around the set in character and never breaking it. He had an early version of his
Anchorman
character Ron Burgundy, and another one who was a flamboyant painter. One night Tracy, Colin Quinn, and I told Will the Painter we’d like to buy a painting, but the money was in Colin’s office. “Would you like to come and get it?” we asked. “Why, yes!” he exclaimed. “Yes, of course.” He knew something was up, but to his credit he still stayed in character. In front of many cast members, most of whom were either laughing or freaked out, we dragged Will, howling, down the hallway and behind some garbage cans. He never broke character.

Then we began to fake punch him right in the hallway as he screamed, “Oh God, please help me.” We pulled his pants off and everything.

Tracy stood lookout with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Hurry up,” he’d say. “Someone’s coming.” Then he’d look over his shoulder at us and say, “Save me some of that.”

Cheri Oteri was down the hallway from us, shouting, “I will call the police!”

When it was over, for the rest of the week, Will went around, still in character, asking if anyone had seen his assailants. And everyone would play dumb. And he’d say, “Well, I am going to get them and they are wanted by the law.”)

“Don’t give me that,” Marci said. “Did you see Chris?”

We nodded slowly, still trying to figure out what she was driving at.

“Well,” she said, “Chris was all excited earlier; he told me, ‘Jimmy and Tracy are my boys, we’re gonna hang . . . ,’ so I know he stopped in here. What the hell happened?” She was getting very impatient. And that set Tracy off.

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Tracy said, getting angry. “I’m a grown man, Marci,” he said, shaking his head and puffing out his chest. “I am a father of
children,
so you don’t come in here and talk to me like that. You don’t talk down to me. When we say we didn’t—”

“Save it, Tracy,” she said disgustedly. “This is what is going to happen this week. If Chris calls, you don’t answer. If he asks you to go out with him, you don’t go. If he wants to talk to you in private, you come tell me. Chris is in serious, serious trouble. Did you two know we have a nurse hired to watch over him twenty-four hours a day?”

We shook our heads.

“Did you know Chris Rock is here, hanging out to sub for him if it comes to that?”

Again, we shook our heads.

“Chris is in a bad place right now. He has a real addiction. And you guys are to stay as far away as possible.”

“I had no clue,” I said. “I’m really sorry.” And we really didn’t have a clue that things were that bad. I wanted to clear the air. “I’m not gonna lie to you. He came in here and had a one-hitter and a swig.”

“But he was on some
other
shit in the pitch!” Tracy said.

“Tracy, I’m warning you,” Marci said, then she stormed out of our office.

This great week we were going to have had soured a bit. But despite Marci’s warnings, we still didn’t think the situation with Chris was
that
heavy. So we worked on writing “Break Time” and kept our heads down. Coming up with skits with Tracy was pretty fluid. We bounced off each other really well. But, just like in the
Uptown Comedy Club
days the actual writing down of sketches fell on me. Tracy couldn’t type for shit; a lot of time was spent just with him saying, “Yo, Jim, where’s the
g
button?” Or “You need to type this, ’cause I don’t even know where the
l
button is.” We were great premise and scene guys, but we were terrible at sitting down and writing the whole thing out.