The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (23 page)

I have a tradition that I get all of the actors to sign my movie poster for me. So one day I gave Chris the
Tommy Boy
poster. He took it, signed it, and handed it back to me. And what it said just cut straight to my heart, and really surprised me. What he wrote on the poster was: “Dear Michael, Don’t give up on me. Chris.”

CHAPTER 10

The Lost Boys

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER,
writer:

In the years I was back at Saturday Night Live, I so didn’t belong there. But then of course, no one belonged there. The cast didn’t belong there. The writers didn’t belong there. And we didn’t belong there with each other. The whole thing was a real marriage of hope.

Just two years earlier, during the run of the 1992 presidential election,
Saturday Night Live
had been at the top of its game, consistently funny and culturally relevant. But in the fall of 1994, as Chris Farley and David Spade flew back and forth from Toronto to film
Tommy Boy
, they returned each week to find the show slipping further and further into confusion and disrepair.

Cast stalwarts Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, and Phil Hartman had all left. In their place, Lorne Michaels had hired a slew of actors and comedians, both young and old, known and unknown. In all, the cast swelled to seventeen members, more than double the original group of Not Ready for Primetime Players in 1975. But in spite of all the talent in the room (or because of it), very little seemed to work. The cast was not a team. It was an odd collection of ill-fitting parts. There was little chemistry and no love lost among several of those sharing the stage. It was not a happy time.

Off-camera the changes were just as severe, and the process just as broken. The younger writers were coming to the fore, but the writing staff as a whole never gelled, especially with veterans like Al Franken and Marilyn Suzanne Miller feeling pushed out and stymied by the new generation. Caught in the midst of this chaos, and trying to manage it, was head writer Jim Downey. Downey’s experience probably encapsulates best what everyone was going through: At the end of the year he was served with divorce papers on the same day he was fired.

With the show in a rut, Chris found himself in one, too. He put in a hilarious turn as a lost contestant on a Japanese game show, and he took on some of the show’s political humor with his impression of House Speaker Newt Gingrich—a role that would even take him to the halls of Congress. But as far as memorable performances go, that fifth year added virtually nothing original to Chris’s
SNL
legacy. The Motivational Speaker came back again (and again). So did the Gap Girls and the Super Fans. And as
Saturday Night Live
limped to the end of a particularly disappointing season, Chris’s attentions drifted elsewhere.

It was a terrible year. Everyone was miserable. And once it starts getting bad, it almost has to get worse.

There was definitely a sense at the start of the ’94-’95 season that we needed to make the show better. After every taping there was more discussion over what worked and what didn’t, more of a conscious effort to pull things together. Nobody wanted to be the cast that brought
Saturday Night Live
to an end.

The ratings plunged. It wasn’t just a critical reaction; it was a popular one, too.

My feeling was that the show had been running on vapors for a while, but the ratings had been crazily spiked by
Wayne’s World
. It annoyed me that the network didn’t care if the show sucked while the ratings were high. They only cared if the show sucked and the ratings were low.

It was just very unclear what the show was supposed to be. When you look at the 1992 year, you had Carvey and Myers and Hartman, Jan Hooks and Kevin Nealon. Those guys were all-stars. Hartman used to put on a bald cap and play ten different characters with ten different voices in ten different sketches. So the beauty of adding a guy like Sandler to that group was that Sandler could go on Update and do his weird, funny thing and kill with it. Same with Chris. He could be a killer supporting part, like in the “Da Bears” sketches, then turn and have his own starring role, like in the “Chippendales” sketch. That was all you really needed of Farley in a given show. It was like a flavor of something. Jim Downey used to say something very interesting, and I will paraphrase it. He used to say that Farley and Sandler were like the special teams on a football team, the great kicker or the great punter, the guy you need to come on, do his thing, and then get off the field.

After the all-stars like Hartman left the show, it never seemed like a working cast so much as “Here’s the Sandler sketch. Here’s the Farley sketch. Here’s the Spade sketch.” All of a sudden, we were playing a football game with nothing but these special teams guys out on the field, and that’s not a team that’s going to play well for a whole four quarters.

The system was flawed in a way that funneled the cream to the bottom and the mediocrity to the top. When we did the table read-throughs on Wednesdays, there were always funny sketches in there. Rarely did they hit the air. Downey was still there, but he wasn’t spiritually there. I think there were some personal things going on in his life that he wasn’t fully present, emotionally. He didn’t have the reserves needed to manage the room. The system was just broken.

People were clinging to the stuff that worked in a time without a lot of focus. It was really, really hard slogging. But I saw Chris as ensconced in a brotherhood of his own making with several of the writers. He was comfortable in a way that I never was.

Chris had the luxury of not only being talented but also well liked. When he would come onstage, even just to take his mark during a commercial break, people would start cheering. It was clear that he was an audience favorite, and kind of the go-to guy for a laugh.

All the writers wanted to get their stuff on the show, and you learned very quickly that there were guys that you could count on. You could ride their charisma onto the air. We would do that with Chris.

Ian Maxtone-Graham gave me this diagram he’d made of “Fred Wolf’s Sketches for Chris Farley.” There were three different dials on it. The first one was labeled “Chris is: Dry. Moist. Soaking Wet.” And the dial was set on “Soaking Wet.” The second one was labeled “Chris is: Quiet. Talking Loud. Screaming at the Top of His Lungs.” And the dial was set on “Screaming at the Top of His Lungs.” The third one was labeled “Chris is saying: Gosh! Oh no! Oh, sweet mother of God!” And the dial was set to “Oh, sweet mother of God!”

It seemed like every sketch I wrote for a while had Chris getting soaking wet and screaming, at the top of his lungs, “Oh, sweet mother of God!” But I couldn’t resist writing them, because they would always bring down the house.

When we did the first “Motivational Speaker” sketch, I added something that I thought was really helpful at the time but that I somewhat regretted later. The sketch was pretty much word for word as Bob Odenkirk had written it at Second City, except for the ending. The stage version didn’t really have a topper for Chris, other than “You’ll have plenty of time to live in a van down by the river when you’re . . . living in a van down by the river!” Chris was so powerful onstage that it carried you to the end. But TV flattens stuff out and I thought it needed something more, so I added the part where he’s telling David Spade, “Ol’ Matt’s gonna be your shadow! Here’s Matt, here’s you! There’s Matt, there’s you!” And then he falls and smashes through the table.

It worked really well, but it inaugurated this trend of Chris being really clumsy and falling down a lot. There were several more “Motivational Speaker” sketches, and all of those ended with him crashing through something. Then the writers started having him fall through other stuff. He used to joke about it. “Everybody laughs when fatty falls down.” Chris and I would laugh about how hacky it had become. I’d say, “Chris, give me a triple boxtop.” And he’d do a certain kind of fall for me.

That sort of broad clumsiness was actually the opposite of what Chris’s talents as a physical comedian were. What really struck me at Second City was how graceful and nimble and athletic he was, a brilliant physical performer who was also capable of really specific, subtle things. But a lot of that got buried in this succession of sketches with yelling and pratfalls. It was to Chris’s detriment, and the show’s.

I think that the writers began to use him as a bit of a crutch, but that’s not entirely the writers’ fault. There’s a natural instinct among a lot of comedians, particularly younger ones, to want to get a laugh. You want desperately to be liked, and sometimes the quickest route is to be loud and broad in your gestures. I think Chris did that in the beginning, and then, unfortunately, it stuck.

As much as the writers used him in a certain way, he also liked working in that certain way. It was easy for him to default to the pratfalls and so on. He could power through a sketch just by hiking up his pants and playing with his hair. Those were stock Chris Farley moves. He also hadn’t started wearing his glasses when he should, and he couldn’t always read the cue cards. You’d write a quiet, subtler sketch, and he’d flub a line ’cause he’d miss the cue card. So maybe you didn’t want to take a chance with him on that kind of sketch, and you’d default to something loud and physical.

There was never any sketch where we said, “This sketch isn’t working. Let’s have Farley walk in to be the joke.” It was not a fallback move. But there were definitely a lot of sketches, especially in that last season, that could be reduced to: “Chris yells a lot.”

It paralleled Raymond Chandler’s rule: Any time the action starts to slow up, just have a guy come through the door with a gun. That’s how they used Chris. He would bring a lot of juice to what could have looked like lazy writing, and he saved a lot of bad sketches. There was this sketch with Deion Sanders—I mean, the comedy stylings of Deion Sanders, first of all—where this flying saucer lands and they keep sending men in to explore, and they all either get killed or anally probed. Then they send Chris in, and he comes out with his clothes in tatters, virtually naked, having been anally violated. That’s all there was to the sketch. In fact, I think I’ve probably embroidered it a little. But even with that, Chris gave it a shot, and he was funny.

The Deion Sanders alien anal probing sketch, it was so embarrassing.

The show was always best when there was a balance between the writers and the performers, when both were operating at their peak level and working together. To some extent, Sandler and Spade and Schneider and those guys were not in sync with the writers, at least with my generation of writers. I was not thrilled with what was happening. But maybe it was just time for me to go.

There was a quality among those guys, Rob Schneider, Adam, Chris, and Spade, that it was “our show.” It was a very David Spade attitude, and it certainly excluded me. Also, I think they knew that, at the bottom line, we weren’t loaded with respect for what they were coming up with.

For some reason the phrase “anal probe” found its way into virtually every sketch. Most of those didn’t make it to air, but at the read-through table it seemed like “anal probe,” “bitch,” and “whore” had assumed the same status as “Good morning, how are you?” It was imbecilic and just as offensive as offensive could be.

I think that the humor did change, and I didn’t get into it that much. And that’s because the times changed. But the stuff we were doing in the first five years of
SNL
, I wouldn’t say it was necessarily so smart. When they talk about this “dumbing down of comedy,” I think comedy just keeps changing with the times, all the time. You can trace the evolution of vaudeville to
Ed Sullivan
to
Your Show of Shows
to
Laugh-In
to
Saturday Night Live
. And it just keeps evolving.

It’s similar to what happened to the guys who took over
National Lampoon
after Doug Kenney and Henry Beard left, when it all fell to tits and racial slurs. Michael O’Donoghue used to say that comedy isn’t a rapier; it’s clubbing a baby seal. But you can only club that baby seal for so long.

They were taking their cues from
Animal House
, whereas we had taken our cues from Bob and Ray, Sid Caesar, and Johnny Carson. Comedy just takes these turns. But that show has to stay young. It doesn’t matter if you like it or agree with it or think it’s funny. It has to stay young.

Chris was part of this gang, and he identified with this sort of gang spirit that they had. When he and Adam and Spade did those Gap Girls, it was kind of like the gang was getting together to play, only they were doing it on national television. They were like the Little Rascals, or the Lost Boys from Never-Never Land.

I remember being overwhelmed one night at some of the capers that were going on. All these overtly sexual—and, frankly, homoerotic—hijinks. Just constantly grabbing each other’s asses—and much worse than that. I went into an office with Al Franken, and he explained to me that when a bunch of guys are marooned on an island together, as was the case with that show, you get this kind of behavior. It happens at boys’ prep schools, on submarines. There was a sketch Jim Downey wrote on the old show, “The Adventures of Miles Cowperthwaite.” It was about this young boy trapped on a ship with all these pirates, and it was all about manly men being manly and doing manly things at sea to prove their manliness—and they all turn out to be gay. Everything these kids were doing was like that.