The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (9 page)

Chris once said that Del Close told him to attack the stage like a bull and try and kill the audience with laughter.

He was so big and emotional, very physical. He gave one guy a permanent scar on his forehead when he dove from the bar onto the stage in this overblown ninja thing. He landed on him, smashing his glasses into his head. His commitment was just past the point of safety.

I was already touring for Second City, and I used to go back and perform at ImprovOlympic every now and then. One night I went up there and did a Harold with Chris’s team. It’s difficult when you’re the new guy in a group, because they already have their dynamic and you don’t know how you’ll fit into it. But the very first time we performed together Chris was right there for me. I started a scene where I was hanging something up, and it was obvious to everyone in the audience that I was hanging up laundry on a clothesline. But Chris came out and said, “Doctor, what does the X-ray say?”

I just looked at him and said, “Well, it’s not good.”

And it got a big laugh because it was such a change from where people thought it was going.

When you get a suggestion in an improv set, usually one performer goes out and sets the stage based on the idea. And sometimes that person is out there for a while, just fumbling around. He doesn’t know where he’s going, and because he doesn’t know, it’s really difficult to step in and help him.

One night this girl walks out and puts a pretend briefcase down and goes, “I had such a great day today, honey. They made me partner at the law firm and they love me and somebody’s gonna be interviewing me for
Newsweek
. . .”

And on and on and on. It was this long exposition, just going nowhere. We’re all standing there at the back of the stage, thinking, how do we even enter this scene? She’s giving us nowhere to go.

This goes about a minute or so. She’s droning on and on, and finally Chris storms out of the back line and goes, “Sweet Lord, would you just shut up and bowl?!”

His instincts were near perfect. With one line he put the whole scene in a place and a context and established what the joke was. “My God, every time you bowl it’s something different. You’re a doctor. You’re a lawyer. ‘Look at me, I discovered something!’ Bowl the
goddamned
ball.”

He was an amazing processor of information. He wasn’t great at getting things started, but if you gave him anything, he would take it, internalize it, have a perspective on it, be affected by it, and ride it out for the scene.

He was an amazing listener onstage, like a sponge. You could just see him reflecting your idea through his facial expression and taking on your mood. He totally got it.

And he was in incredible shape. That always surprised people. I remember one football sketch he was in where his teammates were making fun of him for being out of shape. They’d say, “All right, fatty, drop and give me twenty.” And Chris could do it, with no problem, clapping his hands in between each push-up, even. He was all muscle under there.

We’re at a bar in Chicago one night. It’s ten degrees outside. Chris has got his English driving cap on, Timberland boots, and some cutoff sweat-pants, and he’s sporting these huge muttonchop sideburns. The after-work crowd is there. A bunch of little honeys are at the bar, and Chris starts chatting them up. “Hey, how are you? What do you guys do?” he says.

They work in advertising or insurance or whatever, and they ask him, “So what do you do?”

Chris is standing there, sweating in ten-degree weather, and he goes, “Me? What do I do? I’m an aerobics instructor.”

We’re all laughing, ’cause we know he’s winding up to have fun with them.

“Aerobics instructor?” they say. “Are you kidding me?”

And Chris, with one hand on the bar and one hand on the stool, defying all laws of physics, goes from standing stock still, leaps into a perfect backflip, and lands back right on his feet. Hat doesn’t even come off his head.

“Yeah,” he says. “You know, aerobics instructor.”

I got hooked on Chris’s shows very early. When I went back to Red Arrow Camp to be a counselor, Kevin and Johnny told me Chris was down in Chicago. I’d been thrown out of the University of Denver; I wasn’t having a traditional college experience. So I started hanging out with Chris a lot. When you’d go and see him in these bars, you’d have to sit through an hour and a half of bullshit watching these kids learn how to do comedy. But however good or bad the shows were, Chris always had that moment, that one moment where lightning would strike and he’d just kill the audience.

ImprovOlympic was very young, and I think that’s what made it, for lack of a better word, romantic. There were no agents coming to see you. There was nobody pitching a screenplay. It was just about the pure love of the game, going out every night and making people laugh.

It was like a wave of energy. We were doing five shows a week, one on Thursday and two on Fridays and Saturdays. We were just all constantly together all the time, performing, hanging out. Everybody who was there had come because they wanted to challenge themselves and push the boundaries of comedy. People were either rehearsing or performing every night of the week. You were consuming it all the time. And when you weren’t rehearsing or performing, you were hanging out with people whom you rehearsed and performed with. Once you were on a team, that was basically your fraternity.

It was very collegiate, especially when it came to the drinking. I would say that if you took a clinical definition of alcoholism, then everybody there had a huge problem. Farley always did everything bigger than everybody else, but we were all out of control. One time I saw Pat Finn fall down two flights of stairs solely to make me laugh. That’s what we did, outrageous things all across the board.

Chris must have had something like forty jobs during that time. One day he and I were walking down Armitage Avenue, and he was like, “Yeah, I worked there. I worked there.”

And I was like, “When?”

“Well, I worked at the butcher shop for like an hour, and they fired me. Then I got a job at the hardware store the day after the butcher shop, but I was really tired ’cause I’d had to get up so early for the butcher shop, you know? So I fell asleep on some boxes in the back.”

I said, “How could you fall asleep within hours of your first day on the job?”

“I don’t know, but they were really pissed.”

So he lost that job. Basically he’d lost every job up and down the street. Eventually, we’d go to church and he’d pull the little tags on the bulletin board that said “Need neighborhood workers” and stuff like that.

He got a job as a bouncer, but then one day he said to me, “Hey, I think I kinda got fired from that bouncer job at the bar.”

“Jeez, Chris”—this was on Sunday—“you started it on Friday. What happened?”

Apparently a fight had broken out, so he—Chris, the bouncer—had left, because he didn’t know what to do. And he’d caused the fight.

What had happened was Chris was checking IDs, and, goofing around, he goosed some girl in the butt. Her boyfriend thought it was somebody else, and he started shoving people and it broke out into a real melee, so Chris just kind of slipped out the front door.

All the other bouncers came out from inside and finally settled it. Then the owners came out and said, “My God, who’s on the front door?”

At that moment, Chris came back around from this alley down the side of the bar. He saw the owners, panicked, turned down this alley, and yelled
“And stay out!”

“Where the hell were you?” they asked.

“Where was
I
? Where the hell were
you
? There were like nine guys in the alley on top of me.”

“What?”

“It’s okay. I took care of it. But, man . . .”

“Oh Chris, we’re so sorry.”

So on Saturday he went back to bounce again. I asked him how that went.

“Well,” he said, “normally you get your shift drink around eleven. But the girl behind the bar really liked me, so I got my shift drink at seven. Then I had another one. She was making those greyhounds that I like. Man, I had a lot of ’em.”

“Were you okay?”

“Well, that’s my question. I’m not sure. I passed out on the people in line while I was checking IDs, and all the bouncers had to take me across the street and put me into bed.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So do I just go over there to get a paycheck, or do I ask ’em to mail it? How does that work?”

“I don’t know, Chris. You probably drank more than your paycheck. ”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. I guess I just won’t go over there for a while.”

He didn’t seem particularly fazed by it. It just kind of reinforced to him that he needed to find a way to make a living in comedy.

We got a pilot, an improv game show, similar to
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
I picked out a bunch of our best performers, of which Chris was one, and they flew us all out to L.A. We were doing some really smart work, and the producer just wanted us to dumb it down. “It’s too smart,” he kept saying, “too smart.” And he started firing some of the best people. He wanted to bring in all these dick-joke stand-up comics.

So, one by one, my cast was getting fired. It was just a nightmare, which Del had warned me was going to happen. Chris could see what was going on. At one point in the rehearsal he said, “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t wanna get fired.”

“Do what you gotta do,” I said.

And so he hiked up his shorts into the crack of his ass and started jumping around doing the monkey dog boy dance, which is when you hold your crotch with one hand and put your fingers up your nose and just start jumping around being silly. And, oh, they were on the floor laughing, because that’s the kind of dumb stuff they wanted. And he saved his job.

But Chris wasn’t always a caricature of the fat guy. He did beautiful scenes. When he did serious scenes, oh my God, he could make you cry.

Chris’s vision of himself was that everyone just wanted to see fatty fall down, so that was what he was going to give them. But there were plenty of other guys who could fall off a chair and eat in Roman proportions. What Del Close liked about Chris wasn’t necessarily what everybody else liked about him. Del felt that Chris was in touch with genuine emotions in a way not all improvisers allow themselves. That’s what Del was really attracted to in Chris. He wanted to show Chris that he could be more than just a one-note performer.

After Chris was done working with me, I couldn’t wait for him to get to Del, because that was the next level. I said to Del, “I can’t wait for you to see this guy. I want to see what you think.”

Del watched him, and after the show he turned to me, and the first thing he said was, “Oh, that’s the next John Belushi.”

CHAPTER 5

Whale Boy

JUDITH SCOTT,
cast member:

If you think of the rest of the Second City cast as flat land, Chris was something that fell out of the sky and gave us shape. He might blow out a huge crater, like a meteor, or just collide with the ground, becoming this huge mountain. And by creating this landscape, he gave the rest of us the terrain on which to play.

Chris Farley spent a little over eighteen months studying and performing at ImprovOlympic. The young theater was rapidly becoming one of Chicago comedy’s best-known training grounds, but at the time it remained just that: a place to learn. For actors seeking out professional opportunities and a professional paycheck, Second City was still the place to be. Since its founding in 1959, Second City had established itself as the nation’s graduate school of comedy. In the early days, Robert Klein, Joan Rivers, and Alan Arkin all came across its stage. Over subsequent years, dozens of Hollywood stars matriculated there as well.

Chris auditioned for Second City’s touring company in January 1989 and was offered a position. Most performers would have spent months or even years on the road before joining the main-stage ensemble; Chris made the move in a matter of weeks. Del Close had been offered the opportunity to direct Second City’s spring revue, and he was given great latitude to mold the show and its cast to his own liking. The performer he liked most was Chris. Second City producer Joyce Sloane expressed reservations about the young performer’s readiness and his outsized partying habits, but Charna Halpern insisted that working with Close was exactly the kind of discipline Chris needed. Sloane ultimately agreed.

And everyone agreed that Chris’s potential was virtually without limit. During his eighteen months at Second City, Chris performed in three revues:
The Gods Must Be Lazy
,
It Was Thirty Years Ago Today
, which marked the theater’s thirtieth anniversary, and
Flag Smoking Permitted in Lobby Only
. Also making the leap from the touring company at that time was Chris’s friend Tim Meadows. Second City veterans David Pasquesi, Holly Wortell, Joe Liss, Judith Scott, and Joel Murray, as well as understudy Tim O’Malley, rounded out the cast. With each show, Chris’s reputation grew. He created a number of characters and scenes that would go down as some of the best in the theater’s history.

I was sitting in the main lobby at Second City. Chris came through the front door, all big and boisterous like he always did. He went upstairs and auditioned. What he did for his audition was he pretended he was late for whatever the scene was, took a running leap from stage left, and landed flat in the middle of the stage. They hired him right away, just on his energy and his commitment. Everyone was like, “You should have seen this guy’s audition. He was fucking nuts.”