Yes Please (15 page)

And then Keri’s mom, Ginny, got cancer.

Suddenly the world was small and tight. Our parents could get sick and our pretend games felt a million miles away. The inevitability of death became a new nightmare. I don’t remember when I first heard of Keri’s mom getting sick, but it was in that way young children receive news, a watered-down fashion that is a combination of investigating and straight-up eavesdropping. I remember her children pleading with her to stop smoking, and stealing her cigarettes from her purse and throwing them in the garbage. I remember her daughters spending days lying in her bed with her as her cancer spread from her brain to the rest of her body. I remember their dad and her husband, Mike, seeming very lost but also very strong. I also remember my incredible paralysis through the whole thing. All of my practice chasing bad guys did not add up to much. Cancer was too scary and too real, and I wanted the whole thing to go away. I was in high school when Ginny died, and I didn’t do a very good job of being there for my friend. I had little experience with death and did that classic thing of thinking I should just leave everyone alone and wait for the sad parties to reach out when they needed help.

Now that I am older life seems full of things to worry about. Sometimes I search for bad news as if reading the details will protect me somehow. I call it tragedy porn. I will fill myself up with every horrible detail about the latest horrible event and quote it back to people like some bad-news know-it-all. Remember that Austrian dad Josef Fritzl who raped his daughter and kept her and her kids in the basement for twenty-four years? I do, because I spent many nights reading every horrible specific fact about it and talking about it to everyone who would listen, until one day Seth Meyers gently reminded me that I worked at
Saturday Night Live
and it was a comedy show and maybe I was bumming everybody out. At the end of the year the “Update” team surprised me with a framed copy of an
Entertainment Weekly
cover Seth and I had posed for. They replaced Seth’s face with Josef Fritzl’s. I am smiling and pulling at his tie. This is what it is like to work in comedy. Hilarious and horrifying.

Speaking of horrifying, I still troll the Internet for terrible stories. I see an awful headline and try not to click it. I often can’t believe how hard it is not to read. For a while I was obsessed with a cable show called
I Survived
. . . I was never very interested in the people who were attacked by mountain lions while hiking or the dummies who crashed their single-engine airplanes. Those stories seemed like foolish risk-taking scenarios I could successfully avoid by never going outside. No, I would watch the horrible pieces on women who had been assaulted and left for dead. First-person accounts of people being attacked by strangers or stabbed by boyfriends. This is the ultimate narcissistic white-girl game. I would picture how I would handle the attack differently. Or the same. Inevitably, I’d think about my own death, which next to staring at your face in a magnifying mirror is probably the worst thing you can do for yourself. The ambulance-chasing aspect combined with the Monday-morning quarterbacking of it all is the luxury afforded to those of us left untouched by trauma. Sometimes I would use these tragedy-porn shows to unlock deep feelings or cut through the numbness. I would read terrible stories to punish myself for my lucky life. Some real deep Irish Catholic shit. Either way, it was all gross and all bad for my health. I remember being depressed after my second boy, Abel, was born. I couldn’t lose weight and I couldn’t stop working. One evening, Will tried to gently point out that drinking a bottle of wine by myself while I watched
Oprah
on DVR probably wasn’t the best way to feel better. I remember arguing with him that these shows didn’t make me feel sad. They were real. They were emotional. They were what I needed to feel better. Then Oprah’s show came on and she announced the topic was African baby rape. I was forced to admit perhaps it was time for a break.

Let’s not end on African baby rape (or start with it, for that matter). Let’s end by pointing out all the positive ways you can scare yourself and feel alive. You can tell someone you love them first. You can try to speak only the truth for a whole week. You can jump out of an airplane or spend Christmas Day all by your lonesome. You can help people who need help and fight real bad guys. You can dance fast or take an improv class or do one of those Ironman things. Adventure and danger can be good for your heart and soul. Violence and desperation are brutal things to search out. Why search out the horror? It’s around us in real ways every day. I’m talking to you, the people who made that movie
The Human Centipede
. No more
Human Centipede
movies please. No more movies about people’s mouths being sewn onto people’s butts. The whole idea of making and watching a movie like that makes me want to take a ten-year nap.

Having said all this I would like to pitch some taglines for the inevitable
Human Centipede 4
movie.

humping justin timberlake

© NBC/Getty Images

I
WAS HIRED ON
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
IN AUGUST 2001
. We were supposed to have our first read-through on 9/11. I turned thirty years old five days later. My first year was a total blur that consisted of my trying not to get fired and trying not to die. It was a tough time to join the show. It felt like America might not ever smile, never mind laugh, again. I hoped that the entire idea of comedy would not be canceled just as I was starting this dream job. I like to refer to the transition period of any new job as “finding out where the bathrooms are.” Not only did I have to find the bathrooms, but I had to attempt to do comedy in a city that was battered and still on fire, while avoiding being killed by the ANTHRAX that had been sent to the floors below us. Talk about jitters.

Wonderful things happened my first year on
SNL
. Will and I decided to get married. I met Meredith Walker, who would become one of my best friends and help shepherd
Smart Girls at the Party
into the world with me. She was tall and from Texas and had already met Sting and Tupac. I got to see Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch every day. I met Seth Meyers in Mike Shoemaker’s office and something clicked inside of me, like a broken locket completed. I got to work with Will Ferrell. It’s tough for me to find a single story that would really explain to you what
SNL
felt like or what it meant to me. So I’m not going to try. I told you, writing is HARD. In lieu of that story, I present to you my bite-sized
SNL
memories, mixed in with some benign gossip about past hosts. Enjoy.

My first show was on September 29, 2001. I walked in the background during a “Wake Up, Wakefield” sketch but according to my parents, you couldn’t see me. Paul Simon sang “The Boxer” and Lorne Michaels solemnly asked Mayor Giuliani, “Can we be funny?” The mayor paused and answered, “Why start now?” Lorne wrote that joke. We all drank hard with exhausted firefighters at the after-party, their uniforms still covered with dust.

The first time I appeared on air was the last sketch of the night, a week later. I wrote it and played a porn star on a date with Seann William Scott. Seconds before we went live, Lorne asked me if I wanted white or red wine in the prop wineglasses. I still don’t know if he was genuinely asking or doing some Jedi mind trick to help me be less nervous.

In that same episode, Will Ferrell played an overzealous office worker who displays his patriotism by wearing an American flag Speedo. I watched him spread his legs and realized that America could and would laugh again. A few shows later, Will and I wrote a sketch where we played two background actors and I realized I wasn’t going to be fired. Will Ferrell is one of the most naturally talented people I have ever met. He was our benevolent captain and will always be a hero in my eyes because: 1) he used his talent to heal me and the country in ways he will never know, and 2) he is a straight-up king.

Later in my first season, they pulled host Britney Spears out of a cold open because she didn’t have time to change. I did her part with five minutes’ prep. It was a skiing scene and I may have worn her clothes. I also think I said “Live from New York” for the first time. For some reason I feel like Dan Aykroyd was also in it? I’m not sure. I could fact-check this but I’m too lazy.

Britney Spears also signed a poster for me that hung in my office. I don’t know where the poster is now. Here is a picture. Yes, I knit.

Molly Shannon, Kristen Wiig, and I all had that office at some point in our
SNL
careers. Each one of us carved her name in the desk.

One night Chris Parnell hid under that desk for an hour while I was writing. He kept gently hitting my drawer so it would spring open. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and so I looked below to investigate. He was curled up in a ball and I screamed my head off. There was a lot of pranking. Horatio Sanz used to call me and pretend he was a weird gentleman named Gomez Vasquez Gomez. Writer Andrew Steele used to leave us notes from a pervert named Thurman, letting us know he was a big fan of “butts and boobs.” Will Forte would call writer Emily Spivey and me to ask us to work on a sketch and we would come in to find him and his writer office-mates Leo Allen and Eric Slovin completely naked at their desks.

We were never fed and were left to our own devices when it came to meals. Interns would go on McDonald’s runs and buy a shitload of horrible candy. A lot of time was spent ordering food and waiting for it to be delivered. The traffic around 30 Rock often meant that we were constantly starving and complaining. One time, Slovin was bitching about his food taking forever, and once it arrived, Forte grabbed it and threw it out the window.

I cried a lot in Mike Shoemaker’s office. Once, a few years after 9/11, I did a 9/11-based joke on “Weekend Update” during rehearsal. It didn’t go well and I came offstage and cried to producer Mike Shoemaker about how I was bad at telling jokes and how I wanted to quit.