God, if You're Not Up There . . . (10 page)

Hell’s Kitchen became the best neighborhood in New York City. There is every kind of cuisine, every kind of perfume, every kind of music, every color of person, every religion. Once the neighborhood was cleaned up, residents returned to their stoops. It’s a marvelous thing to see people in their lawn chairs having a bottle of beer with their grandkids playing nearby because it’s safe.

T
he comedy career was not going the way I’d hoped. Then I heard about a booker working out of some dumpy office in Times Square next to a whorehouse who booked gigs in New Jersey. So I went to him, talked to him for a while, and he decided to give me a shot. I didn’t even have to audition for him. Thanks to him, I made a living wage doing one-nighters on the west side of the Hudson.

And then I did a one-nighter with a dude named Dennis Regan, a fellow Floridian on the stand-up circuit who had previously owned an asphalt business with his dad called Tars and Stripes. Dennis’s younger brother Brian was, and is, a great comedian as well.

Dennis told me, “I’m a regular at the Cellar. Do you work out there?”

“Yeah, at fucking three o’clock in the morning with non-English-speaking tourists facing the other way and drunk on schnapps or going through methadone withdrawal.”

When people are blotto, or they’ve been dragged in off the street for drink specials, they don’t give a shit about what you’re doing onstage, even if it is a bona fide comedy club and not some Podunk sports bar. Woody Allen once said the audience has to know they’re an audience. They have to come there specifically to be an audience, and know that they’re expected to laugh. If they don’t pay for that privilege, you’re in trouble.

Dennis said, “I’ll get you a decent audition. I think you’re funny.”

That was my first real break in comedy in New York. I got a spot at 9:00 p.m. instead of 3:00 a.m., and I did well, and I got booked into the Comedy Cellar on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village thanks to Estee, the manager. Her full name is Estee Adoram, but every comic in the universe knows her just as Estee. She gave a lot of people their break. Even comics who have made it big go back to the Cellar to try out new material—Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Robin Williams, Sarah Silverman. Seinfeld filmed a lot of his documentary
Comedian
there.

The cramped room with the iconic brick wall behind the stage is extremely well run; the audiences—the early ones, anyway—come because they really want to see comedy.

Rather than feature a single headliner, the Cellar is known for its showcase approach, booking several comedians for each show. Back then a single bill might include Ray Romano, Dave Attell, Dave Chappelle, Wanda Sykes, and, if I was lucky, me. I wasn’t even doing impressions anymore, just straight stand-up. I only had one brief impression in my act: “I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world,” and then in Bill Clinton’s gravelly drawl, “I hate you.”

By the early 1990s, I started getting booked at Dangerfield’s on the Upper East Side and the New York Comedy Club downtown in Murray Hill. Pretty soon I was making $75, $100 a night in cash. On weekends, the clubs paid about $50 a set; if I did six sets in three clubs, I could make $300 cash a night. If you worked hard, you could get by and pay your rent. That’s what we were all doing.

It was exhilarating to be a New York comic, to be onstage with those guys, all of us just hitting our stride. I was very proud that I was on the same bill with them. They were all really good people, but I didn’t hang out with them much, since I tended to slink off after my set to nefarious dive bars so I could drink bad liquor and get blind. The bartenders at my regular hangouts all knew my address so they could tell the cabdrivers where to take me at the end of the night. Hell knows, there were a lot of times I was in no condition to summon up something as challenging as where I lived.

And then one night in 1995, Marci Klein saw a set I did at Caroline’s near Times Square, and my whole world changed.

CHAPTER FIVE

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

New York City

1996–2000

S
ome time before the beginning of my second season on
SNL
, fate smacked me upside the head again. My wife and I were in the best-friend stage between our two marriages, which is how I came to be dating Alison, a twenty-seven-year-old blond Kathy Ireland lookalike with a penchant for sticking her finger down her throat. We had broken up because I was trying to do the tough-love thing they teach you in twelve-step programs.

“I can’t stay around and watch you fill jars up with vomit and hide them during the night. I can only be with you if you get help.”

The next day, she was swinging from a rope in her apartment on Fifty-seventh Street.

God might have been telling me, “Not so fast, Mr. Hammond.” But the show must go on.

M
y second
SNL
season opened during the run-up to the 1996 presidential election, and much was made of the fact that President Clinton was well ahead of his Republican rival, elder statesman Bob Dole, in the polls. Ross Perot ran as an independent, as he had in 1992, but aside from giving Cheri Oteri material for
SNL
, his campaign didn’t have much impact this time around. Clinton’s enormous popularity was a huge boost for me professionally.

In the cold open of the first show, I appeared as a smug Clinton in an interview with Tom Hanks as Peter Jennings, in which Jennings declares Clinton the victor with “zero percent of the precincts reporting in.” This was before the insane 2000 election, when so many news outlets incorrectly predicted Gore’s victory, only to have to withdraw their comments in the wee hours of the night. But in the piece, Hanks/Jennings declares Clinton the winner two months before voters went to the polls.

It was the first of fifteen times I’d be putting on the white wig of the forty-second president that season alone, sometimes more than once in a night. I continued to suffer major lithium bloat, although it was still working for me as Clinton.

But it was more than my ability to impersonate people that contributed to my success on the show. I worked really fucking hard. I continued to live by the mandate I’d given myself at that radio station in Vero Beach all those years ago, that a small improvement every week would add up to major improvement in a year. My drinking sometimes got in the way, but I still managed to make progress. I was going up two or three hundred times a year at the Cellar to work on new impressions, and Caroline’s had a 1:30 a.m. show on Saturday night, so after
SNL
I’d walked the three blocks across town and do a set there.

I also owe a lot to the people who helped me, who perhaps saw some talent or promise in me when other people thought I sucked. In October of my second season,
SNL
veteran Dana Carvey—a master impressionist who had famously done George Bush the First and the Church Lady on
SNL
—came back to host the show. The writers had come up with a sketch in which Dana played Johnny Carson, as he had a number of times during his run as a cast member, and I was to play Phil Donahue. In the sketch, Donahue goes to Carson’s house to pick him up for a game of golf, but Carson refuses to leave until he finds his house keys. Dana was a bit of an angel, because the way it was written, Donahue was the stronger role. He could have had the sketch changed, or stopped it from going on the air if he wanted, but he didn’t. He’s a kind guy, and he understood that I needed help to solidify my place on the show.

It was a huge break for me. Remember, I was older than everybody, and I came from nowhere. A lot of cast members came from Second City, but I was essentially some guy Lorne found in a field on the plains in Somalia whom he’d seen kick a coconut, and he thought, That guy kicks pretty well. We should bring him back to New York, give him a job.

Again, if someone doesn’t walk into your world and pull you out of the fucking mess that you’re in, you could try forever and not make it in show business.

I
n December 1996, we debuted the
Jeopardy!
sketch in which stupid celebrities aggravate the hell out of Will Ferrell’s beleaguered Alex Trebek. This recurring sketch would become a fantastic showcase for Will. Host Martin Short was Jerry Lewis, Norm Macdonald debuted his acerbic and filthy Burt Reynolds, and I did a blustery Sean Connery, although he was not yet the lascivious insult-flinger he would become in later episodes. The double entendres (and single entendres) were left to the Burt Reynolds character. Mostly, a combative Connery threatened Trebek like an eighteenth-century swashbuckler, and all three of us answered the clues so stupidly that at the end Trebek says that money would be taken away from our charities.

In May, we did
Jeopardy!
again. Will reprised his Trebek, Norm his Reynolds, and host John Goodman was Marlon Brando. The Connery character hadn’t caught on yet, so I appeared as Phil Donahue, which had gone so well for me when I played him against Dana Carvey’s Johnny Carson earlier that season. In the sketch, Donahue refuses to answer the questions, instead rambling on as though he were on his own talk show.

When we did
Jeopardy!
in the fall of my third season, in October 1997, Will reprised his role as Trebek and Norm his as Reynolds, but I ventured out as a dim-witted John Travolta, with
Friends
star Matthew Perry playing
Mr. Mom
Michael Keaton, who made faces by way of answering the questions.

It wasn’t until our fourth outing with
Jeopardy!
at the end of that season, in May 1998, that Sean Connery returned. He would be there the next ten times we did the sketch, including my very last episode, when Will came back to host the show in 2009. Host David Duchovny played an airheaded Jeff Goldblum. Norm had left the show a couple of months earlier, so the third contestant would be a rotating crew. In this one, Molly Shannon had a go at Minnie Driver.

With Burt Reynolds out of the lineup, the writers let Connery be the sex-obsessed blowhard that he would become known as. As the sketch opened, Connery tellingly misread a psychology category: “I’ll take ‘The Rapists’ for $200.” In a later episode, he would misread “The Pen Is Mightier” as the “Penis Mightier.” After Trebek corrects him, he says, “Will it really mighty my penis, man?” And even as Trebek further tries to set him right, he declares, “I’ll order a dozen!” In later episodes, the Connery character would take it up a notch, never missing an opportunity to declare that he’d been banging Alex Trebek’s mother.

I
’ve often said that if you’re not prepared to lose a finger, a thumb, or any other body part during an
SNL
workweek, you’re probably not going to do well. There is tremendous drama all the way through to the very end, with the entire world watching. Models and political figures and world leaders and athletes and dogs and aardvarks and llamas and dancers, people in period costumes with parasols and high hats, a Model T Ford rolling by, Hillary Clinton walking by, Tom Cruise walking by, and then after a week of grueling work, you get cut from the show. You feel like your career is over, and you sit in your dressing room, trying not to cry.

That’s what it was like during the third episode of my second season, when I did a couple of pretaped voice-overs but didn’t appear on the show. It didn’t happen that way a lot, but when it did, it was brutal. Later that season, I was slated to be in a fantastic cold open, but host Helen Hunt, who was hot off the success of her soon-to-be-Academy-Award-winning role in
As Good As It Gets
with Jack Nicholson
,
decided she wanted to do a bit singing Christmas carols instead, so my piece didn’t make it. When I found out, I wanted to shoot myself. A few weeks later, I had a great piece with Sarah Michelle Gellar where I played Gene Shalit, the
Today Show
movie critic with the ginormous handlebar mustache, and she and I slow-danced, but it got cut. Being cut from a show feels like the first time a beautiful young woman calls you “sir.” It takes getting used to.

You have to go through it for a while to realize Lorne didn’t hire you for no reason. He knows what he’s doing, and he wants you there. The writers are trying to get you in the show, even if they can’t always do it. Maybe the set wouldn’t come from Brooklyn in time. Maybe the host wanted to say “Live from New York.” Maybe the musical guest couldn’t act. There are a hundred reasons you might still be in your dressing room biting your cuticles instead of on the stage when 11:30 rolls around.

T
here were times when I felt good about the work that I’d done after the fact. I felt like a hitter going to bat with two outs in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series every week. You don’t get up in the morning doing joy jumps, thinking that’s what’s going to happen today. I rarely did character sketches except for occasional bit parts, I only did impressions, so that about cut in half my ability to get on the air. Some of the cast developed partnerships with certain writers—Will Ferrell had Adam McKay, Adam Sandler had Tim Herlihy. Given the special nature of what I was doing there, I didn’t have that special kind of relationship with any of the writing staff. No one’s bad, that’s just how it was.

I
might wake up Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. and think, Oh my God, I just figured out how to do so and so. The smallest trifles in the world could improve a piece of four-minute theater. So I’d go in early and try to get those changes made.
How do I get something rewritten? Who do I go to? I’d like to add a line. I’d like to subtract a line. I have a new voice. I figured out a way to do the voice I couldn’t do last night, but I can’t get in touch with the writer
. All the sketches need to get to the cue cards around noon, and the cue card guys only do rewrites at certain times during the day, so I had to find out when
that
is.