God, if You're Not Up There . . . (19 page)

And once, the voice I was doing got screwed up in a completely new way. When Queen Latifah was hosting, we did a Regis Philbin sketch. I always played him a little over the top, but this was different. I’d taken steroids earlier in the day because I was having trouble sleeping and I was exhausted. Two little pills, and for sixteen hours I was so finely tuned and so springy, I was like a shiny new toy. My whole being felt stronger. But my brain and mouth had trouble coordinating all this new energy, and my speech seemed to take on a life of its own. When I got to his trademark “Am I right, Gelman?” part of the sketch, I said it so manically that it was as though Regis had turned into Porky Pig.

I felt like the work, with the exception of Clinton, was always incomplete. It always amounted to a last-minute distillation of age, dialect, speech impediment, and, if I was lucky, a couple of gestures.

With Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, I started with Tom Joad. That is, Henry Fonda as he played Tom Joad in the 1940 film of Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath.
It struck me that the two men had similar accents and tones. So I started with Fonda, and then made him older. The physical part was pretty easy to master because Rumsfeld held himself in such a particularly taut way. And his attitude with the press was distinctive; the way he held his head up and squinted, as though literally looking down his nose at the mere mortals assembled before him. Those were easy gestures to imitate. We introduced him on
SNL
in November 2001, in the wake of 9/11 when he was frequently in the public eye. In a sketch mimicking Rumsfeld’s notoriously testy press conferences, I said, “I’d like to give you a better answer to that question, but I fell asleep during the first part of it.”

So there you have it: the man who so frightened the press that they started to call him Dr. Strangelove was based on a mild-mannered Dust Bowl Okie, and a fictional one at that. I heard later that the secretary of defense liked my impression of him, although when asked about it by a journalist during a press conference, he snapped, “If I want to talk about
Saturday Night Live
, I’ll bring it up.” It was a great line, and, as I recall, it got a nice laugh.

Near the end of my first season on the show, the
Daily News
called me “the best impressionist anywhere, at any time.” The following week, the same paper gave me a shitty review about a bad impression I did of Tom Brokaw. I ran into the reviewer at a coffee shop a month later and told him he was right, and he was. I never did Brokaw again, happily handing those reins to Chris Parnell, who did extremely well with it for ten years, right up to the second presidential debate sketch we did in the autumn of 2008 when I played John McCain against Fred Armisen’s Barack Obama, and Parnell, who’d left the show two years earlier, came back to play Brokaw as the moderator.

T
here isn’t that much cracking up on air, but it’s a guaranteed laugh from the studio audience if you suddenly slip and giggle. I was pretty good at keeping it together, although it was a struggle whenever Amy Poehler’s Kelly Ripa climbed all over my Regis Philbin. But I out-and-out lost it on a few occasions when something unexpected happened.

The first time was in my third season, when we were doing a sketch called “Riding My Donkey Political Talk Show.” It was me, Will Ferrell, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer, and Jim Breuer. It was exactly what the title said it was, a political talk show that took place while riding donkeys. I was playing Sam Donaldson.

At one point in dress rehearsal, my donkey turned around and looked at me, then looked at my crotch as if thinking, “Excuse me, but are those balls by any chance? I’d really like to find out.” And went for it. The sketch fell apart, but—assuming we could get the donkeys under control—it showed a lot of potential.

By the time we got on air, the donkeys had been sedated or something. I was wearing a catcher’s cup, just in case. When my donkey whirled his head to see if my crotch still existed and tried to make a go for it, his legs went out from under him. We all started laughing. All the donkeys were having trouble keeping their footing. I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen anywhere.

The next time, in March 2002, was during one of my favorite sketches ever, with Horatio Sanz and Sir Ian McKellen. Horatio was genius playing a Turkish talk show host, Ferey Muhtar, and in a rare instance where I didn’t do an impression, I was his Turkish Ed McMahon, Tarik. Ian McKellen played a Turkish dance club owner who was a guest on the show. All three of us were wearing dark wigs and mustaches, and everybody was smoking cigarettes.

It was funny enough when Horatio started the sketch blathering in faux Turkish slang, and then Sir Ian came on and kept touching his package, which cracked the house up. I didn’t realize that my mustache was coming off, and every time I spoke, it flopped around my face. As I’m speaking the line to Sir Ian, “Don’t give me that suck job, man,” he reached over and tried to reattach my mustache. I tried to stay in character, but the audience was howling, and I lost it. Horatio giggled every time he looked at me—the reattachment failed, so the mustache kept flapping. Finally Horatio ad-libbed, “We all know you got a drinking problem, man, c’mon! You got the fake ’stache! You can’t even grow a ’stache, man!” By the end of the sketch, the mustache was gone, Horatio—staying in character by the merest of threads—was saying “We’ve got a show to do, bro!” and I could barely speak my lines, I was laughing so hard.

The third time happened during a cold open in 2004, a re-creation of the last episode of
Friends
, but with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld leaving the Bush White House instead of Rachel leaving Ross. I played Rumsfeld opposite Will Forte’s Bush (he’d taken over the recurring role after Will Ferrell left the show). I remember the script was still being written as we were approaching the stage, so I didn’t have a handle on all of it. A lot of it was shown to me on paper, but I hadn’t seen the cue cards yet. It didn’t really matter, because the house exploded into the loudest laugh I ever heard when Rumsfeld and Bush embraced in a big full-mouth make-out. As we unclasped, I turned to the camera to say “Live from New York,” and Will snuck in two extra kisses to the side of my face that weren’t part of the script. That was the only time I was fully facing the camera when I cracked.

When I walked offstage, Jeff Zucker said, “Classic.” He seemed very pleased.

The last notable time happened in 2007, when Molly Shannon came back to host the show. Molly is a genius at four-minute theater, and she always held something back during rehearsal that she’d spring on us on air. No one has ever consistently blown the roof off a place quite like she did.

During this show, we did a sketch where I was Dan Rather moderating a presidential debate between fringe candidates that included Bill Hader as Tony Blair, Amy Poehler as Dennis Kucinich, Maya Rudolph as Fantasmagoria Purlene Robinson, Andy Samberg as Lord Simon Frothingham, and a bunch of others—you can imagine how bizarre it was.

When it was over, I had three minutes to change from staid newscaster Rather to Jersey gangster Tony Soprano for a sketch in which Tony auditions a new dancer for the Bada Bing club. I was backstage in one of the change booths under the bleachers—where we went when there wasn’t even time to go to the quick-change booths down the hall—while someone from hair pulled Rather’s wig off me and then squeezed an almost-baldy wig on; someone from wardrobe helped me out of the suit and into a bowling shirt and slacks; someone from makeup took one nose off and put another on; and someone else from makeup dabbed me with foundation. If I’d had time, I would have gone over to the cue card department, under the bleachers on the other side of the studio, to have at least a quick look at the final dialogue, but there was no time. In the middle of this, a piece of scaffolding fell on my head.

By the time the three minutes were up and we went on air, my eyelashes were semi-glued together, I had pancake in my mouth, and I was trying to get the sting out of my eyes. I looked up at the cue cards and I didn’t recognize the dialogue—at all. I was so thrown by everything that had just happened that my Tony voice came out like Brando with a New York accent, which, as it turned out, worked well enough to get the laughs, but it was not what I had planned.

Then Molly came out. She was playing her recurring character Sally O’Malley, who always proudly declaimed, “I’m fifty years old!” With an unflattering red knit pantsuit and a white handbag slung over her arm, Molly attempted to dance provocatively around the stripper pole. I interrupted her “moves” to tell her she was too old, but nobody puts Sally O’Malley down: Molly hiked up her pants halfway to her chest to reveal the
biggest
camel toe ever seen on live television
. Molly pointed to her “desert rose,” then put her foot on the top of my head, forcing me to look right at her crotch. The place was complete thunder, and I was gone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I Saw What You Did, and I Know Who You Are

I
f I’ve learned anything on this earth, it is that people will pay money to laugh. Recession or no recession, war in the Middle East or tornadoes in the Midwest, the Comedy Cellar is packed every Friday night. Say you’re bored on a Friday afternoon, you want something to do, so you go see a comic do a sixty-minute show. On a good day, that’s five laughs a minute—a laugh every twelve seconds for an hour. That’s three hundred laughs. I think that’s worth a two-drink minimum.

During the
SNL
season, from September to May, I went to the Cellar to work on new impressions Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays. I never went on Wednesdays, because that was read-through, and obviously I didn’t go on Friday or Saturday (except for that late show at Caroline’s after
SNL
). During the summer hiatus, I hit the national circuit.

Once I was on the
LIVE! with Regis & Kelly
show, and I was getting ready to say good-bye when someone handed Regis a card to read. “Darrell Hammond will be at the Improv in Baltimore this week.” He looked over at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Improv in
Baltimore
?” That eyebrow said, What in the world are you doing
that
for?

Truth is, I didn’t turn many jobs down. I knew that one day
SNL
would end, and the chances of having a second career in show business were slim to none, so I wanted to make every single cent that I could possibly make. I had a lot of energy. I drank a lot of Red Bull. I’m not blowing smoke up their ass because I want an endorsement deal (although I do). I discovered that magic elixir on weekends when I would fly to Arizona or some other place on the far side of the country, and I’d get wicked jet lag. I’d do an hour of stand-up already tired as fuck, and still have to face a second show. The audience would be rowdy and noisy and not paying attention, so I’d have to be at my über-best to score and control them. A couple of Red Bulls, and I’d be crystal clear. I’ll be honest, the best performances I’ve ever given were while riding that Red Bull wave. And I’m not saying that because I want a contract (which I do).

I
don’t know if it’s comedy in particular, or fame in general, or maybe it’s just me, but I seem to attract strange women. Not my wife, and not some of my significant others, but out there in the world, my molecules seem to cry out to the oddballs, “Hey, wanna hang out?”

I was sitting in the Cellar one night after a show when a girl came and sat down. She was in her mid-twenties, and had been watching
SNL
since she was a kid. She talked about the minimalist approach I took to Cheney, and the lyrical swoon of Clinton. I thought she was an English major. I was very impressed.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m a fetishist,” she said.

“What is that?”

“I jerk people off with my feet.”

I should have won an Academy Award for keeping my composure.

“Can you make a good living?” I asked, as though she’d told me she did something as ordinary as trading pork futures on the Commodities Exchange.

“Oh, yeah. I go to their apartment or sometimes a hotel. We talk about Chaucer or Rembrandt for a while, drink some wine, then I jerk ’em off with my feet. I charge a lot of money for that.”

Then she said, “I kind of have a crush on you. Would you be interested?”

A little alarm bell went off. No matter how cheery and well put together she was, something told me to sit this one out.

“You know what? Maybe another time.” I’ve regretted it since.

A
nother night I went to a club on the Lower East Side with a runway model, and everything in the place was yellow. They had yellow plastic forks, yellow knives, and yellow plastic spoons, yellow napkins, yellow counters, yellow walls, and yellow cups.

There was a guy speaking French to somebody playing chess. His fingernails were really long and dirty, his hair was matted and speckled with dandruff. He started talking to me about a sketch that I’d done on
SNL
.

Meanwhile, this runway model, who was ostensibly my date, wandered off into the back room.

“What’s back there?” I asked.

“Some of the guys back there will trade coke for sex.”

Oh. Of course.

S
ometimes the women were more than strange. Sometimes they were dangerous.