Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (61 page)

He won’t talk to anybody about the show. He’s done with it. He’s not bitter about it, he loves it. He totally credits the show. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think he does get pissed when they make fun of him, only because the show would have gotten canceled if he hadn’t been there. There would be no show. So he deserves a pass on that aspect. The show would have absolutely gotten canceled. There were really no stars. Have you watched the reruns on Comedy Central, when they do the intros and Don Pardo is saying the names? The yell on Eddie Murphy is so much greater than for anybody else in the cast.

LORNE MICHAELS:

As the fifteenth anniversary approached, I met with Eddie Murphy. He couldn’t have been nicer, was very gracious, but there was a thing that Billy Crystal had said about him in a
Playboy
interview that Eddie didn’t like. So what I was told was that Eddie would come on the anniversary show, but he wouldn’t want Billy Crystal to be on. And I had already invited Billy Crystal. I think Eddie felt Billy was wrong for telling tales out of school.

TIM MEADOWS:

I think Chris Rock and I had a good time just being friends and experiencing and stuff, but I don’t think creatively he had a good time. I think it was hard for him to express his comic thoughts and stuff and the kinds of things he wanted to do. A lot of his stuff didn’t get on, and it’s the same as it is now. Chris and I would have maybe one sketch a week or every other week or whatever. I mean, we never had shows like Dana or Mike. I’ve never been in more than four sketches in a show, in the nine years I was there. I’ve never had a show like Will Ferrell, or Jimmy Fallon for that matter. Even when Jimmy was a featured player he had more sketches than I would.

CHRIS ROCK:

I was on the bench. Three years, sixty shows, I probably was on fifty-five, fifty-two of them. I had a talk with whoever the new black guys are now, Tracy Morgan and the other guy, I forget his name. They don’t really have stars now, so I told these guys they’ve got to assert themselves. When I got there, there were stars, real stars. Dana Carvey was a star of the show. Dennis Miller was a star. Mike Myers and “Wayne’s World” was really popular. Phil Hartman was big on the show. There were a lot of big people on the show. So for me to not get on wasn’t that big a deal.

Black people I guess stopped looking for me after the second year. You know what happened? It was like, when Eddie was on, there was nothing else for black people to watch. So his first year he didn’t get on until the end of the show, I was one of those black people who’d wait until the end of the show to see my favorite guy. By the time I got on, there were all these other things on TV with black people in them, so you don’t wait until the end of
SNL
to see a black guy. You watch another show. Eddie Murphy was for everybody, but we got him first. We knew.

My frustration was half that, and the other half like the black comedy boom was happening and I wasn’t part of it.
In Living Color
was a big show, and
Def Comedy Jam
was on HBO, and Martin Lawrence was on. So there was all this stuff happening, and I was over here in this weird world, this weird, Waspy world. But the things I learned there — there’d be no
Chris Rock Show
, I never would have had the success that I had with that, if I hadn’t been on
SNL
learning how to run a show. I didn’t go to college. So it was all school to me. Everyone was a professor — Professor Al Franken, Professor Phil Hartman.

NORM MACDONALD,
Cast Member:

I always hear about how Chris Rock was underutilized and stuff. That’s not really true. I mean, they let you do whatever you want on that show. So you can’t blame anybody. It’s just that Chris is a great stand-up comedian, a great voice. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he’s a great sketch-comedy comedian.

CHRIS ROCK:

“Can’t compete with white people, man. You’ll lose your mind.” My mother told me that a long time ago. “Just find your spot. Find your spot, work within that spot.” Okay, everybody’s writing sketches for the host. They’ve got to do something without the host, let me write something without the host. I was a separate thing.

With Tim Meadows being on the show, you know somewhere in your mind that if there’s two nonwhite, pretty good sketches, they probably won’t both get on. And they’ll never go back-to-back, even if they have nothing to do with each other. One could be about medieval times and one could be a drag-racing thing, but you’re never going to see this sketch with a bunch of black people, and this other sketch with a bunch of black people, back-to-back. One might go near the top of the show and the other would be at the end of the show.

That’s how it was in comedy clubs too. One black comic goes on at nine o’clock, they will not be putting me on at nine-fifteen. Same goes with women. It was just men in power overreacting, overthinking things.

FRED WOLF:

The one thing I will say is that while Chris was on the show, I would walk somewhere with him and everyone was recognizing him. Everyone out there knew who he was, and typically he’d have more of a black slant to some of the stuff he was doing. And I think he felt like his audience wasn’t really watching
Saturday Night Live
, and that may be the case. But I also think he’s been able to cross over quite a bit, and I think some of the stuff he learned at
Saturday Night Live
or was able to sort of do at
Saturday Night Live
probably helped him prepare for that.

If he had started at
In Living Color
, maybe he would have jump-started much faster than he did at
Saturday Night Live.
My observation was, yeah, he was having a rough time. But I don’t think
Saturday Night Live
hurt him in any way.

CHRIS ROCK:

Maybe I could have worked harder. As I think back on it, I worked just as hard as anybody else, but as my father raised me, “You’ve got to work harder than the white man. You can’t work as hard; you’re not going to get anywhere.” I don’t want to say anything bad about the place. They’re good people.

It’s not the place for a black guy, it’s not the hippest place, man. We used to always get the black acts the year they were finished. Like the music acts. So we got Hammer when he did “Too Legit to Quit,” when he did
The Addams Family
theme song, on his way out. We get Whitney Houston on the way out. I’m just telling the truth, man.

Who wrote for me? Me, man. Just me. No black writers and no one really got into that side of the culture. Half the culture’s into some form of hip-hop sensibility, half of the white culture, it’s not just a black thing, but the show’s never really dealt with that part of the culture. Even now.

DAVID MANDEL:

I was a fan of Rock’s from before I got there, and I had his original stand-up album. He’s a genius, obviously. And his stand-up acts are as close as it gets to perfection. At the time, I just don’t think what he was doing was just exactly right. I mean, even now, when you see the success he’s having in the movies and stuff, he’s basically still playing variations on Chris Rock. At the time, on the show, people were trying to write characters for him and things like that. And I just don’t think that’s what he does, and so it was sort of a bad match at the time. I don’t think anybody was saying that was genius and it wasn’t getting on. I just think it wasn’t a good match.

Chris seemed incredibly frustrated. So were a lot of people.

CHRIS ROCK:

It was the best time of my life. The show, that’s one thing. But then there’s the hang. The hang was the best time of my life. I honestly tell you, I made friendships that will last for the rest of my life. Most people had to share, they had a partner in their office. I had a four-person office: me, Sandler, Farley, and Spade, we shared an office. And those are my boys for life. For life. I love those guys.

ADAM SANDLER:

Backstage with Chris Rock, Farley, Spade, was the best. Nothing was better than having a read-through. You stayed up all Tuesday night — all of us did that — and then we’d do the read-through and you wouldn’t know what was getting on the show but you’d have an hour or so while those guys were figuring it out. So we’d all go to China Regency up on Fifty-fifth, and we’d eat and watch Farley eat more than us. Farley was so happy; I think we went there the most because they had a lazy susan. It’s easier that way. That’s all we did, we just talked about comedy — what we just heard in the read-through, what was funny, what we didn’t like, what we thought was going to get on, what was going to get past dress, that kind of stuff. We lived for comedy. We still do. Every one of us — sadly, I think. The women and the other people in our lives have to deal with the fact that we think of our comedy first. I’m not saying that when something important comes up we can’t drop it, but it’s on our minds more than you would think. We wake up thinking about jokes, we go to lunch together and that’s all we talk about. I think we’ve become pretty obsessive with it. “Obsessed” or “obsessive”? I don’t fucking know.

JANEANE GAROFALO:

I was on from September ’94 to March of ’95. Less than a year. I’d been a longtime fan of
SNL
. I mean, it certainly has had its highs and lows — lows being the Jean Doumanian era and then another low being the brief time that I was on it. Those are the two lowest of the lows. The season that I was on it, the system was geared toward failure. The prevailing comedy tastes were certainly none that I could support or get behind. I did not think we were doing a quality show, and if you mentioned that, you found you were an extremely unwelcome guest. You’re a very unwelcome family member if you do not wholeheartedly accept whatever the level of comedy is at the time.

CHRIS ELLIOTT,
Cast Member:

All the performers there are required to write. That was another thing that bugged me when I got there, was that there was this pressure that, if you wanted to get on the air, you had to write some material for yourself. And I had stopped doing that. I was at a point now where people were writing for me, and when I did write, I was getting paid for that. But at
SNL
performers are sort of just expected to write. For nothing. It’s not a separate sort of deal. I remember mentioning that to Herb Sargent once while he was urinating. And he sort of, you know, blew me off. How does this show get away with having these guys write stuff and not pay them through the writers guild? And I guess there’s just some loophole about performers writing their own material that gets away from the guild.

The only thing I can remember actually enjoying doing on that show was something that was very Lettermanesque, where I just started a skit that was really lame and then, you know, broke in and just told everybody, “That’s it for me. I’m leaving
SNL
. Good-bye.” And walked out of the studio. And as soon as I went through the studio doors, it turned black and white and it was kind of obvious — it looked a lot like, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald being brought down the hallway at the Dallas precinct, and then I get shot at the end. Anything else that I did on that show, I didn’t do very well.

JANEANE GAROFALO:

I had desperately wanted to live in New York City and do a live comedy show from that building — 30 Rock. I just thought it would be the greatest job in the world, and I had friends who had done it and friends who were on it — even though, oddly enough, I had been warned by everyone who had been on it not to do it. I had friends who were writers who had left and a couple of cast members who had left who I was friendly with who said, “You’re not going to like it.” They just felt it would not be a place where I would thrive, especially coming off of
Larry Sanders
and Ben Stiller’s show, which were very progressive, intelligent, and collaborative television programs.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:

I think people just thought I would go there and do my own thing and, you know, be great on the show. And I was thinking the total opposite — that I would go there and everybody else would write for me and I’d have an easy walk through the show. And neither happened.

JANEANE GAROFALO:

I can still remember one sketch in particular, where aliens had taken some of the male cast members on the ship and had anally probed them and written “bitch” in lipstick on their chests. Is that funny? It was a Maalox moment every five minutes. I had irritable bowel syndrome every day. My drinking just got out of hand. I would credit
SNL
with being very instrumental to some bad habits that certainly increased.

I wanted to quit after the first week. I phoned my agent and said, “This is not a good fit. There’s something wrong here.” There is a tangible, almost palpable — perhaps the word is “visceral” — feeling of bad karma when you walk into the writers room. There is something rotten in Denmark.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:

There were so many people in the cast. There was no reason for there to be so many people. There were times when I’d get in my Munchkin makeup and sit until, you know, five to one and come out and do one sketch. There was no reason. When the show first started and there was a smaller cast, it was funny to see, like, Belushi doing Marlon Brando and then having to run and change and be in some other sketch back-to-back. And that never happened with us.

JANEANE GAROFALO:

Every Wednesday there was always a great show in there. There were always funny sketches on Wednesday. Just somehow, I don’t know why, writers were doing some really great, funny stuff that was not getting on the air. I don’t know. For whatever reason, that season seemed to be the year of fag-bashing and using the words “bitch” and “whore” in a sketch. Just my luck. I was always surprised that a chapter of ACT UP never showed up to protest — honestly.