The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (18 page)

It was nice to share the stage with that kind of manic energy. For one thing, you knew the focus was elsewhere. No one was watching me. I could have sat down and eaten a sandwich during some of the sketches we did together.

You never really shared the stage with him. It was always his stage, and deservedly so. The weird thing is that nobody got mad about that. There’s a lot of competition on that show, but no one was competing with Farley. We’d all get upset if someone else had a sketch on and we didn’t, but I can’t think of one person who was ever upset about Chris getting a sketch on. No one ever complained.

Whenever I was watching Chris perform I would think, “How do I get where he’s at? How do I get to be as funny and as honest and as warm?” There are comics that I’ve worked with who are the most self-involved bastards you’ve ever met in your life, and they can’t fake the kind of decency Chris had. Chris was someone who was very vulnerable; it was a card he played. It was a tool in his actor’s repertoire, and yet it was something totally genuine. Even when he plays Matt Foley, and he’s hectoring people in this totally overbearing way, there’s a tinge of the character’s own neediness. Even underneath that, there’s Chris.

He was so fallible. People just felt for him. Women felt protective of him, because they could tell he wasn’t watching out for himself. And men related to all his anxieties and imperfections.

One time we were in the studio, and Chevy Chase came by. Chris was practicing one of his pratfalls. He showed it to Chevy, and Chevy said, “What are you breaking your fall on?”

Chevy always had something to break his fall; you plan these things out. But Chris had watched Chevy and bought the illusion of it. How do you fall? You just fall on the ground and you don’t mind the pain, because that’s the price of doing it. So there was an honesty and a straightforwardness in him that people responded to.

What I would do with Chris, when it came to writing a sketch, was just listen to him and observe him. There was this one thing he did. He’d tell a story—and I’m not doing this justice—but he’d tell a story like, “Anyways, Norm. Did I tell ya I seen my friend Bill the other day, and I says to him, I says, I look him right in the eye and I says to him, I says, I says to Bill, I says to him, get this, what I says to him is I says, get this, what I says, you won’t believe what I says to him, I says . . .”

And of course the joke was that he’d never get to what he’d actually said to the guy. And Chris could keep this going for twenty, twenty-five minutes straight. He’d do it two hundred different ways. It would just get funnier and funnier and funnier. When you can reduce something to four words and be funny for twenty-five minutes without an actual joke or a punch line, that’s genius. It’s not even really comedy anymore. It’s almost like music, like jazz variations.

I always liked comedians who just keep repeating things until nobody’s laughing anymore, but then they take it so far that eventually it’s funnier than it was in the beginning. There are only a couple of performers on the planet who can do that. Andy Kaufman could do it, and Chris Farley could do it.

So I had him do it on Weekend Update. Lorne had decided that the “I says to the guy” segment would last for thirty seconds, which I knew would never work. At dress, I told Chris to do it for four minutes. So he did, and it was just like I thought. People weren’t laughing for a while, but then right as he hit the four-minute mark it was really starting to kill. That’s when I realized he should have done it for eight minutes.

But he never got to do it on air, because Lorne went ballistic on me that I’d let Chris go so far over time. I tried to explain to Lorne that it wasn’t funny for thirty seconds, but Chris understood it completely.

There are people who are smart in a way that has no applicability to performance, but Chris’s brains and his quickness inside of performance were amazing. He knew exactly how to scan a line, exactly what inflection to have, how to time it, what expression to make. A great performer is someone who puts together a half a dozen things in an instant, and Chris was one of the most skilled performers I’ve ever seen in that respect. And he knew that his opportunity would come. He wasn’t sitting there, calculating how he was going to trump you or dominate the scene. He just patiently waited for his moment and then arrived fully in that moment.

When it came to performing in your sketches, Chris was never some egotistical guy who was going to take your material and do it however he wanted to. He wanted to make sure he was getting the sketch the way you wanted it.

The highlight of my career, still, was the first sketch I got on at
Saturday Night Live
, this thing called “The
Mr. Belvedere
Fan Club.” Chris had a big turn in that sketch where he played a crazy person obsessed with
Mr. Belvedere
. He brought down the house. Afterward he came up to me, saying,

“That was funny. Thanks for the good stuff.” I couldn’t believe that about him. To me, it was the other way around. I should have been thanking him.

He always went out of his way to make sure people knew what material was yours, that they were your jokes, and he was just the guy who said the lines.

I worked on some of the Motivational Speaker sketches, because Bob Odenkirk was gone by then. Matt Foley was very much Chris’s character, but Chris was also very loyal. We always had to call Bob up and read it to him over the phone and get his blessing.

There was always an air of competition at
Saturday Night Live
. At read-through, people would purposefully not laugh at something even though it was funny, because they wanted something else to make it on the show. But Chris would laugh no matter what. If it was funny, he gave it a big, big laugh. He didn’t discriminate. He was honest.

I don’t think Chris knew how to hate. I’d feel bad sometimes, because I’d be complaining and I’d go, “You know who sucks?” And I’d go off about so-and-so, some guy on the show. And Chris would immediately go, “I think he’s funny, Norm. Why don’t you like him?” So then I’d just feel like a jerk.

The show was in a very weird spot at that time. During the election year, everything was Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey doing Clinton and Bush and Perot. Chris was a full cast member, and incredibly popular, but in those sketches he’d just do small, memorable turns as Joe Midwestern Guy. Al Franken and I wrote the sketch where Bill Clinton goes jogging and stops in at McDonald’s. In that one Chris played Hank Holdgren from Holdgren Hardware in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. In a lot of those small supporting roles I think you saw the road not taken for Chris. If he hadn’t found comedy, you could totally see him being the friendly hardware-store guy.

When Chris interacted with celebrities, the guest hosts, he would always introduce me by saying, “This is my friend Todd. We met in second grade and grew up together.” He was proud that he was my friend, and he wanted to share that. I remember him regaling Glenn Close with stories of Madison, and you could see that she saw the genuineness in him. She just looked at him and said, “You really are an amazing guy.”

I’m a huge, huge Beatles fan, and so when Paul McCartney was on the show, that was a really big deal. Ten years earlier, Chris and I had been listening to Beatles albums in our basements. He called me during the week at like two in the afternoon and said, “What’re you doing?”

“What am I doing?” I said. “I’m working, like most people.”

“You know what I’m doing?”

“What?”

And then he took the phone and held it up, and I could hear Paul McCartney singing “Yesterday.”

“I’m just here, hanging with Paul McCartney,” he said. Then he giggled and hung up the phone.

The night of the show, he said, “Listen, I want you guys to hang out in my dressing room tonight. I have a surprise for you.”

So, Kevin and I wait and watch on the monitor in the dressing room. McCartney comes out and does the first song, and we watch him, wondering, “What’s the surprise? Why didn’t he come and get us?” Whatever. Didn’t matter. It was one of his new songs. Then the second song comes and goes, another new one, and still no Chris. Just before the end of the show, when we’re pretty sure Chris has forgotten about us, he barrels into the dressing room and says, “Okay, Greenie, you’re on! Follow me!”

We go running down the hallway to the studio. Paul and Linda McCartney come out. Chris introduces me to them. I’m in a state of shock, and the four of us walk out to the stage together. Chris and I stop just short of the cameras, and Paul and Linda go out and he sings “Hey Jude.”

And at that moment, Chris wasn’t a member of the show anymore. It was just two buddies from Wisconsin who grew up on the Beatles, listening to Paul McCartney. Chris literally forgot that he had to go back onstage for the good-nights.

I think, deep down, all of the guys from Edgewood figured that one day we’d end up back in Madison and it would be just the way it was. I think even Chris believed that. Even ranked against all the fame and money and stardom, he felt the days back at Edgewood were the best days of our lives.

When you come to the conclusion that you’re an alcoholic, and you go to these stupid meetings, they’re filled with down-and-out people right off the street. I’d go to Madison, and I’d see Chris, who was on
Saturday Night Live
, had money, had fame. He’d go and drink coffee and talk with these regular folk, and he could talk to them more easily than he could talk to Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney. He felt more at ease with the average Joes.

What he loved was the honesty. Nobody is as honest as they are in one of those meetings, when they’re admitting their faults, admitting that they’re broken human beings. Contrast that with the
Saturday Night Live
after party, where everyone wants you to think they’re hot stuff. They’re putting on airs, and it’s all bullshit because we’re all just broken people anyway. To witness people being honest about themselves and with themselves is a life-changing thing, because it’s something you so rarely see. That’s what’s truly amazing about recovery, and amazing about how it changed Chris.

He was a lot more fun to be around. He was much, much funnier. You could have thoughtful, engaging discussions with him, and he wouldn’t get mad or defensive. That was a huge difference from when he was drinking.

For Chris, being in recovery was a little like being at camp. That’s how he treated it. Make your bed every morning for inspection, that sort of thing. And that carried over once he got out of rehab, too. As disgusting a slob as he was before, he was that clean and organized once he got sober. He turned into a neat freak.

After all the years of being in and out of rehab, I never thought that Chris could take it seriously. But one time I was at this party out in L.A., and I saw him turn down a beer. He was saying no, and he meant it. I thought, oh my God,
he figured it out.
He knows how dire this is, and he’s really taking charge. It wasn’t about pleasing everyone else. It was about him and his choice. I was really impressed, and I thought, wow, nothing is going to stop this guy.

Toward the end of Chris’s
Saturday Night Live
run, my son was born, and he had to stay in intensive care for a week. One day I asked Chris to watch the two older girls while my wife and I went to the hospital. We went down to his apartment, and we were ringing the buzzer, waiting for someone to let us in. There was no answer. I was starting to wonder where the new, reliable Chris was. Then, around the corner here he comes with these huge bags of Cheetos and ice cream and these enormous Barney dolls, walking down the street. It was just a great sight. Chris was so happy that we’d asked him to look after the girls, that we trusted him with that responsibility. He was so proud that he could be a better part of their lives.

Chris paved the way for the rest of us. When he went down to Alabama, I started to look at myself. I was doing the same stuff he was—coke, pot, drinking all the time. I saw where I was headed. I never went into rehab. I just walked into a meeting one day. That’s when I realized we all are alcoholics, the whole family. My mother stopped drinking then, too, at the same time I did. We would go to meetings a lot together. We realized Dad was an alcoholic, and we saw the patterns very clearly once we’d changed our own. But Tommy, Johnny, and Dad were still drinking. Barb was the exception. She was never a drinker at all.

When I look back, or when people ask me what regrets I have, what I realize is that I always felt that Chris’s problems were his own. I was still drinking, and I didn’t take an active role in his recovery. It was his deal, and that was that. Then one day he asked me to come to his second-anniversary meeting, which he was going to lead. I said, “Great, where do you meet?” He gives me the address of this place down on Eleventh Avenue and Forty-something, the real fringe of Hell’s Kitchen. You go down there and you think, Jesus, what am I walking into?

But that’s where Chris liked to go. He had his choice between meetings on Park Avenue and in Hell’s Kitchen, and he wanted to be with the desperate, hard-luck cases to remind himself that his celebrity didn’t put him above them in any way. He stood up there in front of them and said, “Look, I woke up the same way you guys did this morning, wondering if I was going to stay sober today. My disease is no different than yours.” And it wasn’t bullshit. He just seemed so wise and intelligent and in control. I just sat there thinking, this is my
brother
? I looked at him in a whole different light from then on.