by Mohr, Jay
I grew up in the small town of Verona, New Jersey. Verona is practically Utopia in terms of raising a family. A middle-class town of about 16,000 law-abiding citizens, Verona comes complete with clean streets, grassy backyards, lots of Little League, and a community pool. Unfortunately, when I grew up there, the kids my age were primarily guidos. Guido is the term that the Italians of my youth would use to refer to themselves. Translated literally, I think it means “really Italian.” I’ve always had a very fair complexion with blond hair and blue eyes. When I would go to the mall with a couple of pals, they would have their dark hair moussed up and slicked back and gold chains around their necks; they reeked of Drakkar Noir cologne. Problem was, so would I. At one time I even wore an Italian horn around my neck—you know, for the ladies. It’s safe to say that I looked a little different from the rest of the pack.
When I gave up on my lifelong dream of being Italian, I began to wear my hair the way I wanted, like a normal kid. I began to wear my own clothes and stopped saying words like “malron.” I threw caution to the wind in my quest to simply be myself. But who the hell was I? I was a comedian. Once I figured out what made me high, I would stop at nothing to get it.
One Saturday morning when I was fifteen, my best friend James Barone (a guido) drove me to Rascals Comedy Club in the bordering town of West Orange. There was an ad on public access television that week that Rascals was searching the country for teenage comedians. Heck, I lived right down the street. I don’t remember much of what I said that day, but I can assure you it was awful. Regardless, I had been given a precious glimpse of Technicolor that day. I couldn’t wait to see it again.
After I finished high school, I planned to attend community college, but when I reached the parking lot on enrollment day, I turned the car around. I was going to be a comic, and the only school for that was in the clubs. I continued doing one-nighters—as they are called—earning $25 here and $50 there. Through persistence, I met Barry Katz, who agreed to manage me. I made the rounds of the New York clubs—the Boston Comedy Club, the Comic Strip, the Comedy Cellar, and the now-defunct Village Gate—and soon I was approved to do backup at Catch a Rising Star’s Princeton club. Though I was being paid $50 to sit around in case one of the comics on the bill didn’t show up, this meant that I would have a chance to become a featured performer there, which paid $500 a night. Forget community college, I was going to Princeton.
My big break came when I auditioned to become an MTV veejay and was hired to host the show Lip Service, a lip-synch game show. Instantly, I became more marketable on the college circuit because I now had 600,000 television viewers. I knew I had made it when I was hired to perform at my grandmother’s alma mater, a women’s college in Denton, Texas, for $750—which represented the entire balance of my checking account. For me, the family connection was huge. I proudly showed my mom the contract—though she was more shocked than sentimental because I was going to be paid $750 to tell jokes.
After thirty episodes, Lip Service was canceled, but it gave me a lead item for my résumé. I was soon hired to do a pilot for an ABC sitcom called Camp Wilder that costarred Hilary Swank and Jerry O’Connell, which would air for twenty episodes. For the pilot, I was flown to Los Angeles and put up at the Century Park Hotel. I was nineteen, and the room had a minibar. My first afternoon, I sat on my balcony, looking out over the swimming pool and the city of L.A., downing beer after beer, thinking, I will never be more successful than this.
It was official: One Saturday night in July, I was going to have a shot at SNL. The audition would be at the Boston Comedy Club in Greenwich Village, which is owned by my longtime manager, Barry Katz. As you might imagine, this is an amazing luxury for a young comic. If you can’t get stage time at your manager’s comedy club, then you’d better leave the business. But it was hardly the home court advantage for an SNL audition.
The Boston Comedy Club isn’t exactly a suit-and-tie joint. It’s located on the second floor above an Irish pub that has live music. Regularly, you will be onstage and hear “Auld Lang Syne” pumping through the floorboards. The club is also next door to a fire department. Now, I don’t think it’s asking too much for people to call the fire department in between shows, but like clockwork, every other weekend you could count on being onstage at the exact same time someone called in a three-alarm fire. Off the fire engines would race—if you were lucky—but more likely they would sit in the thick Greenwich Village traffic with their sirens blaring, for once, thank God, drowning out the sounds of “Auld Lang Syne.”
The Boston Comedy Club is also a rough room. People in the Village on weekends get really drunk, and some wind up sitting in the room. Slurred heckling ensues, and if you don’t have your thick skin and your A game, they will bury you. There are lots of things to do in Manhattan, and they know that you know it. White, black, or Hispanic, young or old, it doesn’t matter, they will all sit there with their arms folded, telling each other “This guy better be funny.” In short, this is the last room you would choose to have a showcase for Saturday Night Live. But it was, in fact, on one particular summer evening in this room that I had mine.
My manager drew up a schedule of eleven comics. I was batting third. Marci Klein, the SNL talent coordinator, and a few others from the show were sitting in the back of the room with the dreams of eleven human beings in their beautiful, shiny, Saturday Night Live hands. It was about 99 degrees outside; it was also the night that the air conditioner at the Boston Comedy Club broke.
Heat definitely rises. As people got loaded and danced in the pub downstairs, their body heat mixed with the 200 or so people sitting shoulder to shoulder in the comedy club. The room became unbearably hot, and comic after comic performed in front of some very uncomfortable customers. The heat in the room reminded me of when you go into the attic of your house in the summer as a kid. As the mercury rose, Marci Klein and company became increasingly irritated.
I went on third, and the SNL group all left immediately after my set. Eight comics busted their chops that night, not realizing that the people they were showcasing for were long gone. They had probably tipped two different cabdrivers by now and were no doubt sipping apple martinis someplace with a powerful air conditioner. They watched three comics that night, and I was one of them. Seriously, what are the odds? They’re so tough that when Jim Carrey auditioned long ago, he wasn’t picked.
Barry pulled me aside that night after my set and told me that Marci really liked me and wanted to see me again, the next time with Jim Downey and some of the cast and writers. I foresaw a tremendous problem falling asleep that night, so I began to get blissfully shit-faced.
A week later, I showcased again for Saturday Night Live at Stand-Up New York on the Upper West Side. I carried a very pessimistic attitude into my second audition, which I convinced myself was realism. I didn’t take the showcase very seriously. I figured, Why get my hopes too high for something that was nearly unattainable? I decided that my best bet was to just relax and have fun. What I was really doing was keeping my “monitor” down—a term that Buddy Hackett would use years later to explain the DNA of a comic performance.
I would meet Buddy on the set of the film Paulie, and my friendship with him became one of the great treasures of my life. For some reason, Buddy took great pleasure in giving me bits of advice and insights into stand-up comedy. I couldn’t think of a better comic to be dispensing advice. Buddy truly believed that stand-up comics were special people—not special in their individual talents, but special in our capacity to provide happiness to others. Buddy also believed we as comics had a brotherhood: We were an amazing circle of people with a responsibility to take the stage and give 100 percent every night to make others’ lives brighter. He sure made mine brighter.
One day Buddy asked me what my monitor onstage was. I asked him what a monitor was. A monitor, Hackett explained, was the number of distracting thoughts in your head when you’re onstage. Thoughts such as “What’s that sound?” “Why is the wait
ress talking so loud?” and “Why aren’t those people laughing?” are all part of the negative and counterproductive side of your monitor. Basically, any thought that inhibits the projection of your natural self is a piece of your monitor.
Buddy’s theory was that the first time a comic goes onstage, his monitor is almost 100. Standing onstage is so foreign and standing in front of a live audience is so frightening that being yourself is the hardest thing to do. Yet in spite of nearly everything in your brain working against you, you still earn applause. Even though you had used less than 1 percent of your natural talent, people still saw a spark in you and wanted you to come back. Buddy went on to explain that as you do more comedy and spend more time onstage, your monitor naturally begins to decrease, and eventually it becomes so small that you can stand onstage and give the audience nothing but your true, funniest self. (Inevitably, I asked Buddy what his monitor was. I assumed, of course, that it would be zero. Buddy replied, “One.” “One? Why not zero?” I asked. He then leaned close to me and whispered, “I always figure out where the fire exits are.” Then he added, “After that, though, it’s 100 percent of 99 percent for the rest of the show!”)
At the time of my second showcase for Saturday Night Live, my monitor was about ten. I thought about all the other comics on the show, about how they were all wearing their “funny” shirts and had groomed themselves to near perfection for their sets. I figured I would be the guy that didn’t primp and iron; I wanted them to see what I looked like before the shower. I went to the gym that night around 8:00 P.M. and showed up at Stand-Up New York around 9:30 P.M. I was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and I was still sweating. Sure enough, every other guy there looked like it was class picture day. I ordered a beer and joked around with my roommate Mike DeNicola, a comic from Brooklyn by way of Wisconsin. Mike and I drank beer and hit on girls until I was in the on-deck circle.
My approach was simple. The last time they saw me, I was doing my act. This time I figured I would be less structured and show them a lot of different impressions. I can either do an impression right away or can’t do it at all. If I have to work on it, it ain’t comin’. I also can’t look at myself in the mirror and do an impression. Some guys who do impressions will rehearse them in front of a mirror. They contort their faces and examine the changes they’ve made. If I look in the mirror to watch one of my own impressions, I can’t really see myself. It’s useless. I’ve tried it, and for me, it just complicates everything. I can never figure out how you can tell if you’re doing a good impression if you’re watching it as someone else.
I took the stage with my three-beer buzz and had one of the best times in my life. I truly did not give a shit. I did Andrew McCarthy, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Arsenio Hall, and Harvey Keitel. When I ran out of impressions, I simply had them all talking to each other. I was improvising nearly everything and the crowd, thankfully, was with me.
The entire time I directed all my energy to the back right-hand side of the room, where I thought I saw Marci Klein and the SNL people sitting. I stared them down with all my power. As important as it was for me to show them how funny I was, for some reason it was equally important to me to demonstrate that I wasn’t afraid of them. After practically every sentence I would look to the back right-hand corner with an expression that said I found them mildly intriguing. It wasn’t until I had been offstage for a few minutes that I discovered that half of the SNL cast, along with executive producer Lorne Michaels, was sitting with Marci Klein in the back left-hand corner of the room. Nice going. I had just spent the most important twenty minutes of my life staring down a real estate agent from Long Island.
I returned to the bar, perched myself on a stool, and figured that was that. Either they liked me or they didn’t. I had a few more beers with the gang and decided to call it a night. When I stepped out onto the sidewalk, there was an enormous white stretch limousine parked at the curb. Marci Klein stood next to it talking to the man, Lorne Michaels. Not wanting to look like a guy hanging around and begging for some validation, I looked away. As I began walking toward Broadway for a cab, Marci called me over. Oh, shit, I thought, I’m drunk!
I walked very carefully toward the two of them. When I was still about ten feet away from them, Lorne extended his hand and said, “That was really excellent.” I reached for his hand, thanked him, and tried for a quick getaway. Basically, I was real happy with my set and didn’t want to say anything to blow it. After Lorne stepped into the limo, Marci pulled me aside. “You don’t understand, Jay, he doesn’t say that to anybody!” I thought to myself, Then where the fuck is he going?
The next morning I awoke hungover and started packing some essentials. I was scheduled for a gig at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina, later that evening. I was looking forward to the show because I was working with Anthony Clark, an outstanding comic. Anthony is an old friend who stars in the sitcom Yes, Dear. We had met on the comedy circuit in Boston and hit it off quickly. Also, I had been to Catawba College once before and the students there were awesome. They were certainly in for quite a show.
Anthony and I flew together from New York to Charlotte, which was about an hour’s drive from the campus. The school put us up in a motel adjacent to the highway. There aren’t too many Four Seasons in Salisbury. We both arrived hungry, so after checking in, we made a plan to meet back in the lobby in about an hour to score some local grub. I was going to my room to take a nap; Anthony was going to go for a swim.
The pool at the motel was by no means filthy, but the cleaning net lying beside it was a welcome sight. Anthony grabbed the net and began the process of ridding the pool of every leaf and insect that had fallen into it.
Once in my room, I undressed and crawled under the blankets for my nap. I found a Cubs baseball game on the television and turned the sound low so I could be lulled to sleep by the voice of Harry Caray. As I was drifting off, the telephone rang. My first thought was that someone in my family must have died. What else could have such importance that I had to be told immediately while lying in bed in a roadside motel in the woods of rural North Carolina?
I answered the phone warily and was relieved that it was my manager, Barry. On the phone with Barry was my agent at the time, Ruthanne Secunda. Barry asked me if they had caught me at a bad time. I told him no and asked him what was up.
Ruthanne spoke next. “You got it,” she said, plain and simple as that. I froze. Got what? I knew what she meant, but I needed more description. Barry clarified the situation. “You, my friend,” he said, drawing out each word, “are a new cast member of Saturday Night Live.”
Strangely, I was not immediately elated. Instead, I felt like a school bus had rolled on top of me. I was dazed. I felt as if something very serious had happened, but I couldn’t quite quantify it. I asked them if I could call them back so I could phone my parents. When I told my mother and father the news, I cried. But oddly, no real joy. I was absolutely dumbstruck.
I pulled on my jeans and went down to the pool to tell Anthony. I had to tell somebody in person. Anybody. Everybody. When I reached the pool’s concrete deck, I saw Anthony, now shirtless, still skimming the pool with the long net. I stood next to him and watched for a while. He didn’t say anything, he just kept waving that stupid pole around. At this point, it looked like he was removing molecules because the pool was spotless. But he just kept going. Finally I blurted out, “I just got Saturday Night Live.” Anthony stopped with the pole and looked up at me for the first time. He was stunned. A minute passed, and he smiled. “Well, there goes that nap,” he deadpanned.
Anthony was genuinely happy for me. I was lucky that I wasn’t doing the gig with some dickhead who would be jealous. That night, in the most beautiful theater I had ever seen, in front of 2,000 students, I was introduced as the newest cast member of Saturday Night Live. Since I had done a show there the prior year, they were juiced. I could feel how happy they were for me. What a show.
Three
A Knee in th
e Groin
I DIDN’T have a single idea in my head. It was my first week on Saturday Night Live and Charles Barkley was the host. This wasn’t bad; it was terrible. The seemingly impossible had happened: I was actually working on Saturday Night Live, filing into executive producer Lorne Michaels’s office on Monday, preparing to pitch ideas for sketches for Sir Charles to perform on Saturday. I had none, but I did have a plan.
I noticed a semicircle forming around Lorne’s desk and guessed that the pitches would start on one side of the desk and then work their way around the room. To act on my own prediction, I had to quickly decide which side of the desk to stand on. I wanted to be dead last to pitch so I could listen to everyone else’s ideas and hope for the light fantastic to strike. It was my only hope.
I picked the right side of Lorne’s desk, on the far side of the office. After some aggressive maneuvering, I managed to wedge myself into a position where I would be either second or second to last. Dave Mandel, a writer from Harvard, was on my left, and across the room, leaning against the wall, was David Spade. If Lorne said David, I was safe; if it was Dave, I was probably going to be axed before I saw any airtime. The office door swung closed and Lorne looked up from his desk. One glance generated instant quiet from the rowdy crowd. After a few seconds of silence, Lorne said, “David…”