Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  Whew! With the exception of Dave Mandel, everyone would pitch before me. Think, damn it! I prodded my brain. Concentrating was particularly hard because as I was trying to come up with an idea, people like Al Franken and Adam Sandler were telling the host what they had in mind. That’s some pretty difficult stuff to tune out. Even more difficult to ignore was a pitch from Tom Davis, a writer from the highly regarded comedy team of Franken and Davis.

  Tom excitedly pitched Charles Barkley doing a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial. Before he had gone far, Charles interrupted with a frosty “What?” But Tom pressed on about how Charles could tap-dance for spicy chicken, slowing only to refer to his notes. Soon Sandler began laughing, followed closely by Farley. The rest of us were staring at Tom, horrified that he was standing by his idea of Sir Charles peddling chicken. I thought I was off the hook. Even if my idea—the one I had not yet conceived—sucked, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as Charles Barkley tap-dancing for chicken.

  I overheard someone on the floor talking about Barney the Dinosaur’s new kids’ album. I thought of Barney the Dinosaur. I thought about Charles Barkley. I pictured Barney the Dinosaur and Charles Barkley. The ideas were creeping through the semicircle and looping toward me. Sooner than was comfortable, I was next. Life all comes down to a few moments, and this was one of them. If I didn’t pitch something decent, I was a dead man. Then it hit me. Charles Barkley had a Nike commercial out at the time where he played one-on-one basketball with Godzilla. What if Charles Barkley played one-on-one basketball with Barney the Dinosaur!

  “Jay?” Lorne said.

  I steeled myself and pitched “Barkley vs. Barney,” a one-on-one pickup basketball game to the death. Everyone in the room smiled. Sometimes it’s just a roll of the dice. All those clubs I worked in all of those cities in all those cornfields, and my entire career seemed to have been determined by which side of the room I was on. No matter now, I had delivered big-time. “Barkley vs. Barney” was chosen as the opening monologue of the show that week—the first show of the nineteenth year of Saturday Night Live.

  Talk about strange. Two days later, at 6:45 A.M., I walked into the gymnasium at Hunter College and saw Barney standing under the boards next to Al Franken. The show must have gotten a great rate on the gym, because for some reason we all had to be there by seven in the morning. I knew why the guy in the purple dinosaur suit was there, but I wasn’t exactly sure why Al was. He wasn’t in the sketch.

  It turned out that the producers had assigned Al Franken to “oversee” the sketch. No one told me this, I gleaned it from his body language. I had naïvely assumed that if I wrote a sketch, my role during filming would be to explain how everything should go creatively. After all, they told me that’s why I needed to be there. That’s why I went. But I quickly became a spectator to my own sketch.

  Putting Al in charge wasn’t a bad idea, but I felt that someone should have filled me in on the protocol. Al was from an entirely different generation than most of the cast members. He was a grumpy fellow with a constantly furrowed brow who was fast approaching fifty. Despite the fact that Al was going into his eleventh year on the show, he was still a featured player and not a full cast member. He clearly didn’t want a rookie’s input on the “Barkley vs. Barney” sketch. From the get-go, Al took over the entire production. I can’t say I blame him. I had no idea how to produce a sketch with an entire camera crew and sound guys. Whenever I offered a suggestion, Al would look at me like I just farted.

  The first thing I discovered was that my sketch had been rewritten. When I asked Franken why several of the jokes had been removed, he replied that I had gone home and someone had to do the rewrite. True, the night before I had left around midnight, about the time it was clear that “Barkley vs. Barney” wasn’t going to be discussed for a few more hours. What was there to talk about, anyway? It’s Charles Barkley kicking the shit out of Barney in basketball. The most baffling change was that I had Barkley first charging into Barney, then elbowing the dinosaur in the face, and finally kicking him in the balls. I asked Franken what happened to the progression of basketball violence leading to the knee in the groin. “A knee in the groin isn’t funny,” Franken told me.

  Weeks later, when Emma Thompson hosted the show and Smashing Pumpkins was the musical guest, Al and I had another dustup. Emma Thompson had just broken through in American film, and though I knew who she was, I made the mistake of wandering through the writers’ room, a blank on ideas that was causing me to blank on everything, and bothering Franken about it. He was sitting at the writers’ table chewing on a pencil. He would go through about three pencils a night with his mouth. I asked Al, “Who is Emma Thompson?” He went ballistic. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He threw his chewed pencil across the room. “She was nominated for a fucking Academy Award!”

  I thought he was remarkably angry for such an innocuous question. Most of the writers were seated at the table with Al and had seen and heard the entire exchange. I was being screamed at like I was a child in front of my coworkers. I looked around to see if anyone was going to tell Al to calm down, but they didn’t. I was on my own. I looked at Franken and asked, “Hey, Al, who are Smashing Pumpkins?” Franken turned red and then bluish red. Getting up from the table and storming out of the room, he yelled over his shoulder: “I don’t know. But they didn’t get nominated for a fucking Academy Award!” Uh, touché, I guess.

  Charles Barkley arrived shortly after seven. He was much smaller in person than I had anticipated. He was about six feet five with his high-tops on. I couldn’t help thinking that Nirvana’s bassist, Krist Novoselic, is taller than Charles Barkley. Al pulled Sir Charles aside and explained to him how the sketch would go. He didn’t introduce me, so I introduced myself. I told Charles that I had written the sketch and was new on the show. Charles was a real cool guy. He was very personable and friendly. It was seven in the morning, so in hindsight, I guess he was a peach.

  Someone from the school brought out several basketballs and Al, Charles, and I all instinctively started shooting baskets. Now it was officially a great day. I was pulling down rebounds for Charles Barkley and he was getting them for me. I really stink at basketball, but, damn it, I was gonna fake it. I bounced a couple shots off the iron and then moved in for some layups. Charles called for the ball and I dished it to him with a beautiful bounce pass. He threw up a brick. He retrieved the ball, shot, and missed again. And again. And again.

  I began counting. Shot after shot, from wherever he was on the floor, he couldn’t buy a basket. It made me uncomfortable. Should I be witnessing this? After shot number eight clanged off the back of the rim, Charles explained himself. “I haven’t picked up a basketball since the horn sounded in the finals,” he said.

  Ten shots and still nothing. Eleven went in and out. Twelve was an air ball. Thirteen bounced off the side of the rim. Finally he nailed his fourteenth shot from about twenty feet straight in front of the basket. “Let’s go,” he said. And with that, Charles didn’t miss more than five out of a hundred the rest of the day.

  There was a stunt coordinator on the set to make sure the guy in the Barney suit wasn’t injured, which was a good thing. I had written the sketch so that Charles beat the snot out of Barney. The action began with Barney guarding Charles one-on-one and Charles cracking the cuddly, lard-ass dinosaur in the face with an elbow. In take after take, Barkley was murdering this poor guy. The stunt coordinator assured Charles that there was a professional stuntman in full padding under that Barney suit. At one point, Charles elbowed the stuntman in the face so hard that the entire Barney head popped off. The thing probably weighed five pounds, and Charles knocked it clean off a guy’s head with one shot. Nice.

  For the next couple of hours, it was more of the same. Barney getting punched, kicked, cracked in the head—you name it. When we finished, the stuntman peeled off the suit. As he emerged from the costume I could see that he was indeed in full padding. Every inch of his body had some sort of pad on it. He lo
oked like he had just fallen off a motorcycle. He was drenched in sweat and his entire face was covered in scratches and abrasions. He looked like he might start crying. Mental note: Never piss off Charles Barkley.

  After we finished shooting the sketch, we all had to go to the offices for the rewrites and rehearsal. Charles was nice enough to invite Al and me to ride with him in his limo back to 30 Rock. He talked about golf the entire trip. The only thing I could have contributed was that I once caddied and had enjoyed Caddyshack, so I kept my mouth shut. Besides, because I was the new, unfamiliar face on the show, there was always a pregnant pause after I spoke. The guest host would look at me as if to say, “Sorry, who are you again?”

  Though I wasn’t going to be performing in any sketches that week, I didn’t care. A sketch that I wrote was going on the air, and I was cruising through Manhattan in a stretch limo with Sir Charles. Baby steps.

  I had written “Barkley vs. Barney” so that after Charles referred to it at the top of the monologue we could just roll tape. When the sketch was over, Charles would say, “Nirvana is here, so stick around.” This would eliminate the traditional monologue, which is usually the least funny part of the show. Perhaps this is because it’s written dead last. I’m talking Saturday afternoon. Why this is, I never figured out. Since the show opens with the monologue, logic says it would command some type of priority. It doesn’t.

  The night of the show, I felt fantastic. It was actually happening. Worst-case scenario, I had written the opening monologue/sketch for the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. For the first time since I walked into 30 Rock, I felt like I had really contributed something. With “Barkley vs. Barney” as the monologue, no one would have to sit through a host reading cue cards written an hour before showtime.

  As the countdown to the show began, I didn’t know where to stand. I figured I should be on the floor watching over my sketch like a parent. That’s what I had seen the other writers do during rehearsals. When the show is in progress, there’s an organized chaos in the studio. It’s an electricity unlike any that I have experienced anywhere else, on any other project. Cameras are flying around the room. Actors are running across the studio to their next setup. All of this is happening around the eighty audience members sitting in chairs on the stage floor. The camera and cable guys have worked there for years and know exactly what they’re doing. Intermittently throughout the show, audience members would be asked to stand up from their seats to let a crane or a piece of a wall pass by. I certainly didn’t want to be standing someplace where I was responsible for any mishaps, especially since there is no correcting an error in a live show.

  The moment arrived. Don Pardo, the NBC announcer, ran down the Saturday Night Live cast: “Ellen Cleghorne, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Melanie Hutsell, Tim Meadows, Mike Myers, Kevin Nealon, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, David Spade, Julia Sweeney…and featuring Al Franken, Norm Macdonald, Jay Mohr, Sarah Silverman. Musical guest, Nirvana. And your host, Charles Barkley.” He lowered his voice to hit the perfect basso cantinato tone. “Ladies and gentlemen…Charles Barkley.”

  The rest of my life began. I constantly repositioned myself to stay out of the way. I must have moved five times in the first three minutes. When “Barkley vs. Barney” ended, the crowd went bananas and gave the sketch a rousing ovation. Charles waited for the applause to die down. “Stick around, Nirvana is here!” he said.

  I was in. A real team player. Everyone had seen what I could do, and I was now on my way to becoming the most famous cast member ever. Undeniably, I thought I was going to be the next Eddie Murphy. There was going to be an applause break the following year when my name appeared in the opening montage. I wasn’t being cocky. That’s always been my personality as a performer. If people leave my stand-up show and say it was pretty good, this wrecks me. Why would this be any different? After all, out of everyone in the country who auditioned, they hired three new people—and I was one of them.

  Four

  Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday

  THE SCHEDULE for putting together Saturday Night Live was made back in the seventies when everyone was on coke. For the two years I was on the show, the schedule was the same as it had always been. Problem was, no one did coke and we were expected to keep the same hours.

  The fact that a show pieced together in two days has stayed consistently funny for more than twenty-five years is truly amazing, but I never understood why the format had to be so unnecessarily difficult. On top of the strain of working the most bizarre hours I had ever known, there was a vagueness to the entire process that was crippling. Everyone seemed to always be on their way to somewhere else. Every question I ever asked anybody was answered as they walked away from me, and no suggestions were ever offered. I assumed that they simply hated me. That would have been fine, but I think that having been on the show awhile, they were just afraid to stop moving. Also, why slow down your day helping the new guy when you’re trying to keep from drowning yourself?

  When I started working at SNL, I was told to be there on Mondays at 1:00 P.M. A few other guys would be there by then, but as with my first Monday, the majority of people showed up much later. When I was hired, I didn’t know how to turn on a computer. While other writers were typing sketches and modeming them to wherever sketches went to be printed, I wrote mine with pencil and paper on a yellow legal pad with horizontal blue stripes and red vertical stripes and then sat around the office with the finished product wondering where to turn in my pages. My Harvard officemates couldn’t help me because they handed in their sketches with the push of a button. It took me about three days of roaming the hallways asking everyone I saw, “Where do I hand in my sketch?” before I knew what a production assistant looked like. All of them tried to be helpful, but they were inevitably on the fly, so they’d point in a general direction and mumble something with their backs to me.

  Early on, it became clear that my body was not reacting well to my new surroundings. My stomach was always knotted. I never knew what time it was. I stopped looking. The clocks on the wall mocked me. Shapes shifted and sounds came and went. I stopped eating out after Norm Macdonald put the fear of a bad avocado in me. I couldn’t sleep, and when I did, it was usually on the couch in my office to the sounds of Dave writing and the smells of Dave chain-smoking. For want of a better expression, I started to feel unsteady. I would wake up each morning with the feeling that something bad was going to happen. All day, I would have to shit with the same intensity of a grade school kid who had just been summoned to the principal’s office. As the months dragged, these feelings increased dramatically.

  One Monday morning early in the first season, I woke up feeling bizarre. Physically I felt all right, but in my brain something was definitely wrong. Have you ever seen an enormous storm approaching while the sun is still shining? Try to take that visual of thick black clouds rolling in and put it in your subconscious. Everything around me looked and sounded normal, but I had a strange and sinking feeling that it was only a matter of time—a matter of time until what I didn’t know.

  I took my seat on the N/R—the subway line with the yellow-looking caution sign that heads north and then snakes east underneath Manhattan—and opened up the New York Post. As the train lurched forward, I suddenly began to feel like I had to escape. Not escape like get off at the next stop; escape like “Holy shit! The train is on fire!” For some reason I took my pulse: 120. Was I having a heart attack? One more stop, I reassured myself.

  At 34th Street, a homeless man boarded the train and began asking for change. What happened next occurred in slow motion. As the homeless man came closer to me with his cup out, I could feel my heart beating in my head. I started to gnash and grit my teeth. I wanted to kill him. But my homicidal intentions were soon overtaken by the sudden realization that I was about to vomit everywhere onto everybody. I closed my eyes and began to pray. I prayed that I wouldn’t die on the N/R train by choking on my own vomit while having a heart attack. My heart felt like a volcano
ready to erupt.

  I was going to die. There was no doubt about it. I didn’t think I was going to die, I knew I was going to die.

  I couldn’t hear anything, but I saw the subway doors open at the 49th Street stop. My stop. If I could just get out of my seat, I wouldn’t have to die on the train. I could die somewhere with a little more dignity—on the subway platform or the sidewalk. I stood up and started to walk off the train. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with a fear of having to go to the bathroom. My next thought was to hurry up and run before the doors closed.

  So run I did. I ran from the pole on the N/R train at the 49th Street stop all the way to Rockefeller Plaza. The entire way I was engulfed in absolute terror. The world was ending, or at the very least, mine was.

  When I arrived at the SNL offices, I took my pulse again. With all the sprinting it had skyrocketed to 200. I ducked into an empty office and reminded myself to stay away from the windows. I lay down on the couch and tried deep breathing to slow my heart rate. I did that until I got up and ran to the bathroom and vomited continuously for an hour.