Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  I called Foreman “Champ”—which is a word people throw out all the time—because he really was. I asked him what his mindset was when he crawled through the ropes. “I’m scared,” he told me, “because that other guy across the ring trained his whole life to punch me in the face, and people get hurt in my business.” This was not what I expected to hear out of the mouth of the man who beat Joe Frazier like a redheaded stepchild.

  While there was always some fear lurking in me, being on the show was hardly the same as entering the ring in a heavyweight title fight. I had overcome my anxiety about the lack of a take two, and I just wanted to show everyone what I could do. My feeling now was “Put me in, Coach,” and once I was in, it was “Please hit the ball to me.” There was no real fear of failure or success—just the fear of not getting to the plate.

  Courtney Love’s band, Hole, was the musical guest the week that Foreman hosted, and she brought Frances Bean, her baby with Kurt Cobain, along with her. At first I was appalled at the number of nannies—male and female—doting on this baby. Then I realized something strange. They weren’t really nannies; they were guys from the neighborhood. They could’ve even been roadies. They didn’t look like they had had any formal nanny training or were even particularly good with kids. Halfway through the show, another thought hit me: It was past midnight and the baby was awake. Why wasn’t she in the hotel asleep? Because she was being passed around among these rocker maggot types while her mommy rocked the place.

  TLC was even more ridiculous. They arrived with an entourage of at least forty people. It was as if there was someone to work the pinky, someone else to move the index finger, and another person to watch over the thumb. The band members all wore overalls with sweatshirts tied around their waists. After each rehearsal, a guy who probably made $50,000 a year would walk out onstage and adjust the knot in each of their sweatshirts. That was all he did. A different person measured the distance between the girls’ wrists and the cuffs on their sweatshirts. There was something silly about the whole TLC thing, like Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez’s not being recognizable without wearing a pair of eyeglasses with a condom in the left eye and the name of their hit, “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls.”

  I was going to do my best not to go chasing any waterfalls in Manhattan.

  Even when things were going my way, there was always a hitch. I had done Christopher Walken twice my first season on the show. My second season, people would stop me on the street and ask me when I was going to do more Walken. I didn’t want to do the same sketch over and over, so I tried working with a few of the writers to come up with something really different.

  When I returned for my second season, I had come back with three other killer impressions to add to Walken: James Woods, Rush Limbaugh, and Phil Gramm, the U.S. senator from Texas who was then running for president. But Jim Downey told me that I was too young to play Phil Gramm, and no one was interested in my doing Woods. When a Limbaugh sketch hit the read-through table, I pleaded my case, volunteering to put on full makeup and a prosthetic and audition, but I was waved off. Instead, Farley was pegged to do Limbaugh and it didn’t work, which was too bad. Even though Farley had a free lifetime pass as far as I was concerned, it was sad to watch him do something that was not funny.

  As I focused on revisiting Walken, most of the ideas people had were funny but not funny enough to be on the show until Steve Lookner approached me one Tuesday night with an idea that I knew would make the cut. Lookner was one of the Harvard guys that Dave Attell and I had run out of the office, and I didn’t see much of him anymore, since guys stayed with the writing groups where they felt most comfortable. My group consisted mainly of me. I was staring at the walls waiting for something to enter my brain when Lookner stuck his head in the doorway and asked to show me something, which turned out to be a finished sketch of Christopher Walken doing a commercial for Skittles. It was certainly different, and it was definitely hilarious.

  However, the Skittles sketch had a few things going against it. First and foremost, I was the only one in the sketch. Further down the list, the host wasn’t in it and neither were any of the women. I felt in my gut that there was no way a solo sketch with just me in it would make its way onto air, but Lookner and I stayed up until five in the morning rewriting it, and we submitted it for read-through.

  At the table read on Wednesday, Lookner and I were both excited. Even if the sketch wasn’t picked to be on the air, it was going to be a lot of fun reading it in front of everybody. “Skittles” got many more laughs than I had anticipated at the read-through, and Lookner and I waited around afterward to see if it would be picked.

  When the door to Lorne’s office swung open, we were afraid to go in and look. We felt that if it was picked, we would have pulled off a coup of sorts. We took our time walking down the hallway toward the corkboard, giggling nervously the whole way. By the time we made it to Lorne’s, people were already filing out. Some looked pissed off, some looked happy. As we made our way closer and closer, a few people passed us and offered congratulations.

  They had to be pulling our legs, right? When Fred Wolf walked by and offered his congratulations, we knew we had done it. Fred was the type of guy who would never lie about a sketch being picked for air. By the time Lookner and I reached the inside of Lorne’s office, no one else was there. We just stood alone staring at the corkboard. Thumbtacked at the bottom was a blue index card that read “Skittles.” We high-fived each other, and I came darn close to hugging him. With two versions of “Good Morning, Brooklyn” under my belt and now Walken doing a Skittles commercial, I really felt like I was finally showing my stuff.

  The sketch went well at dress rehearsal, but not so great that it was uncuttable. After dress rehearsal, not only was “Skittles” still in the lineup, but a few sketches ahead of it were cut, so I had actually moved up in the show. I was ecstatic. I tried not to smile while Lorne gave us all notes. The last thing someone whose sketch just got cut wanted to see was me gloating from across the room.

  As was customary, the sketch had been timed during dress rehearsal. (All sketches were timed so the show would fill ninety minutes, and the time allotted the sketch was written on the index card under the title.) Under the word Skittles was the notation “:50.” Who knew I could be so happy with less than sixty seconds of airtime? But happy I was.

  Christopher Walken pitching Skittles was the only sketch I was in that week, but I was thrilled. It was strange enough and funny enough to inspire some watercooler conversations when people went to work on Monday.

  I took my place on the stage, which was a basic green backdrop. There were no props other than a bag of Skittles that I would hold up halfway through the sketch. I stood there during commercial break, ready to rock and roll. We came back from the commercial break, the lights went up, and I started my impression. I looked into the camera and said, as Walken, “I would like to talk to you for a moment…about…Skittles.”

  The audience went batshit. They laughed much harder then they had during dress rehearsal. I was in heaven. The crux of a Christopher Walken impression is the awkward pauses in his speech pattern. Each time I took a pause, the audience would begin laughing and I would actually have to wait them out to say my line. It couldn’t have been going any better. The sketch ended and the studio filled with applause. I floated off the stage as the studio went dark and the show went to commercial.

  As I was walking from the stage to my dressing room, I saw Lorne walking toward me with an Amstel Light in his hand. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Finally I was going to get some love from the big man. As we were about five feet from each other, I slowed a bit, and sure enough, Lorne waved his hand for me to lean close to him. “That was a fucking minute and twenty seconds!” he said. And then he walked away.

  I was crushed. I had just done one of the stranger and funnier sketches of the year, and here Lorne was tearing me a new asshole for going over fifty seconds. I wanted to turn to him and say, “Hey, sorry, t
hey laughed so hard that they fucked up the time!” I was on Lorne’s shit list for a week because of thirty seconds. My bad.

  Fifteen

  Weekend Update

  I NEVER THOUGHT that there was a conspiracy at Saturday Night Live to keep me off camera, nor do I believe that I was being forced to pay my dues. I can’t recall anyone who has ever been hired on the show who immediately ate up major airtime. I do think, however, that the general belief on the show is that if you are new, the unspoken rule is that you are to be broken into the rotation gradually. But I felt like John F. Kennedy when he ran for the U.S. Senate: I refused to wait my turn.

  I didn’t see any benefit in waiting, either. I was a performer, and the show needed performances. Jim Downey once told me that the show goes through stages when it is performance-based and others when it is writer-based, and that when it goes through the writer-based stage, it suffers. When Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest were on, it was amazingly funny because they were allowed to do whatever they wanted. How do you pitch Billy Crystal doing “You look maaa-velous!” at a table read? When I was there, Ed Grimley would never have gotten on the air because it would have had to be written, formatted, and put on the table for read-through on Wednesday, at which time Martin Short would’ve had to stand up on the table in front of a roomful of people and dance around. When I got there, they hired around sixteen new writers. It was like ROTC guys from the Harvard newsroom coming into Vietnam telling you which hill to take.

  I had spent my whole life taking the stage and making people laugh. Sometimes I’d take a nap, wake up, and go onstage fifteen minutes later—and make people laugh. Other times I’d get high or drunk and go onstage—and make people laugh. Whether I was working a black room, a gay and lesbian club, or a college auditorium, there was always one constant: I would go onstage and make people laugh. I never understood why Saturday Night Live should be any different. After all, why hire a guy like me if you don’t want a guy like me?

  Of the cast members who were on the show during my stay, all of them were seldom used when they first arrived. Whether it was Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, or David Spade, they all spent more than a year or two saying one or two lines a week, if any. The fastest way to break this waiting period is to create an original character so funny that it’s in the show’s best interest to continue to put the character on air. Spade’s was the Receptionist, Rob Schneider had Copy Guy, and Sandler’s were Opera Man and Canteen Boy. The NBC gift shop located in the 30 Rock lobby sells coffee mugs and T-shirts with the most famous recurring SNL characters on them. I used to browse through the gift shop knowing I had a 20 percent NBC discount and dreaming of the day I could use it for merchandise bearing the imprint of one of my own original characters. I would look at the paperweights and greeting cards with my coworkers’ faces on them and become insanely jealous.

  Still, I never harbored any real animosity toward the show or any of the people who were in positions of power while I was on it. I always knew that the key to my success lay within me. Coming up with an idea to pitch to the host was difficult. Coming up with an original character to launch my Saturday Night Live career was maddening. I didn’t want to have to wait my turn. I wasn’t happy having one line in someone else’s sketch. In hindsight, I was probably on the same path as everyone else who had ever been on the show. But eventually becoming a star wasn’t what I had signed up for.

  I did know that the easiest way for stand-up comics who are on SNL to get on the air is to do a feature during Weekend Update. When your well of ideas has run dry and there isn’t an original character in your head, you could always write down some of your stand-up and submit it for Weekend Update. Chris Rock did this a lot, as did Spade when he started out. I was never comfortable with this process because I figured if my stand-up made Weekend Update, then I wouldn’t be able to use it anymore in the comedy clubs. It was hard enough to come up with sketches twenty weeks of the year, but when those twenty weeks were up, I didn’t want to have to write a new act as well.

  I envisioned myself onstage someplace doing my routines with the audience staring blankly at me because they had already heard what I was telling them. So what I did was to devour all the newspapers I could get my hands on to find some current events items that I could write an Update piece on. Few of the pieces I wrote for Update were ever picked, but I was convinced that it had nothing to do with their humor content.

  Sometimes I would write a Weekend Update piece that would get a lot of laughs at read-through or even rehearsal, but wouldn’t be selected for the show. One sketch I wrote was about a guy who talks about how tricky investing in the stock market is, so he turns to currency trading. He goes to the airport and puts down a hundred bucks and receives several million pesos. “Now, I can’t speak for everyone and I can’t guarantee this investment will pay off, but I walked out of the airport with a few million bones in my pocket,” he tells the audience. “I was on a hot streak until I put it all in German marks and lost half my money. So if you go to the airport, stick with the pesos.”

  “Lance Currothers” was an Update piece that killed at dress rehearsal but was killed before the live show. The sketch featured me as an obviously gay movie critic who sang his reviews. To the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” Lance sang: “Hey, little girl, is your daddy home? Or did he go and dress up like a woman from an old folks’ home. Hey…he’s a maid for hire. Go see Mrs. Doubtfire.” Lance would then score the movie on his Yaah-meter and let out a “yaahh.” Though no one ever gave me a definitive reason, I knew that Jim Downey didn’t like gay sketches, so I suspect his phobia did Lance in.

  I had always thought that getting sketches on the air would be like playing baseball. If you’re playing well and knocking the ball out of the park, you play. That wasn’t the case for me. Some weeks I would write and act in the first sketch of the show. It would do great and I would think to myself, Great, now I’m on a roll! Then the wheels would just stop turning.

  Often a sketch would be put on the air because certain performers in the sketch were light that week. Translation: They weren’t on last week’s show, and to pacify egos, the producers needed to put something with them in it on the air. How can the funniest sketches get on the air each week when the writers have that handicap? You stay up all night busting your ass and your sketch gets huge laughs at read-through, but the corkboard is loaded with sketches that are not as funny and are loaded with light cast members.

  My second season on the show, I started to notice Lorne politicking a bit here and there. I would overhear him say things to Jim Downey like “Mike is light this week.” I always thought it was a magnanimous gesture on his part, but I couldn’t seem to get him to say it about me. This wouldn’t have bothered me if better sketches were getting on, but they weren’t. It would be reasonable to assume that the best sketches are the ones that make it on the air. Definitely not. If the women were light that week and there was a mildly amusing sketch that had all of them in it, that sketch was certain to be picked—though this wasn’t only in regard to the women.

  During my second season, Janeane Garofalo was hired midseason, presumably both to pump some life into SNL and to create sketches for the women. Though Janeane’s very funny and a talented actress, she was a drag when she worked at SNL. Upon her arrival, Janeane told the press that the show was biased against women. What better way to motivate writers to write for you than to tell the New York Post that they don’t want to write for you! She described the show as a boys’ club and a frat house—though apparently no one was notified that I was a boy.

  Janeane’s comments were piling on. The reviews of the show from my first season through the midpoint of the second ranged from savage to brutal. Critics called the show nothing short of humiliating, and headlines like “Saturday Night Dead” were commonplace in the New York tabloids. The negative reviews were almost always accompanied by a reference to the show’s problem with women, which always burned my ass. Eve
ry so often Lorne would begin a pitch meeting by reassuring us that he knew we were working hard, but he certainly never would have addressed such an issue as one cast member complaining to the press about the show.

  Aside from a few brief snickers behind closed doors, the Janeane matter was never openly addressed by the staff. Janeane and I were always friendly, and I’d often go down to Lundy’s Deli with her and Chris Elliott for sandwiches and beers. However, I was annoyed at her for spouting off in public because I was one of those so-called oppressive white guys, and no one was writing for me, either. Many performers write their own sketches. That’s one of the few ways you can attempt to control your destiny. Trust me, if Janeane wrote a funny sketch, it stood a great chance of being on the air because the writers were constantly being asked to create more sketches for the women on the show. The problem was, Janeane realized early on that she didn’t want to be on SNL, so she didn’t contribute anything.