by Breuer, Jim
“Well who the hell is he?”
I quickly reminded Dad that Lorne had created the whole show, then grabbed him by the arm and hustled him over to the doorway.
“Lorne,” I said, smiling. “Before you take off, I wanna introduce you to my dad.”
“Oh,” Lorne turned and smiled warmly. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Breuer. Your son is very talented.”
Dad just screwed up his face, looked at Lorne disgustedly, and said, “Yeah. So, I flew up here all the way from Florida to see the show. What happened to him?” He jabbed his thumb into my chest. “He wasn’t on.”
I immediately started sweating.
“That happens sometimes,” Lorne said calmly and politely. “I can tell you that our host next week, Chevy Chase, inquired about Jim and is excited to work with him.”
“Next week? ” my dad said, grinning. “Who gives a shit about next week? I’m back in Florida then. Why wasn’t he on this week? The show sucked.”
“Nice meeting you,” Lorne said drolly, then just walked out the door.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, certain I’d be given my walking papers on Monday.
Not too long after Dad and I rejoined our group, the waitress came over to the table with a bill for $800. I looked at the bill, and then I looked up at the waitress and said, “I’m sorry, I’m a cast member.”
“Oh, cool,” she said. “Can I take your credit card for this?”
“I don’t think you get it,” I explained. “I’m on the show.”
“I know that,” she said. “And I’m telling you that your bill is eight hundred dollars.”
“But I’m part of the cast. NBC is paying for it.”
“No, no, no, no,” she laughed. I was the one who had something wrong apparently. “The cast pays for their own stuff. You ordered the drinks and the shots, and you get to pay for them.”
My guest list got considerably smaller after that night.
I’d done stand-up by myself for so long that being part of a team again—and a dysfunctional one at that—was difficult. SNL had the most unusual system I’d ever had to navigate. You worked so hard that it was truly satisfying when you made it to air and killed, but getting there was such an effort.
For starters, there just wasn’t enough airtime for the amount of talent on the cast that year. It was discouraging to sit at the pitch table and watch my fellow cast members continually bring in hilarious ideas. At the same time, I admired them, too. These folks were able to knock out everything. Week after week Cheri Oteri would walk in with slam-dunk characters. She had the cheerleaders with Will Ferrell, a little kid, a crazy woman on a porch, Barbara Walters, Debbie Reynolds, you name it. She was a monster. Molly Shannon was the same way, with her awkward Catholic schoolgirl, Mary Katherine Gallagher, blowing up. Mark McKinney had the Chicken Lady. And Will was basically in every single sketch; he was unstoppable. I quickly sized up the competition and concluded there was no way for me to get on the show. These guys were monsters.
Over time, the Shut-up Guy became one of the most popular characters never to appear in a sketch. Lorne liked him, and I worked for three years to get him onto the show, but the closest he ever got was the fifteen- and thirty-second show promos that aired during the week on NBC. In those first couple months, it was a self-perpetuating cycle. The more I worried about not getting on, the less funny I was. I had no confidence. And without confidence, it was impossible to make sketches go. I had a nine-episode contract and was certain I’d be shown the door if I didn’t come up with at least one hit character by then. Later that season, in fact, two of my fellow brand-new cast members, Nancy Walls and David Koechner, were let go, so the pressure I felt was real.
By early November, I’d routinely pace the halls, looking for clues that I was getting fired. One night, I ran into Will Ferrell in the hallway and asked him point-blank if he thought any of us—namely me—were going to get canned.
“I’m just not getting my stuff on,” I said, looking around suspiciously. “I don’t think I’ll be long for the show.”
“No,” Will said innocuously. “I haven’t heard anything. Don’t worry about it.” Then he smartly kept walking. No one wanted to get tangled up in my bad vibe. The cast got along pretty well, but at the end of the day, everyone was fiercely protective of their own material and concerned mainly with their own job security. Being vulnerable or appearing vulnerable was something you wanted to stay as far away from as possible.
Since the show started, I’d gotten on where I could—I had a nanosecond in a fake commercial for A.M. Ale; I fell down the stairs in a Chevy Chase sketch; and I had a couple of beat-myself-up characters—pulled from my stand-up act—in sketches. But the week after Thanksgiving, I was running on empty. Anthony Edwards from ER was hosting, and nothing I’d thrown out in Monday’s pitch meeting stuck.
Pitch meetings kicked the week off. It was our first real chance to meet with that week’s host and find out what they were into. We’d all go into a giant room and sit around a table with Lorne and the guest host, and toss out ideas for that week’s show. It was a fun, loose process, but tough, too, because you were just recovering from the last week’s show and you didn’t always know what this week’s host was going to respond to. Anything could happen.
Norm was known for fake pitches in those Monday meetings. He’d purposely pitch the worst stuff. Tom Hanks hosted one year, right around the time he’d won two straight Oscars. We were doing the pitch meeting and it was Norm’s turn. He very energetically stammered to Tom, “I got this great idea where you’re the, ah, ‘shit my pants guy,’ like you just, you know, shit your pants. But you don’t know why! You’re just like, ‘Yeah, I shit my pants.’”
Tom, being superpolite, gave an anticipatory half smile, waiting for Norm to elaborate. Norm continued, completely earnestly, “And everywhere you go, you shit your pants. People stop and say, ‘There’s the guy who shits his pants.’ It’s gonna be funny.”
Total silence. After a beat, Lorne just wrinkled his lips, raised his eyebrows, and said, “Next.” Norm would never bring anything real into a pitch meeting. He had a steady gig—“Weekend Update”—and was the brightest star on the show at that time. He’d do these awkward, uncomfortable joke pitches only with really big guests, which made it even funnier.
Rather than get uptight about not having anything coming out of the pitch meeting, I decided to change my attitude. Good things always happened to me when things looked the worst. My folks moved to Florida—I overcame it and turned it into a positive. As a waiter, I never learned the elaborate drink glass system at TGI Friday’s—I quit and wound up with a bunch of free ice cream. My manager inked me to a bad contract—I still got on a TV show, met Tracy Morgan, and learned a lot of life lessons. My first network sitcom fell apart—but I got to work with and drive around L.A. with Dave Chappelle.
So I came into work on Tuesday and just started winging it, trying to stay loose. Instead of walking around with fear, my goal was just to make people around 30 Rock laugh in their day-to-day existence. Never mind getting on air; I wanted to get back to just being funny for being funny’s sake.
There was this hippie kid interning with the writing staff who was legitimately terrible at easy stuff like taking messages and remembering to give them to you. But he was funny, and I liked to stop and gab with him once in a while. So that Tuesday, with nothing much going on for me work-wise, I bumped into him in the writers’ room and started doing Joe Pesci.
“What are ya, eatin’ lunch? ” I said. “You call dat a roast beef sandwich? Whatsamatta? Whaddaya bustin’ my bawls for, kid? You got some noive.” I went on like this for a few minutes, just riffing and trying to make him laugh.
He loved it. “How come you’ve never tried this on the show?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Pesci’s gold,” he said. “You’ve got him down perfect.” I could see the wheels start to turn in his head, thinking about where this could fit into the l
ineup. He snapped his fingers and said, “You know, you really should take this onto the ‘Update’ with Norm.”
“Really?” I said. “How would that work?”
“Well,” he explained, “Pesci has a movie coming out. Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag. So you’d go on the ‘Update,’ as Pesci, to promote the movie, and ask Norm if he’s seen it yet, and Norm, of course, hasn’t, and that makes you mad and you just go off in a rage.”
“That’s great,” I said, laughing, and started pretending I was Pesci berating Norm. One of the head writers, Steve Koren, walked by, then he stopped and came back.
“What the heck is so funny?” he asked, and looked at me quizzically as a grin spread across his face. “Wait, are you doing Joe Pesci?”
Out of all the writers on staff, Steve would end up being my biggest champion. He was a Queens guy, from near where I grew up. He had long hair and looked like the kind of guy who’d be happier in the woods than in an office. He’d helped Molly with her Mary Katherine Gallagher character, later went on to write for Seinfeld, and also wrote a bunch of movies.
“Yeah,” the intern said enthusiastically. “Breuer does the most unbelievable Joe Pesci.”
I kept talking like Pesci, and the intern told him his “Weekend Update” idea. Steve smiled.
“You guys got a few minutes?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. I had nothing but time.
“Come to my room,” he said. “I’ve actually had an idea for a Pesci sketch for a long time.”
So we went to Steve’s office and sat down. I hadn’t planned on any of this.
“I’ve always wanted to do Pesci as a talk show,” Steve confessed.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “He could even have De Niro as a sidekick.”
Steve agreed. “Sure. And other people he worked with would be guests. My idea is that in making a movie with them, Pesci got mad or felt wronged by them, built up a grudge, and he’s going to handle it like Tommy from Goodfellas would.”
“Yeah,” I said. The whole thing was building organically. “He could have a baseball bat at his desk.”
“And one by one,” Steve said, nodding, “he’s going to have them on his show and settle the score by beating the crap out of them. Every single time.”
“Totally,” I said. “He could do that with any big-name star. Whoever our host is that week, he’d have them on, get really impatient with them for trivial crap, and then beat ’em down.”
We worked Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, banging out the shell of a script. Steve had the idea stewing around in his head for a while, and I was fluent in all things Pesci, so it came together pretty fast. My stress disappeared and I felt like I had a renewed purpose. At the same time, I was impressed with Steve’s command over how his words and jokes would come to life onstage. No detail escaped him. He knew what it took to sell a character, even the most comically absurd ones.
“Lock into Pesci completely and lose yourself,” Steve said, bringing up specific scenes from Raging Bull and Goodfellas. “Remember how Tommy moves when he stuffs Billy Batts in the trunk?” he asked. “Get the body language down, and stay in character, no matter how over-the-top it seems, and Lorne will eat it up.”
We ran the basic concept of the sketch by Anthony Edwards.
“I love it,” he said.
“Do you do any impressions?” I asked. “Who do you think Pesci should beat down?”
“Ugh,” Anthony groaned. “I really suck at impressions.”
Steve pondered this news for a second before a mischievous grin spread across his face. “Macaulay Culkin?”
“Yeah!” I said. “Why not? Joe Pesci got his ass kicked in Home Alone.”
“You up for it?” Steve asked Anthony. “Don’t worry about getting Culkin down, all you have to do is act like a little kid. In fact, let’s make you an overgrown Culkin with too-short pants.”
The key to the Pesci sketches was the impressions. The night Jim Carrey played Jimmy Stewart while Mark McKinney played Jim Carrey was surreal. The more twists the better. We wrote Anthony as Macaulay Culkin into the sketch and brought it to the Wednesday read-through, just to see what would happen. Often, some of the funniest stuff on the show wouldn’t come together until late in the week. If there were any holes in the lineup, and you had something funny, you always had a shot. Everyone gathered around a big table, a couple of sketches were read, and then Lorne looked at us and asked, “Whaddaya got?”
“Hey,” I said, looking around the room, going right into my Pesci voice. “I’m Joe Pesci and this is The Joe Pesci Show!”
Lorne started laughing immediately, rocking back and forth in his chair. People around the table were howling. We read through the script and Anthony loved it. It made the lineup. I’ll never forget that feeling, knowing I had something locked, loaded, and going onto the show.
The biggest killing I’d seen on the show was Molly doing the hapless, crazy Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher. I couldn’t believe the roar of the live crowd while she was doing that sketch. After hearing that, I didn’t want laughs. I wanted that sound—a huge, all-encompassing white noise. In the dress rehearsal that Saturday, the minute the sketch started and I said, “I’m Joe Pesci!” I heard that noise, and I knew that my contract was saved, at least for the rest of the season.
Shortly after the New Year, Alec Baldwin hosted the show. He had a big, serious movie—The Juror, with Demi Moore—coming out in a couple of weeks. Even back then, I marveled at the guy’s versatility. He can take on any role, usually with a heavy display of bravado and masculinity, and knock it out of the park. I also knew, as he consistently proves nowadays with 30 Rock, that he could be funny, too—darkly funny—and poke fun at himself in the process.
Because the first “Joe Pesci Show” crushed, Steve and I were feeling a little cocky. Walking around the studio, I was way looser. If I ever got canned and all people remembered of me was “The Joe Pesci Show”? I was cool with that. I’d killed on one of the legendary stages in American comedy, and no one could take that away from me.
Steve and I knew that to do the sketch again, and do it right, we had to have someone do a unique and great impression. Sketches get tired fast for many reasons, and doing them repeatedly just because they crushed once is a sure way to bore the hell out of people. Even most of the cast recognized that about their own sketches and would grumble to one another if Lorne or a guest host asked that a dead horse be trotted out to get beaten yet again.
But having Alec Baldwin as a host brought a prime opportunity to put our best stuff on the table and let him go to town on it. “The Joe Pesci Show,” Steve and I figured, was no exception. Not only is he a superb actor, but Alec was one of the only SNL hosts besides Tom Hanks who was super approachable 100 percent of the time. Most were nice, undoubtedly, but those two guys just really got it. They dropped their ego and fame at the door and were game for whatever was going to be funny. From the minute he got there, Alec ingratiated himself to everyone, hanging out in the hallways, talking to both producers and custodians or having a sandwich in the writers’ room with whomever was around. He was happy to learn about you—your wife, your family, where you grew up. And when he said, “We should all go to dinner Thursday night . . . ,” he actually meant it, and he’d include everybody.
Early in the week, in the writers’ room, Steve and I were BS-ing over lunch and studying Alec, who was sitting nearby, gabbing with a couple producers.
“Look at that mug,” Steve said, nodding in Alec’s direction. “You know what? He’s De Niro.”
“You’re right,” I said, smiling. “Think he’ll do it?”
“Let’s find out.”
We waited until there was a lull in Alec’s conversation and then slid our chairs closer to him.
“Hey,” Steve said. “So we did this ‘Joe Pesci Show’ thing back in December. ...”
“Yeah,” Alec answered, breaking into a grin. “That was funny.”
“We w
ant to try it again this week,” I added.
“Excellent,” Alec said.
“And we were hoping that you would play Robert De Niro,” Steve said. The warmth left Alec’s face quickly as he clammed up and gave us a terse answer.
“Nah,” he said with a shrug and a shake of his head. “I don’t do impressions.”
Both Steve and I started laughing because what Alec had just done, whether he knew it or not, was a spot-on impression of De Niro. It was classic De Niro, tight-lipped, not very forthcoming—he favors using short, compact facial expressions more than words to communicate.
“That’s all you gotta do,” Steve said, smiling. “You don’t even have to speak, you’re already hilarious.”
Once again, Alec said, “Nah, really. That’s not my thing,” in a very De Niro way. “I couldn’t play Bobby.”
I backhanded Steve on the arm. “Did you hear him say ‘Bobby’? ” I turned to Alec. “You must know him,” I said. “Only people who know him call him that.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I see Bobby from time to time, you know, at parties and events.”
“Well,” I explained, “all you’d have to say is two lines.” In the sketch, a guest would come out and say the most harmless thing, and it would get misinterpreted by Pesci. The guest would be clueless, but then De Niro would remind the guest à la Raging Bull that he, too, had “heard some things” or that what the guest said was a “li’l bit” offensive to Pesci—in the same way De Niro’s character Jimmy said it in Goodfellas. Naturally, it would all lead to an epic beat-down by Pesci.
“Two lines?” Alec asked with a glint in his eye. “That’s all?” I nodded yes. That got him encouraged enough to start making the famous De Niro mug, where he tucks his chin in, doesn’t say much, and almost looks like he’s smiling. He started looking around the room, mugging, in character, twisting his neck and trying it out.
“See? ” Steve said, reassuring him. “That’s perfect.”
“That’s all you gotta do,” I said. “You come sit next to me out there, and when the guest gets going, and Pesci gets offended, you just say, ‘I heard some things,’ and that will set Pesci off even more.”