Almost Interesting

by David Spade

  I had been told it was Corbin ahead of time, so I had a little jump-start on my sketch idea . . . and that would never happen again. I went back to my tiny office and started trying to write sketches. My first sketch was not for Corbin at all, because I could not think of a good idea for him. (See what I mean? Stand-up comedians only write for themselves. You don’t know the other person’s comedic rhythm, you only know yours. So it was a hard switch to make at first.) I wound up putting all my eggs in the Jan Hooks basket that week. I had an idea for a sketch about Life Alert, where Jan would play an old lady who was so lonely she kept calling Life Alert just to hang out with the paramedics. As the sketch went on, her reasons for calling would become more and more absurd. “Life Alert . . . I stuck my hand in the toaster, and it’s on dark! HURRY!” Life Alert was a big commercial back then so it seemed timely.

  That sketch was read fourth out of forty-three at the table read on Wednesday. I later learned that being read early was a good sign. Mike Shoemaker, one of the talent coordinators, would create the order of the sketches in read-through. It became clear to me later that the first ten in the read-through had the best shot of making it onto the show, because everyone was ears open, high energy at that point. The read-through room probably had fifty people packed in it from every department—all the writers, the cast, the host, and of course Lorne. Having the fourth sketch up in read-through was great in my first week. Not having the host in it was not. Having the host in the sketch is key. Sometimes the host will choose to drop out of a sketch if they feel they are in too many and replace themselves with a cast member, but really, the goal is to make the host look good, so you are better off writing sketches that include them if you want your sketch to go.

  So, my sketch came up fourth, and as it was read I started to sweat and freak out more than I thought I would. It is such a tense, hot, sweaty, and intimidating room that your heart starts pounding long before your turn comes up. When you write a sketch you get to walk around before read-through and coach people on how you want them to play their parts . . . even the host. It is a fun micro-power trip to give direction to the host, I have to be honest. But with more than forty sketches every week, the coaching doesn’t always sink in, and suddenly you hear the host reading your sketch with an unexplainable Irish accent and you realize you’re dead in the water. It is common for a host to want to “try” things as an actor with your characters. “I thought I’d play that character gay.” Or some such. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it really bombs.

  But I was in the clear, because I had gone with a cast member for my sketch, and Jan Hooks is about as good as it gets. I was so desperate for her to really nail it, because I knew it was my first chance to score as a writer. When we finally get to the sketch, I was drenched in sweat. All the other writers are secretly wanting it to die. Jan read and did a great job, and I got some laughs, and then it was on to the next one. Mine was actually decently written because I had so much time with it and it blended in nicely. No heads turning like, “Who wrote this piece of shit?” After about twenty-two more sketches there was a break.

  The second half of the table read is rough. The sketches aren’t as good, the host is usually getting tired, and you see Lorne start yawning, which as you can imagine is the nail in the coffin. After read-through, Lorne, Robert Smigel, Jim Downey, Al Franken, and all the head honchos go into Lorne’s office and lock the door to make their decisions. They write every sketch’s name on a large index card and put it up on a corkboard. The corkboard has the beats of the show written out. First there’s the cold opening, then the monologue. (This usually doesn’t get written until Saturday, scaring the shit out of every SNL host. On a side note, it’s a sneaky way for a writer to get on the show if you put a monologue in read-through. Because if it works, the higher-ups will be relieved they don’t have to worry about it that week and will maybe even help you—but you will still get the credit! Bonus! It took me a bit to figure this out.) Because it usually took about two hours for the bosses to pick the sketches, it became our ritual to head down to Wally’s & Joseph’s, an old-school steakhouse nearby, for dinner. That place had been there for ages, deep in the Theater District and not far from the studio. My pals and I would all go sweat it out over our Caesar salads, hoping that our cards would land on the right part of the corkboard this week.

  The game starts with all the cards on one side of the corkboard, and as the decisions are made, the cards get plugged into the show in the places that seem right. Back in my time, that might have meant a Wayne’s World cold opening card followed by the monologue (always “to come”), then a sketch or two, followed by Weekend Update, a few more sketches, even cards for commercials. At the very end of the show there is room for one more sketch, which is known around the shop as the 5-to-1 sketch, because it airs at five minutes before 1 A.M. Those are sometimes the most interesting on the show because they are the weirdest, and the riskiest; that is when the show has the fewest viewers.

  That first night, I was sitting at dinner obsessing over my Jan Hooks Life Alert sketch, feeling like I had a decent shot of getting something on air my first week. Dennis Miller had already told me that Rob and I had four shows to prove we were good and to get a sketch on air. If that didn’t happen, chances are we wouldn’t be asked back. So that was rattling around in my head, too, as I walked back to the studio. We drifted around aimlessly until we finally heard, “Okay, the door is open!” We all gathered around the corkboard, ready to meet our fate. Lorne and the rest of the big dogs had already skedaddled because they didn’t want to hear the bitching (a tactic they used every week I was there). I looked up at the board, searching for my sketch. I started at the end of the show and moved toward the front. My heart sank. My sketch wasn’t there. But what I did notice was that it was pinned on the right next to the sketches around Weekend Update. When I asked what that meant, Shoemaker told me, “It’s because they liked it and it almost got on. You can tell the ones that stayed on the left side where we put all the sketches weren’t even considered. If it has been moved it means they thought about it, but yours got outvoted.” Sometimes you are in the show for two solid hours, and then in the last minute before they open the door, a switch is made and you’re out.

  The worst thing is when you realize that not only did you not get any sketches on, but you aren’t in any sketches, either. In that case your week is basically over on Wednesday at 10 P.M. That was my fate my first week at SNL. I headed back to the Omni Berkshire knowing that now I only had three shows to prove myself. I was tired, beat up, and, frankly, scared. As I walked out I saw all the writers who had landed sketches, and they were excitedly talking to the set designers. It just sucked. The amazing thing about Saturday Night Live (and I rarely say “amazing,” unlike L.A. girls who use it five times in every sentence, mostly to describe a salad) the show isn’t even planned until Wednesday at 10 P.M., and the live show is seventy-two hours away. Also, once the sketches are chosen, the process for how the show unfolds is amazing. The writers immediately go into action talking to set designers, then to wardrobe to pick out clothes, then to the wig department to discuss hair and whether each character should wear a wig or use their real hair. It was way more work than I thought, with a million decisions to be made. It looked like fun, but I just kept walking, because I wasn’t a part of it.

  Thursday is rehearsal day for the cast on whichever set is ready, which usually just means tape on the ground where the walls will go after the set designers are done building them. The writers spend Thursdays rewriting sketches. I was under the impression (because no one will actually tell you what to do at SNL, you have to figure this shit out on your own) that you only came to rewrite day if you had a sketch that got on. So I had planned to spend my Thursday night dining alone with a notepad, instead of in the mandatory fifteen-hour day in the writers’ room. I was at the Omni, just about to leave for dinner solo because I had no friends outside of the show, when Rob Schneider and Jim Downey called me from the wr
iters’ room. “Where the fuck are you?” Since I was in the dark, I said, “I didn’t get anything on, I’m just hanging out.” Downey said, “Get up here. You have to be in these meetings and help with jokes.” I was so pissed off at Rob. He had known about this meeting for more than a week but never mentioned a word. To be honest, this was the beginning of the friction between us. I had totally missed another meeting he was in, too, so I wondered why he didn’t share that with me. So from Thursday on, I was always in that goddamn, sweaty writers’ room, which happened to be the same room where we had the read-throughs. Those Thursdays were torture, especially back then, when there was no Instagram to check every eight minutes. It was fifteen hours of trying to add jokes to someone else’s sketch to make them score, to make them look good. It was very humbling and a tough adjustment for me. I had only ever written jokes for myself. Now I was handing over one-liners to a host or cast member because I was at the bottom of the totem pole. I got used to it, but honestly it took me longer than it should have.

  The next host up was Alec Baldwin, who turned out to be one of the all-time great SNL hosts. This was his first time hosting, and the episode that earned him an Emmy nomination. I remember seeing him in that first Monday meeting. He had just come off of The Hunt for Red October and he had this jet-black, slick-backed hair, and he just looked like a stud. I thought, This dude’s a movie star.

  I met over a hundred hosts during my time on the show, and there were definitely moments when I thought, This person has no charisma, little to no talent, and nothing special about them. They are just really lucky. And then there were a handful where I just said to myself, This person is a fucking star. I didn’t know what to expect from Baldwin, to be honest, but he was a very upbeat, very fun guy, and he gave all the writers respect, including myself. He could do tons of different voices and a lot of accents. He was and still is exactly what you want in an SNL host. Talented and up for anything. Those are the hosts that score the most on the show.

  The show was very good that night. On a live show, you get one take. Usually, on an average SNL, you get one or two awesome sketches and then a bunch of C-pluses. Movie stars come into the show and they are used to multiple tries to get something nailed. It doesn’t work that way on SNL. The worst is when a sketch is killing in rehearsals all week, but on Saturday, something trips and it falls apart. Maybe a cast member misses a cue because something happened in wardrobe, or the whole thing just starts wrong and then the cast spends the rest of the time trying to recapture the magic they had in rehearsals but it just isn’t there. But Baldwin, he was great in every sketch. He made me see how it’s supposed to be done. Meanwhile, this was the second show in a row where I didn’t get anything on. And I was starting to feel like I was legitimately in over my head.

  Andrew Dice Clay was the host for my third show. His episode was the one that got the most attention of the entire season, but the wrong kind. Clay was the biggest comedian in the country at that time. He had just sold out two nights at Madison Square Garden, which was a remarkable coincidence because I had just done a gig in the back room at T.G.I. Friday’s . . . and it looked pretty full. Dice had gained a reputation for being a homophobic, sexist pig. His career was peaking and everyone was after him. His exaggerated character always made me laugh, but some people took his act very seriously. One of those people was Nora Dunn, a longtime and very valuable cast member on SNL. Nora made it clear she would not perform with Dice, making a crazy situation even crazier. Dice had so much pressure on him, I could tell he was sort of freaking out. He had this buddy with him named Hot Tub Johnny West, who had long hair that I swear was a wig and who was a dead ringer for Steve Perry from Journey. I’m not sure what his job was other than being Dice’s friend, but I have a lot of guys in my life who have that job now, so I didn’t have a problem with it. I don’t know why they called him Hot Tub. All I could think about was a lot of hair in the filter. Anyway, I could tell Dice was getting more tense as the week went on. As a comedian, I couldn’t imagine hosting the show, let alone having every person in America watching and hoping you fuck it up. There were definitely a lot of folks out there who hated this guy. I would have killed to have appeared in a sketch in this show, but with no pull, there was no chance. There was no demand for me from the audience, the writers, or Lorne. Once again I was stuck punching up.

  Dice got heckled by protesters during his monologue, and his big comeback was something along the lines of “This is the kind of guy that goes into a public bathroom to smell other people’s crap.” I don’t recall the exact quote, but that was the sentiment. It wasn’t a great comeback and that stumble set the whole show off on the wrong foot. It wasn’t the worst show in my run, but with so many people watching, we needed a home run and we probably hit a double. We weren’t helped by the fact that our musical guest that night was Julee Cruise and the Spanic Boys. I like to look back at the musical guests and see who blew up after the show and who disappeared. I feel like this week it might have been the latter.

  The last show in my four-show trial run before summer hiatus was hosted by Candice Bergen. She was stunningly gorgeous and so sweet. In the Monday meeting, you all start out on the same footing. You are all just faces in the crowd to the host. The host is obliged to treat everyone equally because they don’t know who is important and who is not. As the week went by, most hosts realized that I was pointless, but at that Monday meeting I got a little bit of eye contact and attention. That was fun. But, as per my usual course, I didn’t get anything on that week. I had two shots—one was a sketch I had written with Rob, and one was a bit for Weekend Update. Unfortunately, Rob forgot to put my name on the sketch we wrote together, so when the read-through came along, it looked like I was only writing sketches that I could appear in. I looked like a selfish prick. So I went to Rob and asked him what happened. His response was, “You left at two A.M. I stayed all night. I was bleary when I handed that thing in.” I had left at 2 A.M. because we finished at 2 A.M. I didn’t need to walk around in my boxer shorts to show everyone how I had stayed up all night writing. It was a little obvious, but it showed Lorne and Shoemaker and Downey that he was there all night. I think that helped.

  Our trial run was over. Neither Rob nor I had landed a sketch on SNL. It was going to be a long summer of stand-up and waiting to see if I still had a job in the fall. I sure hoped so. I was going to miss that soup at the Omni.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SNL 1990–1991

  After sweating bullets all summer, wondering if I’d get hired back, I finally got the call from SNL. Thank God I did, because I hadn’t booked any stand-up gigs for the fall, on the hope that I’d be headed back to New York. Looking back, that was pretty presumptuous of me considering I hadn’t exactly set the world on fire in my trial run the previous season. I would have been doubly fucked if SNL hadn’t called. Rob also got picked up again, but we were headed back as writer/performers, which still meant 95 percent writer, 5 percent performer. Rob was still fine with this arrangement. Me, not so much, but this was not a job you turned down.

  As a “middle act” on the road (twenty-five to thirty minutes onstage), which meant better than the opener (who gets about a ten-minute set) but not quite headliner (forty-five minutes to an hour) level yet, I had been making $1,000 a week on the road. My workweek on the road was Tuesday through Sunday, with Monday as a travel day. So that meant no break, no real day off. It was a rough ride sometimes, and I’d try not to do so many weeks on the road back-to-back. I’d do an off week in the middle of the month so I could do auditions back in L.A. Here’s the thing about that SNL gig. I thought I’d start out making something crazy, like $10,000 a week. I had about $2,500 a month in bills back then, so I needed to cover at least that, which I was able to do by touring constantly. When I got my option picked up by SNL, I was offered the same salary I had been given in my trial run. Not $10,000 a week but a measly (what a great word, right?) $900 a week and a bump to $1,500 if I actually “performed” on th
e show (fat chance). I was grateful, don’t get me wrong. But that $900 came with stress and anxiety from working outside my comfort zone. At least with touring stand-up, I knew what to expect, I knew how to write for myself, I knew how to get laughs. It sucked traveling all the time, but I didn’t go to work every day afraid it would be my last.

  I went back to the Omni Berkshire Hotel (cue high-pitched singing-angel music) for two weeks of comfort and joy before I was forced to move into a microscopic dogshit apartment. I kept an apartment in Los Angeles, too, so I could come home on weeks off. This kept my expenses high, but I needed that safety net out in L.A. I had hoped that SNL was going to be my ticket to the bank, but that wasn’t going to be the case right out of the gate.

  When I got to New York, I learned that SNL had hired two new feature players: Chris Rock and Chris Farley. I didn’t know it at the time, but both ended up becoming great friends of mine. (It’s funny, my best friends have come from high school and SNL. Nothing from college, where most people get them; #boringtrivia.) I had heard about each of them through the comedy grapevine and the SNL scouts. Rock was a young Eddie Murphy protégé with a dirty, hilarious act. Chris Farley was a sketch player out of Chicago that everyone on staff kept saying had superstar breakout potential (talk about nailing it). Rock lived in Brooklyn so he drove into work every day. I didn’t meet him until table read for the first time. Farley was staying at the Omni, so I ran into him in the lobby. I first saw him looking confused there. (I would later realize this was his look 90 percent of the time. Everything confused him . . . ATMs, washing machines, pogo sticks, etc.) I recognized him from his head shot at work and approached him to say hi. I think his response was something along the lines of, “How ya doin’? Chris Farley . . . Gallagher Tent and Awning.” Chris always said his name just a hair louder than necessary, with a dip to the side and flip of his hair. (This is a move I saw repeated maybe five thousand times over the course of our friendship. It was his “go-to” move and always got a laugh.) That immediately put my nerves at ease because I could tell right away he wasn’t a cocky showbiz asshole. He was scared as hell to be working at SNL, just like me. We walked to work together that day, like it was the first day of school. We stopped at an ATM machine so Chris could take out some money. This was something he did all the time. He would usually take out twenty dollars, as he did that afternoon. Noticing this, I said to him, “How long is that twenty bucks going to last you? Make it two hundred so you don’t have to hit the ATM again in thirty minutes, man.” But that was just how he was. It was his small-town upbringing. Once he pointed at the McDonald’s and commented that there was also one back home. This kind of naïveté is why I started calling him Wisconsin Dundee. Everything was new to him, and it was just part of his charm. That was the beginning of our dynamic. Every day I would casually analyze what he did and make fun of it. We did this all day long. And the more he laughed the more I would do it. It fell into place right away and never changed. If I thought for one second it hurt his feelings I would stop, but if I slowed down he would say, “Davey, make fun of me.” He knew it wasn’t malicious and it was our thing. This is starting to sound like The Notebook so I’ll move on.