Almost Interesting

by David Spade

  That season, I had another chance to trot out one of my impressions—my old standby from the suitcase days. Tom Petty. I was pretty excited to meet the dude in person. I even thought he might be excited to meet me, since I had been doing him for years. I forgot that sometimes impressions aren’t 100 percent flattering, so the person being imitated might not be head over heels in love when they see it. Being the genius sketch writer I am, I couldn’t think of a sketch that would include an impression of him. Here I had a chance to do one of the three killer impressions in my arsenal, and I was blowing it. I say three because that’s a pretty low number. I should have had at least ten, but I was a little light in that department. Luckily I made up for it with snarkiness! (Said like a used car salesman.) So, on Wednesday night after read-through, in a shocking turn of events, I realized I had nothing in the show. I spent the next two days wandering around the halls watching everyone else work on their sketches like little elves, while I took my place as the resident loser. During the dress rehearsal, I had a bit of a brainstorm while sipping on an Amstel Light. I ran into Tom Petty’s dressing room with my beer balls and said, “Can I talk to Tom?” Unlike Patrick Swayze, his people let me right in. I said, “Tom, here’s my pitch . . . I have been a fan of yours forever and I actually do an impression of you. I’ve done it on the show. Is there any way when they go to commercial on the live show, you and I can sing together? They always cut to that boring G. E. Smith playing guitar for thirty seconds or however long they need to kill time before a commercial. I think that should be us.” He stared at me for a second and then leaned over to pick up his guitar and said, “Sure, what song?” I was like, Holy fuck. He’s going along with it! I said, “Well, I can’t really sing. I just make noises.” And he goes, “What about ‘Breakdown’?” And I said, “I love it but it’s got too long of an intro. We only have about thirty seconds. How about ‘I Need to Know’?” And he said, “Let me see how it goes again.” And he starts strumming his guitar, which of course put me in fan-girl mode because it was so cool. He says, “There’s sixteen bars and then you come in.” I said, “Well, I don’t know how that works because I don’t know music, so, can I just start at the words and then you jump in?” And there was a pause and he goes, “Sure, we’ll figure it out. I’ll just follow you.” And then to make things even cooler, Ben, his keyboard player, said, “Can I play, too?”

  Meanwhile, in my drunken haze I have not run this by ONE PERSON from Lorne’s office. This is fully unauthorized, but put an Amstel Light and a half in me and look the fuck out! I’m on a mission! My only snag, aside from breaking all the rules, was one mercy line that was thrown to me in a sketch after read-through. I guess someone felt sorry for me. Depending on where the sketch fell, my master Tom Petty plan should have gone off no problem. And, in pure Spade fashion, it turned out to be a problem.

  The “band shot,” as they call it, is usually scheduled before a commercial. The camera pans from the actors at the end of a sketch over to the band jamming until commercial break. These are strategically placed throughout the show. On this particular evening there was only one and it happened to be right after the sketch I was in. When I drunkenly bombarded Tom Petty with this idea, I had forgotten I had one line in the show. Now I realized when timing it out, I had probably sixty seconds to do my line, run around the corner, throw on my Tom Petty hat, glasses, sideburns, and fringed leather jacket and get settled before the live band shot started. I had to run around during the live show and tell the actual band what was going on, then tell Tom Petty where to stand, basically tell everyone what was happening BUT LORNE. Tom and I decided that I would start right at the beginning of “I Need to Know” right when the red light went on on the camera, meaning we were live. I informed the cameraman that instead of panning over to me, to just cut to me when the sketch was over.

  So I did my sketch and nailed my line (debatable) and sprinted over by the band as soon as I was off camera. I quickly threw on my gear with my heart pounding because I am terrified to sing . . . and more terrified that Lorne is going to rip me a new one. Tom Petty walked out, holding his guitar. He looked over at me with a cocked eyebrow that said, “You ready?” I realized we probably should have run this in rehearsal because I had no idea what to do next. Before I knew it, the camera turned to me and the red light went on. I instantly screamed, “WELL THE TALK ON THE STREET SAYS YOU MIGHT GO SOLO . . .” in my best Tom Petty voice. Then I heard Petty kick in with the guitar that I’m so familiar with and I jumped on the second line, “A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE SAW YOU LEAVING THROUGH THE BACK DOOR . . .” More guitar, adrenaline going, crazy . . . Now the chorus, “I NEED TO KNOW . . .” And bless Tom Petty’s heart he threw in a background vocal, “I NEED TO KNOW . . .” And we went back and forth for another ten seconds until the red light went off and we were clearly at a commercial. I stepped back from the mic and Tom quickly pointed to me and said, “Keep going!” I leaned forward and we belted out the rest of the song for the audience. We did the whole thing; I was horrible but had such a blast. I felt like I was really in the band for a minute. I see why guys like to be in bands. It was ridiculously fun. At the end of the show, I even scurried up for the “good night” curtain call because I felt like I added something to the show that night. Surprisingly, Lorne never said a word about it.

  A few shows after that, Macaulay Culkin was the host. This is when I finally developed my encounter with Patrick Swayze’s publicist into a sketch. The germ of the idea was that the assistant to the celebrity is always more important than the celebrity in Hollywood. The assistant has the keys to the kingdom. If you want to talk to the famous person, you have to get through them first. (I made my editor work with my assistant on this book. I’ve never even spoken to her!) I didn’t know how to frame the sketch or who I was going to play yet—publicist, agent? I finally landed on personal assistant. Then I needed a setting. I decided on a waiting room of an office where the assistant would be alone with the people waiting to meet a “very important person,” and where he could privately pull his power trip. I didn’t know who to make the star but I thought it was funnier to make them someone less obvious. For some reason I chose Dick Clark . . . and I still don’t know why. I must have just seen him on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve or some bullshit that year and decided that he was a guy not as powerful as say, Jeffrey Katzenberg or some studio head, so it would be that much more frustrating if his assistant was talking down to someone.

  This is the week I made my move to do my own sketch, writing myself into the lead. To give myself an even better shot, I decided to try to use the musical guest. David Bowie was appearing on the show that week with his band Tin Machine (remember them?). I knew Bowie had acted before and I figured he’d be perfect because . . . well, he’s DAVID BOWIE and therefore unbelievably famous. It would be a hilarious scenario if Bowie couldn’t get in to see Dick Clark because of some asshole assistant. I wrote something up where David Bowie comes into the office and I, as the receptionist, stop him and make him explain to me who he is, why I should know him, list his credits . . . and ultimately not let him in. I would even make him sing. I typed this up (well, the typing girls did) and gave it to the talent department and they told me, “We will try to get this to David Bowie . . .” And I waited. And waited. The next day I came in and there was a lone message in my tiny little mailbox written on yellow NBC letterhead that said, “You missed a call from: David Bowie.” My heart stopped. I missed a call from my musical hero. The return number was a Boston hotel with a fake name.

  I remember I didn’t call him until I was alone in my apartment and I had all my balls up. I couldn’t do it in the office for fear of saying the wrong thing and having Farley or Sandler bust my chops or, worse yet, interrupt me. I nervously poked at the keys on the old-school push-button phone in my house (beep . . . boop . . . beep beep . . .). I asked for his room and . . . David Bowie answered. I hadn’t planned what to say. I was just winging it. Luckily, he was very nice. “David, I read your ske
tch, it’s hilarious. I have to do this.” I got an instant shot of adrenaline. He said, “I come back tomorrow so let’s rehearse this and get it going.” “Great! This will be really fun!” In my head I am thinking, I can’t believe I am going to have a sketch, that I wrote, on Saturday Night Live WITH DAVID BOWIE. Then came the bombshell. “Just one thing . . . I want to play the receptionist, so who do we get to play me?” My heart stopped . . . Oh fuck, what? . . . Wait . . . what? Shit, what was I going to do? I was hoping to get a sketch on that I felt could help me finally gain some footing. What do I do? I can get a sketch on right now and gain some ground at work or keep waiting and try to get it going with a future host. I took the latter. I explained to DAVID BOWIE that the receptionist was a character I wanted to own, like Wayne from Wayne’s World, and that I wanted to build him over multiple shows—and therefore I couldn’t just hand it over. He then said, “Well, it’s not fun playing myself.” I could tell he was a bit annoyed, and I knew he was when he told me he had to go and hung up the phone. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that I had been able to talk to David Bowie, and then within four minutes piss him off enough to hang up so fast. And so much for my sketch idea. I spent another week getting paid by SNL for doing jack shit, basically. But this is life in the big city, like my dad had told me. (This was rich, of course, coming from the same guy who had skipped town all those years ago on my mom. It is hard to take advice from a guy who can’t handle life in a small city.)

  With the receptionist sketch already written, I just needed someone to plug into it. The next week’s musical guest was M. C. Hammer, so I decided to roll the dice with him. To be honest, he wasn’t exactly who I had in mind, but he was very famous at the time, so it made some sense. I reworked it from the David Bowie setup, but there were the same basic jokes—the receptionist (me) was to embarrass the star by asking them to recite their résumé, act out scenes from movies, and sing their songs or whatever to jog my memory. These are all things that actually happen in Los Angeles, and as such, the sketch got big laughs at read-through. I was so close to the finish line. The sketch just had to play well in front of the audience at dress, and then it would make the cut to get on air.

  I found out between dress and air that the sketch did make the cut, but it would be the last sketch of the show, at five minutes to 1 A.M. I couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t bother calling anyone at home to say stay up, because the issue with the “5 to 1” sketch is that the show expands or contracts according to how big the laughs are with a particular audience. If the crowd is great and the other sketches get major laughs, the final sketch of the night usually gets cut during the show. That is why that last sketch is also referred to as “cut bait” (lingo!). You never want your sketch to be referred to as cut bait. Well, luck was on my side. We made it on. Hammer was great and the sketch made an impact. We got laughs. This was the days before Twitter and Instagram so it was literally word of mouth. I got good feedback from friends and people I ran into, but as Lorne says, that kind of thing doesn’t count. One of the many wise things Lorne tells each cast member early on is that “people will tell you you’re the funniest person on the show. You’re not.” That kind of cold reality really takes your legs out from under you right out of the gate, even though it is completely true.

  But even Lorne gave good feedback on the sketch. I heard from other writers and cast members. I felt so relieved to finally have a sketch under my belt that worked. I finally felt like I was part of the show and not just an observer. Naturally I wanted to do that sketch again, as soon as possible. But I had to give it a little breathing room.

  Five weeks later, Roseanne Barr was hosting, and lucky for me she was game. Phil Hartman also joined her, playing Jesus, and the one-two punch of those two made the sketch crush pretty well in read-through. The sketch did so well at dress rehearsal that it got moved to the very first sketch after the monologue, the point in the show when there are the most viewers. Anything on before Weekend Update is solid because that’s when we have a big tune-out problem. This was my best week on the show to that point. The sketch got better every time it ran. It did so great on air that I felt like I might actually spend the summer not worried about getting fired.

  Well, that feeling didn’t last long. By the end of my third year, I was again on the chopping block. Nothing I did after my second receptionist sketch landed on air. The stress was getting to me. My neck hurt, my jaw hurt from grinding my teeth at night. I wasn’t sleeping well and was very thin because of my lousy diet of pizza and pussy. (I say pussy because it sounds funny but I wasn’t getting any action. Stressed writers/barely performers aren’t as sexy as they sound.) I’m pretty sure I didn’t eat a single vegetable my entire Saturday Night Live career and I’m sure I had some level of malnourishment. My hair turned brown from being in New York for so long. I never knew my hair could be anything but really blond and fluffy, in that beautiful Farrah Fawcett way I had always known. I had spent my whole life in the sunshine of Arizona and then L.A. But six months out of the year in dreary, sunless, creaky midtown Manhattan buildings made my blond hair brown. It sounds like a Crystal Gayle song, but it’s true.

  I wondered if I should just pack it in. This was too fucking brutal.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SNL 1992–1993

  The summer of 1992, I was still on thin ice. All my pals were killing it. Schneider had scored with the Copy Guy skit. Adam was creating one awesome character after another. Chris was just on fuego. We were all doing gigs to make extra cash, but that year, Adam’s road price shot through the roof. Your road price was another way to know how you were doing on SNL. Adam, Rob, and I had always made the same price for stand-up gigs the first year we were all together on the show. But then Adam’s started to creep up on mine. Eventually he started to get double my rate. We would still go out on the road together but he now closed the shows. Adam was clearly the bigger draw. It was slightly humiliating, but I chose to look at it from the perspective that I had never made so much money on the road before in my life. I knew there were tons of comics out there who made a lot less than I was making. I was fucking lucky.

  But it’s hard to keep that attitude while you are on Saturday Night Live. It is very much a culture of comparison—you look at what your peers have and what you have and you are constantly doing the math to see who is on top. It is almost impossible to avoid, but you have to try if you want to stay sane. (Take my advice, young SNL wannabes.) I’m just as competitive as the next guy, but if you handle competition like a dick, you’ll end up ruining your career and your friendships. At the time, though, it was a bitter pill to watch my pals doing so well while I was having such a hard time. I can admit that.

  By late summer, I still didn’t know if I was going to be invited back to the show. The only thing I’d done of note the previous season had been my receptionist sketch, but that didn’t seem like enough to get me picked up. That and “being fun around the office” was about all I had going for me. And even that I wasn’t always sure about. Chris, Rob, Adam, they had already gotten their calls. Once again I had to sweat it out longer than anyone. At some point in early August, one of my managers talked to Lorne and told me, “He’s bringing you back. But I really had to work hard. And, you’re still going to be a writer/feature player.” This was disappointing to me. I was now the only chump in my “class” left slaving away at those rewrite meetings. Sandler was now a full cast member, and Rob, and Farley had been one basically since the day he started (deservedly so). What this also meant was that none of the new writers would feel any responsibility to put me into their sketches. Why would they? I had been treading water with minimal talent for a long time and didn’t know how long it was gonna last.

  The host for our first show that season was Nicolas Cage. I came out swinging hard . . . and whiffed three times. I got nothing on the show at all, so I was off to my typical strong start of being invisible. (This helped me later when I played the Invisible Man in Hotel Transylvania. I
drew from my real feelings.) Next up was Tim Robbins, and this show was a very important and memorable one for me for several reasons. The first, and most important, reason is that it was the show where I finally saved my ass on SNL. I was sitting at the writers’ table on Monday, bored as usual. I was reading People magazine out loud and basically shitting on every celebrity featured. Bob Odenkirk, bless his heart, was sitting near me and said, “You have to write that up.” And so the Hollywood Minute sketch was born. During that read-through, Lorne said to me, “You’ve found your voice.” And that was the best fucking thing I could possibly hear. I could tell by the way he said it that he was happy, and that I was actively saving my job in the process. The first Hollywood Minute bit went off without a hitch. The audience bought into it right away. A young loser nobody from Arizona, taking out major celebrities at the knees—well, it just clicked from the first burn. A new segment had been born for me, one that would become my best move at that place. This was a time when there was only People magazine. It was always fawning over these guys and no one was saying what people really thought. That was my great timing award, because after that came Entertainment Weekly and blogs where everyone got super-snarky on celebs. So I got lucky there.