Almost Interesting

by David Spade

  But that show is also memorable for other, more unfortunate reasons. You see, Tim Robbins is a pretty political guy. He was hosting SNL and he wanted to make a statement. In the Monday meeting he explained to us: “I want to go after everybody in my monologue . . . all these big corporations, even GE.” (As in General Electric, then NBC’s parent company.) Everyone sort of nodded along and pretended that we thought that was hilarious, and then we went about our business writing sketches that did not shit on GE. Well, during his monologue on Saturday night, Tim Robbins went for it. He made some political statements. He made some jokes. I recall him quietly singing the GE ad slogan but changing the last bit to “GE, we bring good things to . . . death.” The cast and the audience awkwardly laughed because honestly, it was more of a comment than a joke. But he had done what he set out to do and he was happy, I guess.

  I think he was hoping some of the media would pick up on his statement and run with it, which may have happened . . . EEEEEEEEXCEEEPPPPPT . . . about twenty minutes later, Sinéad O’Connor came on to sing one of her dopey songs. (If it wasn’t “Nothing Compares 2 U,” I wasn’t listening.) I remember I was standing behind Lorne watching the monitor and sort of basking in the glory of my Hollywood Minute sketch doing well, waiting for him to put his arm around my shoulders and say, “Good job, son.” And while I was there quietly begging for a Snausage from Lorne, I saw something odd on the screen. At the end of her snoozer tune, Sinéad held up a picture of Pope John Paul and said, “Fight the real enemy,” and ripped it up into ten pieces. The room fell silent.

  “Oh snap . . . no she di-int.” (I wish I made that phrase up, because that moment was the perfect place to bust it out.) I wondered the same thing everyone else on the cast probably did: Is this part of the show? And then she dropped the pieces on the stage and nervously scurried away. The crowd was dead silent. It’s the first time in SNL musical history that the guest did not get applause after their song. No one knew what the fuck was going on. Lorne turned back to me after sipping his glass of Amstel Light, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Irish.” I had to laugh. During the commercial, I walked out to the stage, looked down at what was left of the pope there on the floor, and grabbed a piece. As I stuffed it in my pocket I thought, This will be a nice memento if anyone ever remembers this happening.

  Cut to the next day. This shit is world news. People are freaking the fuck out. I don’t know much about religion. It wasn’t part of our family culture at all. My mom didn’t have much time for church. She had to work and fight my dad for child support that never came. So I didn’t really get what the big deal was. All I knew was that Sinéad O’Connor was kind of sexy when she got to the studio that week, and I sort of flirted with her. Then I decided that I wouldn’t try to sleep with her since she was now a worldwide pariah, which is a major boner killer.

  That Sunday night while I was doing my piles of laundry in the basement of my dogshit apartment building, I watched Inside Edition. As my flannel shirts were drying, there was Deborah Norville yammering on about Saturday Night Live. I pushed my two-foot stack of quarters to the side to get a better look, and saw that they were actually reporting on how Sinéad O’Connor had ripped up a picture of the pope on camera! Then they put the torn pieces back together to make the photo whole again. Well, almost whole . . . because there was one piece missing. My eyes slowly drifted over past the laundry machine quarters to that little slice of pope I had snagged the night before. I held it up to the television screen, and it fit perfectly. Inside Edition clearly had the ACTUAL photo that this Sinéad chick had shredded!! How did that happen?? I had told Adam and a few others that night that I had taken a little piece of the pope pic with me, and sure enough the next day I got hauled into SNL producer Kenny Aymong’s office. (I love Kenny Aymong. He was always very cool to me during my SNL years. Even when I was a nobody, which was most of my time there.) Kenny sat me down with two security guards and said, “You might have something that belongs to us.” And, ever the smart-ass, I popped back with, “Oh, I don’t think so unless you’re talking about a pile of bad sketches that never got on the air.” I chuckled. No one else did. One of the security guys then said, “Do you have a piece of the pope picture?” And I said, “Oh that . . . uh yeah, I guess I do. Who ratted me out?” (I still thought the situation was funny. I was clearly not reading the room very well.) Then the security guard asked, “Do you have it with you?” Of course I did, because I wanted to show off and talk about anything but Joe Pesci sketch ideas that day. It quickly became clear to me that I needed to hand that piece of the pope over, and quick. These security dudes weren’t messing around.

  I learned soon after that a member of the crew had stolen the ripped-up photo off the floor and sold it to Inside Edition for ten thousand dollars. He was fired, but security thought that I might be in on it. Kenny knew I wasn’t, but he had to follow protocol. We laughed about it later, even though we agreed I could have used part of that 10K. The rest of the season I peppered in a few Hollywood Minutes sketches, and I felt I was officially on the radar. It took me way too long, let’s be honest, but by midseason I had the audacity to believe that I might be able to enjoy summer without worrying about getting canned. We had a solid lineup of hosts that year, and ratings were good. I remember during February sweeps the musical guests were Bon Jovi, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and Sting. That’s a pretty solid lineup. But in the nineteenth show of the year, I was part of the most memorable sketch of my SNL career.

  I had heard about the Motivational Speaker character here and there throughout the year. Farley and Bob Odenkirk used to talk about it a lot in the office. They discussed that and a sketch called Whale Boy—two ideas that they had worked up at Second City and were trying to bring to SNL. Well, the week that Christina Applegate was the host was the week that they decided to put it out there, with Chris in the lead. (I almost said “and the rest is history” but it’s too corny, even though it’s kind of true.) Christina and I were cast as the two kids the speaker had been brought in to motivate. Phil Hartman played our nerdy dad, clearly at his wits’ end with his troublemaker kids and making a last-ditch effort. This was the most tailor-made Chris Farley sketch ever, a fastball right down the middle that he could knock out of the park. It was physical, it was hilarious, and with his scratchy-hoarse voice, Chris made it even funnier. He slicked his hair back after seeing Christian Slater do it when he hosted the year before. He had already started wearing these massive Dan Aykroyd–style reading glasses every day, so those became part of the costume. It all came together with that horrible plaid blazer. Matt Foley was born. This was one of those bits where everybody on the floor was laughing every rehearsal. It was pretty bulletproof. There was no way it could go south because the more Chris stumbled, stammered, and squinted at the cue cards, the funnier it was.

  When we did it on the show, we were all prepped not to laugh. These were the days before Fallon and Horatio Sanz were losing their shit a lot on air. Lorne did not like laughing in sketches during our era. There was a very strict rule for us that we were not The Carol Burnett Show and must stay in character at all times. Of course, Chris didn’t give a shit about those rules and did his best to make Adam or me laugh in every single sketch we were in with him. He felt like it was victory if he broke us, which it was. During some sketches, he would get close enough to me that he could head-butt me and throw me off (it worked every time). Other times, he would be facing me and cross his eyes, cracking me up with something the audience couldn’t see. Or he would overly ham up a line in a way he had never done in rehearsals, and totally throw me off. It is now very well known that Christina and I totally lost it during this sketch. The thing that set me off was Chris twisting back and forth on his belt like Chubby Checker. He looked like an idiot, and it caught me off guard. Then he did the running motion and that was it. Once I started to crack, he knew he could come in for the kill and he did. Christina and I didn’t have a chance. Rolling Stone called this the best sketc
h of all time and while I’m not sure that’s true (because there are too many to pick from), Matt Foley is definitely one of the greatest characters ever on Saturday Night Live.

  I was very lucky that I had a front-row seat for it, and it is one of my favorite memories of Chris. We did Motivational Speaker a few more times and the head writers were cool enough to always put me in it. My second favorite one is where he tries to speak Spanish and basically reads it phonetically off cue cards. (SAY YAMMA SOY ME HOMBRE . . .) The whole sketch was hysterical to me because in rehearsal I kept laughing and yelling, “Chris, what the fuck are you doing? Pretend we’re in the sketch with you.” Then he would laugh and go, “Shut up, David.” That pretty much turned into “Shut up, Richard” in Tommy Boy because he said it so much.

  During this season, Chris dated one of Lorne’s assistants. She was this sweet, preppy blond girl we all thought was super-cute and fun. Chris and Erin dated on and off for a while but eventually called it quits—for a myriad of reasons that she never really told me. But she did once tell me that she went back to Wisconsin with Chris and stayed at his childhood home with him. She was totally traumatized by dinner, which consisted of his dad bringing in a big platter of steaks and everyone just going at them like a bunch of crazed wolverines. Then Chris’s mom carried around the “yuck bag” and each man would spit his bones into it. I busted Chris’s balls about the yuck bag forever, and how horrifying it must have been for this sheltered, waspy East Coast girl to see the Farley family eat dinner, with all the booze and bones flying.

  A few weeks after they broke up, word got around that Erin was dating someone else. Then we heard who the new guy was, and we decided not to tell Chris right away. But one day he confronted me and Sandler. “I hear Erin’s got some new boy toy. Did you hear about this shit?” And we said, “Um, yeah.” And he goes, “Well, he might be better looking than me but he’s not funnier, he’s not richer, and he’s sure as fuck not more famous.” And we stared at Chris for a few seconds in silence. Finally, I had to break it to him. “We’ve got some bad news . . . you’re oh for three, pal. She’s dating Steve Martin.” Crickets . . . then, “Ah fuck!!!!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SNL 1993–1994

  For the 1993–94 season, I was finally a full cast member. True to my SNL employment pattern, I didn’t learn this news until the very end of the summer, after another long, hot season of sweating bullets waiting to be fired. I was excited to finally have taken the next step, but to find out so late was a bit embarrassing. I was bummed this year because Chris Rock was gone. By this point we had become really tight. But to be honest, he was frustrated, and Saturday Night Live was never the perfect place for him. So he left the show and went back to his stand-up roots. Two years later, in 1996, he released the unbelievable stand-up special Bring the Pain and reminded everyone what all the fuss was about. He deserved that and busted his ass to do it. We were all stoked it paid off huge for him. He was back on top.

  I, on the other hand, was busy finding my fourth apartment on the Upper West Side and writing sketches about working at the Gap. Remember that little doozy? I had been home in Arizona once, shopping at the Gap for some of their exceptional ring-neck T-shirts when I overheard two chicks folding clothes. I sat there listening to one tell the other something along the lines of, “You’re folding those cable crews wrong.” “I know, I missed the folding meeting.” “Oh my God, you’re going to get so busted,” and back and forth. The girls themselves even laughed at how stupid their conversation was. It gave me the idea of a sketch of guys working at the Gap and having these asinine conversations. Then I thought it would be even funnier if we dressed in drag and played it as girls. Now, this wound up being a bit sticky because there were not enough parts for girls on the show already, and this sketch had parts for four girls being taken up by guys. I decided not to worry about that and to look out for numero uno because, according to my calculations, I was on air less than most of the girls anyway. I had to remember the old “nobody said life was fair” motto. The other benefit of this sketch was that it gave me a reason to hang out with Farley, Sandler, and Schneider all week. That made coming to work a lot more fun.

  The first host that season was Charles Barkley, and he was up for playing a girl with long dreadlocks, and I wrote the sketch so that we had a girl-girl hookup at a keg party during a game of Truth or Dare. (Edgy!) I also wrote a part of the sketch that had the Gap girls going to a Nirvana concert, and having the band hit on them backstage. It was so fucking stupid, but we had the balls to ask Nirvana to actually do it. (On a side note: I’m still in shock that I met Kurt Cobain. He was one of the most memorable, interesting people who came through that show. I sat down with the band at dinner break once and they were all very cool. I sometimes feel I have a kinship with Dave Grohl, because both of the guys we were very close to got very famous quickly and then died, and we stuck around to field questions about them for the rest of our lives. It is an honor, but not an easy one sometimes.)

  The day before we were set to film the backstage segment, we heard from the music department that Nirvana was not going to do the sketch. I was all fired up, so bummed that my brilliant sketch was in jeopardy. “Why not?” I asked. “We didn’t ask them.” I stood there in shock. “Why didn’t you?” “Maybe because the sketch shows the band trying to date-rape you and Adam backstage and maybe their managers wouldn’t think that was super-appropriate.” Sheepishly, I said, “Oh yeah, I guess I can see that.” But I still wouldn’t give up. I liked the idea of Adam and me getting drunk and making our way backstage at a concert, and having Adam run out moments later screaming, “He grabbed my boob!” and me, “Where’s my scrunchie? Just run!” with our shirts half off. There was no way I was throwing away this award-winning scene.

  So we called the band Skid Row and they were more than happy to come in from New Jersey and help us out. Lead singer Sebastian Bach and guitarist Rachel Bolan came over and played it perfectly, and I’m sure Nirvana were kicking themselves when they saw this amazing piece of comedy on air. The Skid Row guys were nuts. When they were on the show Sebastian Bach yelled, “We are live, motherfucker!” at the end of his song, which I thought was funny. Especially on a show called Saturday Night Live. No one broke the rules there, but Sebastian Bach just didn’t give a fuck. It wasn’t like they were Guns N’ Roses or the Stones. They were a solid band with two good songs at the time. I’m not even sure the swearing went out on the air; I thought it did but I didn’t hear anything about it afterward. The other thing Bach did that was pure insanity was wear a T-shirt during the “good nights” that had a Raid can on it with dead bugs around it. Everyone had seen the ad that said, “Raid: kills bugs dead.” As he was waving good night, I looked closer and realized much to my shock that it didn’t say that . . . it said, “AIDS: kills fags dead.” I was like, “Ummm.” Wearing that shirt today would get you kicked out of show business immediately; in fact, you should just see yourself out if you wore something like that. But at the time, there wasn’t much of a controversy over that shirt, which seems shocking. I’m sure today Sebastian regrets wearing it. Thank God that’s one style from the nineties that hasn’t resurfaced at Urban Outfitters.

  After the first Gap Girls sketch went well, I was all gung-ho to come up with another one, and one of them from this season ranks in the top five most memorable sketches I appeared in during my SNL run. (The first Motivational Speaker sketch is the top, but I take zero credit for how great that one is. Anybody could have played my part.) There was a Gap Girls sketch we did when Sara Gilbert was the host. I decided to leave the date rape out of this one. Farley made this one memorable, as he did for so many sketches, but at least I got to write what he said. The idea this time around was that the Gap Girls were on break in the mall food court, and they get in a heated argument with the girls from Donut Hut. Chris, Adam, and I were the Gap Girls again, and Schneider and Sara Gilbert played the Donut Hut chicks. Clearly there was a tense rivalry between these
two factions, one that hadn’t been seen since the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story. It started out with us discussing current events and getting almost everything wrong, from calling carpal tunnel syndrome carpet tunnel syndrome to discussing the trial of the “Menenenedez” brothers. We didn’t know what the fuck we were talking about. Then there came the infamous fries joke, which was inspired by the fact that Chris always ate the fries off my plate whenever we were in a restaurant together. If you watch closely, you can see me mouthing everyone’s lines as the sketch goes on. This happens a lot when you write sketches—you just want the jokes to work perfectly and I was desperate for Chris not to fuck up the “LAY OFF ME I’M STARVING” line because I wanted it to work so badly. The real kick was the quiet “Diet starts Monday” right after. I saw that quote on a meme recently, and I was so happy that something I scribbled twenty years ago on a wrinkled legal pad at a crummy wooden desk at four in the morning was still funny to someone today.

  After that the girls enter from Donut Hut and Sara says, “Oh, there’s the Gap girls and they’re eating again, what a surprise.” They continue to make fun of me because I’m dating a loser who doesn’t really like me. Sample: Adam: “He’s so mean to you, doesn’t he always tell you, you look like you slept on your face?” And I say, “Yeah, but he’s just really honest.” Adam: “Well, what about when you reminded him that he owes you $600 and he punched you in the neck?” Me: “Well, he’s just really sensitive. He’s a Cancer.” There was another throwaway joke we put in to see if the audience would get it—a time lapse. When there is a time lapse in a sketch, the graphics department just puts up an exterior photo, in this case of the mall, with the words “Four days later” on the bottom. Obviously they come back to us just still sitting there ten seconds later. So I added, “Isn’t it funny that we are all wearing the same outfits from four days ago?” And then Adam says, “No, we’re not.” And I go, “Trust me, we are.” People think I made that up that night but it was planned, I’m sad to say. I made up that joke at rehearsal and we decided to keep it in. The last question I get about that sketch is about how at the very end we say, “The Donut Hut girls are always OTR!” Some people have asked me what that meant. In Arizona when girls were bitchy we said they were “on the rag.” And so I thought everyone knew what OTR meant. Apparently, it’s not universal. But that’s what I get for being from Scottsdale.