The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  MARK HERMACINSKI, friend:

  The thing about Chris was that he always made all of us feel like we were the funny ones. He always listened and anything you’d throw out there, he’d bounce it back as a joke, so he made everyone feel like they were a part of what was going on. Even if you’re not a comedian, it’s fun to sit around and laugh together, and he could pull the humor out of you.

  MICHAEL PRICE, dean, College of Communications:

  I was going through the student registrations for the spring semester of his sophomore year, and I saw that Chris hadn’t preregistered. I called him in. He said he really didn’t want to be there anymore. He didn’t want to be in school, period. I said, “Chris, what do you want to do?”

  “I want to be at Second City,” he said. “It’s a comedy company in Chicago.”

  “Well, I can certainly see you doing that,” I said, “but why don’t we talk it over with your folks? See what they say.”

  He seemed a little reluctant to even bring this subject up with them. His father wanted him to go into business. But Chris and his parents came down to my office. We talked about what Chris wanted. I said, “You guys talk it over, and I’ll be right outside.”

  When I came back in, the decision was made. Chris would remain at Marquette. He could drop the business studies major, and he’d major in communications studies and minor in theater. Then, if he graduated, they would support his wishes to do what he wanted. Onward he went.

  PAT FINN:

  Chris and I took this professional speaking class together. The teacher would give you a topic, like a how-to speech or a “talk about a relative” speech. Then you would have to write a three- or eight-minute talk.

  The first one was fine, but we both thought it was a little easy. We were sitting at lunch right before the next class, and one of us said, “Hey, why don’t we make up each other’s topics and go improvise it?”

  So that’s what we did. Our speech was supposed to be on our summer job. Chris decided that I’d spent the summer repairing air conditioners. I told Chris that he’d been a carny in the circus.

  Chris got up with nothing but a blank sheet of paper and said, “Hi, I’m Chris. This summer I spent three months as a carny with the circus.” And he just started telling stories. How he fell in love with the fat lady, made out with a midget. The class stared at him. It was amazing to watch, because you knew it was complete fiction.

  After those speech classes, Chris and I were determined. We wanted to “do comedy,” but what that meant we didn’t actually know. If you want to be a lawyer you go talk to somebody’s uncle. But it wasn’t like we could call up Bob Newhart and ask him. We’d sit and listen to National Lampoon albums. We’d watch Saturday Night Live, David Letterman. We’d do everything we could to see anybody do anything funny.

  JIM MURPHY:

  Chris and I both had these things that we were pretty passionate about, art and comedy, but we were at a Catholic liberal arts school in Wisconsin, not the place most conducive to learning these things. Fortunately Marquette actually did have a healthy theater program. The big thing for Chris was when he got a part in the school play. It was Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class. It kind of got him going.

  TOM FARLEY:

  Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of choices: you played sports. But at Marquette a dean said to Chris, “Why don’t you try out for one of the plays?”

  Chris was like, “Guys don’t do that.”

  But he did it anyway and eventually found out that he wasn’t an athlete who happened to be kind of funny. He was an actor who happened to be very athletic.

  MICHAEL PRICE:

  Dance was a part of the theater requirement. If you’re going to be a theater minor or major, you gotta do that. So Chris took ballet. You know, he moved well. He was large, but he was not a slouch. He was great. Sheila Reilly, the ballet teacher, had a dress code and it was pretty stringent, and I think Chris got by without having to abide by that. He may be one of the first students she ever allowed to wear sweats instead of tights.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  It was a very formative time for him. After he moved out of the dorms, he and a bunch of his rugby pals lived in this big piece-of-shit house up on Nineteenth Street. They called it the Red House. It was a hellhole.

  JOHN FARLEY:

  Whenever I’d walk into the Red House I’d say, “Well, well, well. Looks like somebody forgot there’s a rule against alcoholic beverages in fraternities on probation.” It was just disgusting. Dad refused to go in for basic sanitary reasons. Everything had a touch of something on it. Odd smell, too.

  JIM MURPHY:

  One of our roommates was the Budweiser rep on campus, so everything was Budweiser, signs and cups everywhere. Chris’s room was at the top of the stairs. Any time your parents would come, it was the first room they’d see. He was such a slob, food and clothes everywhere. There’d be all these fruit flies and it was, well, let’s just say it was college.

  MARK HERMACINSKI:

  We put Farley close to the bathroom, but that didn’t help much.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  The bathroom was unspeakable. One of the things that made Chris a legend on that campus was his room, simply the fact that a human being could survive in there. People would come over just to look at it.

  JIM MURPHY:

  We were pretty poor, so we didn’t turn on the heat until after Thanksgiving to try and save money. It was so cold. We had a rugby awards banquet there. We kind of cleaned it all up and everyone brought dates. The girls all came in dresses, and they were freezing. We had a bucket for ice so we could make cocktails. We put it out on Friday night. By Sunday night, the ice hadn’t melted.

  The other thing I remember about the Red House was every couple of months Chris’s mom and dad—this being Wisconsin—would send him a twenty-five-pound summer sausage and a twenty-five-pound wheel of cheese. Any time you’d look in the refrigerator there was never anything inside it except this gigantic sausage and this huge wheel of cheese.

  MARK HERMACINSKI:

  The kitchen was all infested with flies and maggots. After two months we just closed the door. But we had a lot of fun. Since we had the campus Budweiser rep, they’d pull up the truck with ten, fifteen kegs and we’d have a party with five hundred of our closest friends. Chris always drew a crowd. Wherever he was, in Madison, on a rugby road trip, he’d have a crowd around him in minutes.

  TOM FARLEY:

  The place where Chris really learned how to be this galvanizing figure was at Red Arrow camp. It was like a graduate school in male bonding. Every summer in college we all went back as counselors, and every summer all the kids and the other counselors, they’d rally around Chris.

  FRED ALBRIGHT:

  The kids loved him. How could you not? Every year, he was one of the most popular counselors. Chris had this very sensitive, sweet side to him, an empathetic side that helped him communicate with kids in this amazing way.

  DICK WENZELL:

  He could take any old boring activity and make it a fun, exciting experience. If you were eight years old, digging for earthworms with Chris was the most fun you ever had. He’d just hypnotize these kids. “We’re digging for monsters, boys! Oh! Hey! I found a big one!” And he’d lead them off on this grand adventure. And that’s the same thing he did with an audience.

  RANDY HOPPER, counselor, Red Arrow Camp:

  Chris came to life around those kids. He was the biggest kid there. We had this flag-football game called the Salad Bowl. When it was time for the big game, Chris would get up there in front of the boys and give them a pep talk that convinced them that this was the game of their lives. He’d get them all riled up. He’d be waving fistfuls of bacon, going, “Sooweee! Love them Hogs!” doing his big, high-school-coach motivational speech. In ten minutes, he’d have thirty kids so riveted and excited to be playing in this game that the Super Bowl would pale by comparison. His ability to connect with people was uncanny.

>   FRED ALBRIGHT:

  He couldn’t talk to girls, though. Around girls, Chris’d hide behind his jokes. He’d start flexing and doing this jokey, deep-voice, macho-man thing to try and hit on them. One night we’re out at a bar near the camp and he goes up to these women and says, “Well, which one of you little ladies is gonna go home with me tonight?”

  And one of the women looks at him and says, “Well, it can’t be me, because you’re my son’s counselor.”

  Chris felt so small after that you just about could’ve balled him up and put him in a thimble.

  He had one girl that he had met up north in Minocqua during the summer. She really adored Chris. They’d kid around, and it was like they were buddies, but Chris had this greater attraction to her. He would talk to me every day about how he’d had some moment with her. I see her now fairly often, and she didn’t even realize that he was so completely enthralled with her.

  TIM HENRY:

  Being a camp counselor was all about working the girls from the other camps. If you played your cards right you could go out several nights a week, but the girls were only allowed to go out one night a week. So you always had one little honey from each camp.

  RANDY HOPPER:

  We’d all go out in the woods, have a big bonfire, and it was all about trying to score. That was the game. Chris was not too adept at that, not usually. But he would entertain everyone.

  TIM HENRY:

  It would always piss Tom off, because Chris didn’t know when to stop. We’d be out in the woods, Tom would be working his magic on some girl, about to close the deal, and Chris would come barreling through the campsite fucking around. Then Tom would have to tell me to fuck off because I was laughing so hard.

  TOM FARLEY:

  One night, these two girls I knew from Georgetown had come all the way up from Chicago to visit. Chris was so out of control, and he wouldn’t turn it off. These were nice girls, and one of them I was really trying to get serious with. They were getting annoyed, really offended. He wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I lost it. He was acting up and running around, and I grabbed him and I beat the shit out of him, just whaled on him, punching him in the face. He was crying so hard he couldn’t even fight back. He was so scared. The next day he showed up at mass black and blue and bloodied all over.

  TIM HENRY:

  Chris so wanted to be with one of those girls, but he would always go back to what was safe. He would revert to the guy who’s had too many beers and got silly. Most nights the parties would go really late. As the hours wore on, everybody would start to drift away and pair off out in the woods, and there would be Chris, alone by the campfire.

  DAN HEALY:

  I only stayed at Marquette for a year. After that, I transferred to University of Wisconsin. That sophomore year was a crucial time for Chris. I started to hear stories about him drinking alone in his room, which was weird. We were always big social drinkers, but never the sit-alone-in-your-room kind of drinkers. The Marquette rugby team came into Madison one time. We all went out and drank, and then afterward I made a point of saying to Chris, “What’s going on? I hear you’re really going off the deep end.” He backed away immediately. He didn’t want anything to do with that conversation.

  JIM MURPHY:

  Then, during our junior year in the Red House, Chris read that book about John Belushi, Wired.

  MARK HERMACINSKI:

  Wired was the only book that Chris Farley read in college. The only one.

  JIM MURPHY:

  For our spring break that year, me, Chris, and this other guy went to L.A. We had a couch to crash on, and Chris was really developing an appetite for this career he wanted. We went around doing all the Hollywood tourist stuff, and the whole time Chris was like, “Jimmy, I really think I can do this.”

  I’m a huge fan of Buster Keaton and all those early physical comedians. One time I was trying to turn Chris on to Fatty Arbuckle. So I made him sit down and watch one of Arbuckle’s films. At the end of it, the only thing Chris said to me was, “Wow, Jimmy, he did all of his own stunts.” He fixated on this one thing about Arbuckle, and that was all he really took away from it. And that’s sort of what happened with Belushi. When Chris read Wired, he just took completely the wrong thing away from it. You could tell that what he saw in Belushi and what you and I saw in Belushi were two different things. Chris wasn’t blindly imitating Belushi, but reading that book validated all the addictions and impulses that Chris already had inside him.

  Chris didn’t smoke pot freshman or sophomore year, didn’t do any drugs at all, other than drinking. Then all of a sudden that year it clicked. I have this vivid memory of him in his room one day. While everybody else was going to class, he sat in this chair with a big red bong. He sat there doing bong hits and chugging Robitussin cough syrup. Back and forth. One after another.

  At that point you could see where it was going. I’d try to explain to him, you know, that you can only get so high. It’s like pouring water into a glass. You can pour in all you want. After a while, it’s all just spilling over the sides. But it was the same thing no matter what he did. It was the same when he tried pot, or when he tried mushrooms, or when he tried comedy.

  PAT FINN:

  The first place Chris and I ever got up and performed together was during our senior year in a skinny bar in a bad neighborhood in downtown Milwaukee. It was called Wimpy’s Hunt Club, and it had an open-mike night at midnight. The stage was literally twelve milk crates turned over in the corner. There were about nine people in the audience, all factory workers on break from the brewery. Tough crowd.

  Chris and I went up there, and it was like when you’re in middle school and you go on a date and you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. It was that awkward, and that bad. We bombed. We signed up to do it again the next week. Then we found out that a bunch of Marquette students were going to be there. We chickened out and didn’t go. Everyone got real mad at us.

  Finally we signed up for the Follies, the school talent show. We got an actress, and we decided we’d do a parody of The Dating Game. Jim Murphy was the host, and another friend of ours, Seamus, was the third bachelor. We kept on meaning to get together and work, and we’d talk about it every once in a while, but we never had any idea what we were doing. Then about a week before the show the girl quit school and moved to Chicago, and we figured we’d just blow the thing off.

  But the night of the Follies, I was over at Chris’s house and we were hanging out. About fifteen, twenty minutes into it, and we get a phone call from the stage manager. “Where the hell are you guys? You better get down here. People are pretty pissed. They want to see you—and they’re screaming for Farley.”

  We hopped on our bikes and rode over. It was way bigger than we thought it was going to be. There were at least a couple thousand people there. The show had three more acts to go before it ended. “You’re goin’ after this singer,” the stage manager told us.

  Chris just goes, “All right, Jim, you’re the emcee.” He looked over at Seamus, who had overalls on. “Seamus, you’re farmer guy.” Then he flicked my collar up on my shirt, unbuttoned a button, and said, “And Finner, you’re cool guy.”

  “Okay. What about you?” I asked.

  He pulled out these nerdy glasses and said, “I’ll be nerdy guy. Let’s go.”

  Jim went out, made up some intro, brought out Seamus, and they did a funny little Q&A. Then I went out, doing this “cool guy” walk, hopped on my stool, and answered some questions. There was no girl, mind you, just the host and three male contestants, but that became part of the gag.

  Then Jim said, “All right, let’s bring out the next guy.” The spotlight hit Chris coming out of the curtain. He ran as fast as he could and then tripped and slid across the entire length of the stage. The place went berserk. Then he went over to his stool, clumsily knocking it over. He finally clambered on and then fell right off. It was insane. The audience loved it.

  As s
oon as it was over, Chris and I ran backstage, and I remember he just grabbed me by the shirt and he looked right in my eyes and said, “We’re gonna be doing this for the rest of our lives. That was the greatest high I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  MICHAEL PRICE:

  In the spring of Chris’s senior year, we got one of those rare days when you can open windows, be outside, and throw a ball around. There was this white house on Kilborn Avenue where all these girls lived. Chris had a cherry smoke bomb. He lit it and put it on the open windowsill, thinking the smoke would drive everyone out and it’d be a good prank. But he forgot that when you light those things they twirl around and spin out of control. Well, it spun off and landed on their couch. And it burned. I mean, it really burned. Pretty soon the house was on fire, and it was spreading to the second floor. Chris figured he’d better get the heck out of there. So he took off with a friend, and they went down to Illinois, just across the border.