The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  In 1984, comedy guru Del Close joined Halpern’s cause. As a director in Second City’s early heyday, Close had trained and mentored a who’s who of comedy, from John Belushi to Harold Ramis to Bill Murray. He was instrumental in shaping the forms and conventions of the Chicago school of improvisation. Perhaps his most notable contribution was the Harold, a long-form, fully improvised performance in which a whole cast works together off of a single audience suggestion to create a cohesive, continuous series of scenes.

  For Close, the goal of improv was not to get laughs but rather to find the real, emotional truth of the characters that created those laughs. He found the perfect instrument for that in Chris Farley. With Halpern’s instruction and Close’s inspiration, Chris began his comedy education in earnest. Some expressed doubts about his raw, unschooled talents, but those doubts quickly vanished. Chris, performing full throttle at night and bumbling through a comical parade of semiemployment by day, proved to everyone that he was destined for a life onstage.

  PAT FINN:

  After I graduated from Marquette, I went down to Chicago. Chris followed about a year behind me. We had no jobs, and we had no idea what we were doing. He moved into his place off Armitage, and we went from there down to Second City one day around two in the afternoon. We just kind of paced around in front of the theater, back and forth. In our minds, the scenario literally went something like this: Somebody up on the second floor would say, “What? We need two more people for the Second City main stage? Where are we going to find— Oh, wait! What about these two people out front? They look hilarious.”

  That was about how far we’d thought things out. Then, after about ten minutes of pacing around, Joel Murray—Brian and Bill Murray’s brother—walks by. He was at Second City at the time, and he and I had gone to the same grammar school, so I knew him a little.

  Chris said, “There’s Joel Murray. He’s Bill’s brother. You should talk to him.”

  “I don’t know, Chris.”

  “You got to! C’mon. That’s why we’re here.”

  So Joel walked up, and I said, “Joel. Hi. I’m Pat Finn, from St. Joe’s.”

  “Yeah. Little Finn,” he said. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Um, nothin’. This is my friend Chris. We wanna get into comedy.”

  He just kind of looked at us. Chris’s eyes had this look like the next thing out of Joel’s mouth was going to be the keys to the kingdom. And, actually, it turns out it was.

  JOEL MURRAY, cast member, Second City:

  So one day here’s Pat Finn, who I haven’t seen since high school, standing there with this big guy. I could tell that the big guy was restraining all of his energy to just listen and be attentive to what I was saying. But I basically told them, “Go find Charna Halpern and Del Close at the ImprovOlympic and study with them, and then see if somebody’ll let you paint the bathroom at Second City.”

  It was funny, knowing Chris later, just to watch him holding it in, trying not to be an idiot.

  CHARNA HALPERN, director/teacher, ImprovOlympic:

  ImprovOlympic didn’t even have an actual theater at the time. We performed at Orphans, this bar on Lincoln Avenue. We had to be out by ten o’clock so the band could come on. We got kicked out of Orphans, and we moved around to like fourteen different spaces. It was an insane time. But I kept attracting these really brilliant people—Farley and Pat Finn, Mike Myers, Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Andy Richter—and the shows kept getting better and better. But even though we were getting thrown out of these places, the audience was following us. It just kind of kept snowballing, getting bigger and bigger, and that was what it was like when Farley showed up.

  BRIAN STACK:

  I went down to Chicago to visit him at ImprovOlympic. He was taking classes, but Charna hadn’t let him go up onstage to perform yet. After the show, he was pacing outside, and I could just see he had all this pent-up, frustrated energy that had nowhere to go. You could see how he was bursting at the seams, how he needed to get up onstage.

  CHARNA HALPERN:

  One night after a couple of weeks, Chris came up to me with Pat Finn and said, “Let me go onstage! Let me play tonight!”

  “You?” I said. “God, no. You’re definitely not ready.”

  He started getting violent. He was banging his fists on the wall above me, like, “Let me go! Let me go onstage! I’ll be great! You’ll see!”

  “I’ll tell you when you’re ready to be onstage,” I said.

  He was just not hearing it. After a good seven minutes of his badgering, I finally got fed up myself. I said, “All right, I’ll tell you what. You can go onstage and play tonight, but if you’re bad you will never ever get on my stage again. Do you wanna take that chance?”

  Before I even finished my sentence, he was bounding out into the room to tell the guys he was going on. Everyone was looking at me like, “Are you crazy?” But he got up there and was absolutely hilarious.

  The good thing about it was that when he got back to class, he started to calm down. Once I’d let him go onstage, he’d lost that need to prove something. From then on he was really willing to learn and get better.

  PAT FINN:

  From that point on, he just committed a hundred and ten percent. We took classes with Charna. Then we got classes with Del. There were two improv teams that got assembled around that period. One was very cerebral—that wasn’t us. We were the physical group, called Fish Shtick. People wanted to watch them because they were so smart and heady, but then they’d want to watch us because we were just off the wall.

  BRIAN STACK:

  Chris once said that Del Close told him to attack the stage like a bull and try and kill the audience with laughter.

  NOAH GREGOROPOULOS, cast member, ImprovOlympic:

  He was so big and emotional, very physical. He gave one guy a permanent scar on his forehead when he dove from the bar onto the stage in this overblown ninja thing. He landed on him, smashing his glasses into his head. His commitment was just past the point of safety.

  TIM MEADOWS, cast member, Second City:

  I was already touring for Second City, and I used to go back and perform at ImprovOlympic every now and then. One night I went up there and did a Harold with Chris’s team. It’s difficult when you’re the new guy in a group, because they already have their dynamic and you don’t know how you’ll fit into it. But the very first time we performed together Chris was right there for me. I started a scene where I was hanging something up, and it was obvious to everyone in the audience that I was hanging up laundry on a clothesline. But Chris came out and said, “Doctor, what does the X-ray say?”

  I just looked at him and said, “Well, it’s not good.”

  And it got a big laugh because it was such a change from where people thought it was going.

  PAT FINN:

  When you get a suggestion in an improv set, usually one performer goes out and sets the stage based on the idea. And sometimes that person is out there for a while, just fumbling around. He doesn’t know where he’s going, and because he doesn’t know, it’s really difficult to step in and help him.

  One night this girl walks out and puts a pretend briefcase down and goes, “I had such a great day today, honey. They made me partner at the law firm and they love me and somebody’s gonna be interviewing me for Newsweek . . .”

  And on and on and on. It was this long exposition, just going nowhere. We’re all standing there at the back of the stage, thinking, how do we even enter this scene? She’s giving us nowhere to go.

  This goes about a minute or so. She’s droning on and on, and finally Chris storms out of the back line and goes, “Sweet Lord, would you just shut up and bowl?!”

  His instincts were near perfect. With one line he put the whole scene in a place and a context and established what the joke was. “My God, every time you bowl it’s something different. You’re a doctor. You’re a lawyer. ‘Look at me, I discovered something!’ Bowl the goddamned ball.”

  JA
MES GRACE, cast member, ImprovOlympic:

  He was an amazing processor of information. He wasn’t great at getting things started, but if you gave him anything, he would take it, internalize it, have a perspective on it, be affected by it, and ride it out for the scene.

  CHARNA HALPERN:

  He was an amazing listener onstage, like a sponge. You could just see him reflecting your idea through his facial expression and taking on your mood. He totally got it.

  And he was in incredible shape. That always surprised people. I remember one football sketch he was in where his teammates were making fun of him for being out of shape. They’d say, “All right, fatty, drop and give me twenty.” And Chris could do it, with no problem, clapping his hands in between each push-up, even. He was all muscle under there.

  TIM HENRY:

  We’re at a bar in Chicago one night. It’s ten degrees outside. Chris has got his English driving cap on, Timberland boots, and some cutoff sweat-pants, and he’s sporting these huge muttonchop sideburns. The after-work crowd is there. A bunch of little honeys are at the bar, and Chris starts chatting them up. “Hey, how are you? What do you guys do?” he says.

  They work in advertising or insurance or whatever, and they ask him, “So what do you do?”

  Chris is standing there, sweating in ten-degree weather, and he goes, “Me? What do I do? I’m an aerobics instructor.”

  We’re all laughing, ’cause we know he’s winding up to have fun with them.

  “Aerobics instructor?” they say. “Are you kidding me?”

  And Chris, with one hand on the bar and one hand on the stool, defying all laws of physics, goes from standing stock still, leaps into a perfect backflip, and lands back right on his feet. Hat doesn’t even come off his head.

  “Yeah,” he says. “You know, aerobics instructor.”

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  I got hooked on Chris’s shows very early. When I went back to Red Arrow Camp to be a counselor, Kevin and Johnny told me Chris was down in Chicago. I’d been thrown out of the University of Denver; I wasn’t having a traditional college experience. So I started hanging out with Chris a lot. When you’d go and see him in these bars, you’d have to sit through an hour and a half of bullshit watching these kids learn how to do comedy. But however good or bad the shows were, Chris always had that moment, that one moment where lightning would strike and he’d just kill the audience.

  PAT FINN:

  ImprovOlympic was very young, and I think that’s what made it, for lack of a better word, romantic. There were no agents coming to see you. There was nobody pitching a screenplay. It was just about the pure love of the game, going out every night and making people laugh.

  JAMES GRACE:

  It was like a wave of energy. We were doing five shows a week, one on Thursday and two on Fridays and Saturdays. We were just all constantly together all the time, performing, hanging out. Everybody who was there had come because they wanted to challenge themselves and push the boundaries of comedy. People were either rehearsing or performing every night of the week. You were consuming it all the time. And when you weren’t rehearsing or performing, you were hanging out with people whom you rehearsed and performed with. Once you were on a team, that was basically your fraternity.

  It was very collegiate, especially when it came to the drinking. I would say that if you took a clinical definition of alcoholism, then everybody there had a huge problem. Farley always did everything bigger than everybody else, but we were all out of control. One time I saw Pat Finn fall down two flights of stairs solely to make me laugh. That’s what we did, outrageous things all across the board.

  PAT FINN:

  Chris must have had something like forty jobs during that time. One day he and I were walking down Armitage Avenue, and he was like, “Yeah, I worked there. I worked there.”

  And I was like, “When?”

  “Well, I worked at the butcher shop for like an hour, and they fired me. Then I got a job at the hardware store the day after the butcher shop, but I was really tired ’cause I’d had to get up so early for the butcher shop, you know? So I fell asleep on some boxes in the back.”

  I said, “How could you fall asleep within hours of your first day on the job?”

  “I don’t know, but they were really pissed.”

  So he lost that job. Basically he’d lost every job up and down the street. Eventually, we’d go to church and he’d pull the little tags on the bulletin board that said “Need neighborhood workers” and stuff like that.

  He got a job as a bouncer, but then one day he said to me, “Hey, I think I kinda got fired from that bouncer job at the bar.”

  “Jeez, Chris”—this was on Sunday—“you started it on Friday. What happened?”

  Apparently a fight had broken out, so he—Chris, the bouncer—had left, because he didn’t know what to do. And he’d caused the fight.

  What had happened was Chris was checking IDs, and, goofing around, he goosed some girl in the butt. Her boyfriend thought it was somebody else, and he started shoving people and it broke out into a real melee, so Chris just kind of slipped out the front door.

  All the other bouncers came out from inside and finally settled it. Then the owners came out and said, “My God, who’s on the front door?”

  At that moment, Chris came back around from this alley down the side of the bar. He saw the owners, panicked, turned down this alley, and yelled “And stay out!”

  “Where the hell were you?” they asked.

  “Where was I? Where the hell were you? There were like nine guys in the alley on top of me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s okay. I took care of it. But, man . . .”

  “Oh Chris, we’re so sorry.”

  So on Saturday he went back to bounce again. I asked him how that went.

  “Well,” he said, “normally you get your shift drink around eleven. But the girl behind the bar really liked me, so I got my shift drink at seven. Then I had another one. She was making those greyhounds that I like. Man, I had a lot of ’em.”

  “Were you okay?”

  “Well, that’s my question. I’m not sure. I passed out on the people in line while I was checking IDs, and all the bouncers had to take me across the street and put me into bed.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So do I just go over there to get a paycheck, or do I ask ’em to mail it? How does that work?”

  “I don’t know, Chris. You probably drank more than your paycheck. ”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. I guess I just won’t go over there for a while.”

  He didn’t seem particularly fazed by it. It just kind of reinforced to him that he needed to find a way to make a living in comedy.

  CHARNA HALPERN:

  We got a pilot, an improv game show, similar to Whose Line Is It Anyway? I picked out a bunch of our best performers, of which Chris was one, and they flew us all out to L.A. We were doing some really smart work, and the producer just wanted us to dumb it down. “It’s too smart,” he kept saying, “too smart.” And he started firing some of the best people. He wanted to bring in all these dick-joke stand-up comics.

  So, one by one, my cast was getting fired. It was just a nightmare, which Del had warned me was going to happen. Chris could see what was going on. At one point in the rehearsal he said, “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t wanna get fired.”

  “Do what you gotta do,” I said.

  And so he hiked up his shorts into the crack of his ass and started jumping around doing the monkey dog boy dance, which is when you hold your crotch with one hand and put your fingers up your nose and just start jumping around being silly. And, oh, they were on the floor laughing, because that’s the kind of dumb stuff they wanted. And he saved his job.

  But Chris wasn’t always a caricature of the fat guy. He did beautiful scenes. When he did serious scenes, oh my God, he could make you cry.

  NOAH GREGOROPOULOS:

  Chris’s vision of himself was th
at everyone just wanted to see fatty fall down, so that was what he was going to give them. But there were plenty of other guys who could fall off a chair and eat in Roman proportions. What Del Close liked about Chris wasn’t necessarily what everybody else liked about him. Del felt that Chris was in touch with genuine emotions in a way not all improvisers allow themselves. That’s what Del was really attracted to in Chris. He wanted to show Chris that he could be more than just a one-note performer.

  CHARNA HALPERN:

  After Chris was done working with me, I couldn’t wait for him to get to Del, because that was the next level. I said to Del, “I can’t wait for you to see this guy. I want to see what you think.”

  Del watched him, and after the show he turned to me, and the first thing he said was, “Oh, that’s the next John Belushi.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Whale Boy

  JUDITH SCOTT, cast member:

  If you think of the rest of the Second City cast as flat land, Chris was something that fell out of the sky and gave us shape. He might blow out a huge crater, like a meteor, or just collide with the ground, becoming this huge mountain. And by creating this landscape, he gave the rest of us the terrain on which to play.