by Tom Farley
TODD GREEN:
When Chris interacted with celebrities, the guest hosts, he would always introduce me by saying, “This is my friend Todd. We met in second grade and grew up together.” He was proud that he was my friend, and he wanted to share that. I remember him regaling Glenn Close with stories of Madison, and you could see that she saw the genuineness in him. She just looked at him and said, “You really are an amazing guy.”
I’m a huge, huge Beatles fan, and so when Paul McCartney was on the show, that was a really big deal. Ten years earlier, Chris and I had been listening to Beatles albums in our basements. He called me during the week at like two in the afternoon and said, “What’re you doing?”
“What am I doing?” I said. “I’m working, like most people.”
“You know what I’m doing?”
“What?”
And then he took the phone and held it up, and I could hear Paul McCartney singing “Yesterday.”
“I’m just here, hanging with Paul McCartney,” he said. Then he giggled and hung up the phone.
The night of the show, he said, “Listen, I want you guys to hang out in my dressing room tonight. I have a surprise for you.”
So, Kevin and I wait and watch on the monitor in the dressing room. McCartney comes out and does the first song, and we watch him, wondering, “What’s the surprise? Why didn’t he come and get us?” Whatever. Didn’t matter. It was one of his new songs. Then the second song comes and goes, another new one, and still no Chris. Just before the end of the show, when we’re pretty sure Chris has forgotten about us, he barrels into the dressing room and says, “Okay, Greenie, you’re on! Follow me!”
We go running down the hallway to the studio. Paul and Linda McCartney come out. Chris introduces me to them. I’m in a state of shock, and the four of us walk out to the stage together. Chris and I stop just short of the cameras, and Paul and Linda go out and he sings “Hey Jude.”
And at that moment, Chris wasn’t a member of the show anymore. It was just two buddies from Wisconsin who grew up on the Beatles, listening to Paul McCartney. Chris literally forgot that he had to go back onstage for the good-nights.
I think, deep down, all of the guys from Edgewood figured that one day we’d end up back in Madison and it would be just the way it was. I think even Chris believed that. Even ranked against all the fame and money and stardom, he felt the days back at Edgewood were the best days of our lives.
KEVIN FARLEY:
When you come to the conclusion that you’re an alcoholic, and you go to these stupid meetings, they’re filled with down-and-out people right off the street. I’d go to Madison, and I’d see Chris, who was on Saturday Night Live, had money, had fame. He’d go and drink coffee and talk with these regular folk, and he could talk to them more easily than he could talk to Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney. He felt more at ease with the average Joes.
What he loved was the honesty. Nobody is as honest as they are in one of those meetings, when they’re admitting their faults, admitting that they’re broken human beings. Contrast that with the Saturday Night Live after party, where everyone wants you to think they’re hot stuff. They’re putting on airs, and it’s all bullshit because we’re all just broken people anyway. To witness people being honest about themselves and with themselves is a life-changing thing, because it’s something you so rarely see. That’s what’s truly amazing about recovery, and amazing about how it changed Chris.
TOM FARLEY:
He was a lot more fun to be around. He was much, much funnier. You could have thoughtful, engaging discussions with him, and he wouldn’t get mad or defensive. That was a huge difference from when he was drinking.
For Chris, being in recovery was a little like being at camp. That’s how he treated it. Make your bed every morning for inspection, that sort of thing. And that carried over once he got out of rehab, too. As disgusting a slob as he was before, he was that clean and organized once he got sober. He turned into a neat freak.
BOB ODENKIRK:
After all the years of being in and out of rehab, I never thought that Chris could take it seriously. But one time I was at this party out in L.A., and I saw him turn down a beer. He was saying no, and he meant it. I thought, oh my God, he figured it out. He knows how dire this is, and he’s really taking charge. It wasn’t about pleasing everyone else. It was about him and his choice. I was really impressed, and I thought, wow, nothing is going to stop this guy.
TOM FARLEY:
Toward the end of Chris’s Saturday Night Live run, my son was born, and he had to stay in intensive care for a week. One day I asked Chris to watch the two older girls while my wife and I went to the hospital. We went down to his apartment, and we were ringing the buzzer, waiting for someone to let us in. There was no answer. I was starting to wonder where the new, reliable Chris was. Then, around the corner here he comes with these huge bags of Cheetos and ice cream and these enormous Barney dolls, walking down the street. It was just a great sight. Chris was so happy that we’d asked him to look after the girls, that we trusted him with that responsibility. He was so proud that he could be a better part of their lives.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris paved the way for the rest of us. When he went down to Alabama, I started to look at myself. I was doing the same stuff he was—coke, pot, drinking all the time. I saw where I was headed. I never went into rehab. I just walked into a meeting one day. That’s when I realized we all are alcoholics, the whole family. My mother stopped drinking then, too, at the same time I did. We would go to meetings a lot together. We realized Dad was an alcoholic, and we saw the patterns very clearly once we’d changed our own. But Tommy, Johnny, and Dad were still drinking. Barb was the exception. She was never a drinker at all.
TOM FARLEY:
When I look back, or when people ask me what regrets I have, what I realize is that I always felt that Chris’s problems were his own. I was still drinking, and I didn’t take an active role in his recovery. It was his deal, and that was that. Then one day he asked me to come to his second-anniversary meeting, which he was going to lead. I said, “Great, where do you meet?” He gives me the address of this place down on Eleventh Avenue and Forty-something, the real fringe of Hell’s Kitchen. You go down there and you think, Jesus, what am I walking into?
But that’s where Chris liked to go. He had his choice between meetings on Park Avenue and in Hell’s Kitchen, and he wanted to be with the desperate, hard-luck cases to remind himself that his celebrity didn’t put him above them in any way. He stood up there in front of them and said, “Look, I woke up the same way you guys did this morning, wondering if I was going to stay sober today. My disease is no different than yours.” And it wasn’t bullshit. He just seemed so wise and intelligent and in control. I just sat there thinking, this is my brother? I looked at him in a whole different light from then on.
NORM MacDONALD:
What’s hard for a comedian is that they make a living on their anxieties and their self-doubts, but in real life they try and separate themselves from that. Chris didn’t do that. He was absolutely honest in what he was.
CONAN O’BRIEN:
You got the sense with Chris that he wasn’t punching a clock. And, obviously, that isn’t always a fun way to live. But it was fun for everybody else.
DAVID MANDEL:
Emilio Estevez hosted the show in support of Mighty Ducks 2, which we were given a screening of. We saw it in a private screening room. No one really cared about Mighty Ducks 2, so only a couple of us were there.
Now, in Mighty Ducks 2—which, if you need your memory refreshed—they’re training for the Junior Olympics, and they let some street kids from L.A. join the team. So now they have some black kids on the squad, and they do a giant musical montage where they take the rap song “Whoomp! There It Is” and change it to “Quack! There It Is.” And of course it was the actual musicians who’d sung “Whoomp! There It Is.” They’d sold out to Disney and done “Quack! There It Is.”
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br /> It was so ridiculous that those of us in the room started clapping along and jumping up and down and dancing with the music in the middle of the screening room. The next thing you know, Farley’s pants are down around his ankles, and he’s standing up on a chair, smacking his ass in time to “Quack! There It Is.” I have never seen anything funnier in my life. And yet when you look back sometimes you think, you know, maybe that was a cry for help.
SARAH SILVERMAN, cast member:
The cast was on a retreat, sitting around a campfire, and Chris sidled up to Jim Downey. I overheard him say in this little-boy voice, “Hey, Jim? Do you think it would help the show if I got even fatter?”
Jim said, in his parental voice, “No, Chris. I think you’re fine.”
Chris said, “Are you sure? ’Cause I will. For the show.”
Chris was fucking around for sure, and seeing the back-and-forth of the conversation was hilarious, but there was an element of truth in it: He would do anything to be funny.
NORM MacDONALD:
I never thought about it as needing attention, because Chris laughed at everybody else, too. He loved Sandler and Spade and me, guys who were much less funny than he was. And he was always more generous in giving you a laugh than in taking one for himself.
His greatest love was just the act of laughter itself. As much as he made other people laugh, to watch Chris do it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever see. Nobody could laugh with as much unbridled glee. He’d just go into these paroxysms of mirth. If Chris laughed at one of your jokes, you felt like the king of the world.
STEVEN KOREN:
Chris was really smart. He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s the same with Jim Carrey. He knows the exact degrees to which he’s being big or small or clever. When they’re that good, they know the difference between being laughed at and laughed with. There’s a definite awareness. I guess Chris was a victim of his own desire to make people laugh, but also I think his heart was so big that if he was the butt of the joke it was okay. He wanted to give people laughter so much that it was okay if it hurt him a little bit. It was a conscious decision, I think.
JAY MOHR, cast member:
No one was laughing at Chris. Everyone was laughing with him. Show me someone who was laughing at Chris Farley, and I’ll show you a real cocksucker.
DAVID SPADE:
I would have to write sketches all week to try and stay alive on the show, and Chris would be written for, so he didn’t write a lot, or read. So while I was busting my hump, he’d be bored behind me trying to amuse himself. One night he goes, “Davy, turn around.”
“I’m busy,” I say.
“Turn around.”
“Dude, if this is Fat Guy in a Little Coat again, it’s not funny anymore.”
“It’s not.”
“Really?”
“I promise.”
So I turn around and he’s got my Levi’s jacket on, and he goes, “Fat Guy in a Little Coat . . . give it a chance.”
And the coat rips, and that’s how we wound up putting it in Tommy Boy.
TIM HERLIHY, writer:
When comedians get together . . . I wouldn’t call it one-upsmanship, but it is like a game. Who can be the funniest? When I knew Chris, he was surrounded by the elite of comedy. Sandler’s a huge, funny star, but you always knew Farley was going to top him. He was the funniest among a group of very funny, talented people. All of us who worked with him are richer for it. We’re better writers, better performers.
FRED WOLF:
Comics are a pretty strange breed. Put all of us in a room and we can fight among ourselves and disagree with all our bitterness and neuroses. But when it came to Farley, it was unanimous: He was the best.
NORM MacDONALD:
What astonished me about Chris was that he could make everyone laugh. He could make a child laugh. He could make an old person laugh. A dumb person, a smart person. A guy who loved him, a guy who hated him.
IAN MAXTONE-GRAHAM:
He was a very funny, jovial presence in the office. He’d be very, very outgoing, and then he’d have this very cute, shy thing he’d do where he’d sort of retreat into himself. Hugely outgoing and hugely shy. That was the rhythm of his behavior. You can see that in some of his sketches.
BOB ODENKIRK:
Most of my memories are just of hanging out with Chris and him making me laugh so hard. But then, if Chris wasn’t being silly, if he was just listening to you quietly, that was as funny as when he was worked up. “The Chris Farley Show” on SNL, that was Chris behaving himself.
JOHN GOODMAN, host:
“The Chris Farley Show,” that was Chris.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
That was Chris.
STEVEN KOREN:
That was him.
JACK HANDEY, writer:
He was basically playing himself.
TIM MEADOWS:
That’s how he acted whenever he was around someone he admired. Until he got to know you, he really was that guy—shy and asking a lot of dumb questions but not wanting to be too intrusive. It was a very endearing quality.
TOM DAVIS:
I thought of that sketch originally. I thought, what the fuck are we going to do with this guy? He’s just over the fucking top all the time. I buttonholed Downey and said, “Let’s do ‘The Chris Farley Show’ and just have him talk as he really is so he doesn’t go over the top.”
JIM DOWNEY:
Farley was such a comedy nerd. He knew all the old shows, better than I did. He’d come up and say, “Do you remember that superheroes sketch on the show where they were having that party?” Then he’d proceed to do the entire sketch for me, his version probably longer than the original. He’d finish that and be like, “You remember that?”
“Yes, Chris,” I’d say, thinking this was all leading up to something significant. “What about it?”
“That was awesome.”
So we decided to put that in a talk-show format, with some poor sap being trapped on a talk show with Farley asking him retarded questions. We submitted it, actually, as a joke at read-through. I thought it was too inside, and so would never make it on the air. But Lorne liked it immediately, and seemed to have big hopes for it.
At dress, Steve Koren was watching it, grinning ear to ear and laughing. And of course the audience loved it. I don’t think it was just Farley being adorable. I guess there was just something universal about it, and I didn’t appreciate the resonance it had.
The first one was with Jeff Daniels. Then we did Martin Scorsese. By the time Paul McCartney came around, I actually didn’t want to bring it back at all. I just thought, what can you do that’s different? If you just do the same thing over again just because people liked it, they might stop liking it. But Lorne insisted on doing it.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Actually, I think Chris was the one who was adamant about doing it with McCartney.
ALEC BALDWIN:
We were just dying. We couldn’t believe how perfect it was. How hard is it to make Beatlemania funny again? How hard is it to make gooing over McCartney funny? We didn’t know if that would work. But Chris came on, and we were sobbing with laughter it was so funny. It was going along, and then Chris says, “You remember that time you got arrested in Japan for pot?”
And McCartney just suddenly changed his tone. “Oh, those are the things I’d like to forget, Chris.”
They played it perfectly.
JOHN GOODMAN:
The funniest bit that I ever saw him do was that McCartney interview. When I first met him he was like this kid who kept staring at me, just like that character did. I don’t know why, but he seemed genuinely thrilled to meet me. It wasn’t a celebrity type of thing, either; it was just that he couldn’t get enough of other people, of their stories. He was endlessly curious.
BOB ODENKIRK:
I said once—and it was misquoted in that fucking Live from New York book—that Chris was like a child. How it reads in that book was tha
t I meant Chris was like a little baby, which wasn’t what I said at all. The whole quote—which they didn’t include, because they’re dicks—was, “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but Chris was like a child. He was like a child in his reverence and awe of the world around him.” And he was. He was so respectful of everyone, like he always had something to learn from you.
JAY MOHR:
I learned from Chris how to have more fun. Nothing is that serious. Acting is really a ridiculous way to make a living. You’re playing make-believe, and Chris never got away from that fact. Kids never come home and say, “I was over at Michael’s house and we played make-believe. It was awful. We were in a spaceship and I had a helmet on and there were Martians and then we chased them through the woods—and it just wasn’t my thing.” No kid has ever said that. It’s make-believe. You paint as you go. I have a three-year-old son now. I open up his coloring book and say, “What color are these footprints going to be?”