by Tom Farley
It seemed like every sketch I wrote for a while had Chris getting soaking wet and screaming, at the top of his lungs, “Oh, sweet mother of God!” But I couldn’t resist writing them, because they would always bring down the house.
ROBERT SMIGEL:
When we did the first “Motivational Speaker” sketch, I added something that I thought was really helpful at the time but that I somewhat regretted later. The sketch was pretty much word for word as Bob Odenkirk had written it at Second City, except for the ending. The stage version didn’t really have a topper for Chris, other than “You’ll have plenty of time to live in a van down by the river when you’re . . . living in a van down by the river!” Chris was so powerful onstage that it carried you to the end. But TV flattens stuff out and I thought it needed something more, so I added the part where he’s telling David Spade, “Ol’ Matt’s gonna be your shadow! Here’s Matt, here’s you! There’s Matt, there’s you!” And then he falls and smashes through the table.
It worked really well, but it inaugurated this trend of Chris being really clumsy and falling down a lot. There were several more “Motivational Speaker” sketches, and all of those ended with him crashing through something. Then the writers started having him fall through other stuff. He used to joke about it. “Everybody laughs when fatty falls down.” Chris and I would laugh about how hacky it had become. I’d say, “Chris, give me a triple boxtop.” And he’d do a certain kind of fall for me.
That sort of broad clumsiness was actually the opposite of what Chris’s talents as a physical comedian were. What really struck me at Second City was how graceful and nimble and athletic he was, a brilliant physical performer who was also capable of really specific, subtle things. But a lot of that got buried in this succession of sketches with yelling and pratfalls. It was to Chris’s detriment, and the show’s.
JANEANE GAROFALO:
I think that the writers began to use him as a bit of a crutch, but that’s not entirely the writers’ fault. There’s a natural instinct among a lot of comedians, particularly younger ones, to want to get a laugh. You want desperately to be liked, and sometimes the quickest route is to be loud and broad in your gestures. I think Chris did that in the beginning, and then, unfortunately, it stuck.
DAVID MANDEL:
As much as the writers used him in a certain way, he also liked working in that certain way. It was easy for him to default to the pratfalls and so on. He could power through a sketch just by hiking up his pants and playing with his hair. Those were stock Chris Farley moves. He also hadn’t started wearing his glasses when he should, and he couldn’t always read the cue cards. You’d write a quiet, subtler sketch, and he’d flub a line ’cause he’d miss the cue card. So maybe you didn’t want to take a chance with him on that kind of sketch, and you’d default to something loud and physical.
There was never any sketch where we said, “This sketch isn’t working. Let’s have Farley walk in to be the joke.” It was not a fallback move. But there were definitely a lot of sketches, especially in that last season, that could be reduced to: “Chris yells a lot.”
MICHAEL McKEAN:
It paralleled Raymond Chandler’s rule: Any time the action starts to slow up, just have a guy come through the door with a gun. That’s how they used Chris. He would bring a lot of juice to what could have looked like lazy writing, and he saved a lot of bad sketches. There was this sketch with Deion Sanders—I mean, the comedy stylings of Deion Sanders, first of all—where this flying saucer lands and they keep sending men in to explore, and they all either get killed or anally probed. Then they send Chris in, and he comes out with his clothes in tatters, virtually naked, having been anally violated. That’s all there was to the sketch. In fact, I think I’ve probably embroidered it a little. But even with that, Chris gave it a shot, and he was funny.
JANEANE GAROFALO:
The Deion Sanders alien anal probing sketch, it was so embarrassing.
AL FRANKEN:
The show was always best when there was a balance between the writers and the performers, when both were operating at their peak level and working together. To some extent, Sandler and Spade and Schneider and those guys were not in sync with the writers, at least with my generation of writers. I was not thrilled with what was happening. But maybe it was just time for me to go.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
There was a quality among those guys, Rob Schneider, Adam, Chris, and Spade, that it was “our show.” It was a very David Spade attitude, and it certainly excluded me. Also, I think they knew that, at the bottom line, we weren’t loaded with respect for what they were coming up with.
For some reason the phrase “anal probe” found its way into virtually every sketch. Most of those didn’t make it to air, but at the read-through table it seemed like “anal probe,” “bitch,” and “whore” had assumed the same status as “Good morning, how are you?” It was imbecilic and just as offensive as offensive could be.
TOM SCHILLER:
I think that the humor did change, and I didn’t get into it that much. And that’s because the times changed. But the stuff we were doing in the first five years of SNL, I wouldn’t say it was necessarily so smart. When they talk about this “dumbing down of comedy,” I think comedy just keeps changing with the times, all the time. You can trace the evolution of vaudeville to Ed Sullivan to Your Show of Shows to Laugh-In to Saturday Night Live. And it just keeps evolving.
JOHN GOODMAN:
It’s similar to what happened to the guys who took over National Lampoon after Doug Kenney and Henry Beard left, when it all fell to tits and racial slurs. Michael O’Donoghue used to say that comedy isn’t a rapier; it’s clubbing a baby seal. But you can only club that baby seal for so long.
TOM DAVIS:
They were taking their cues from Animal House, whereas we had taken our cues from Bob and Ray, Sid Caesar, and Johnny Carson. Comedy just takes these turns. But that show has to stay young. It doesn’t matter if you like it or agree with it or think it’s funny. It has to stay young.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
Chris was part of this gang, and he identified with this sort of gang spirit that they had. When he and Adam and Spade did those Gap Girls, it was kind of like the gang was getting together to play, only they were doing it on national television. They were like the Little Rascals, or the Lost Boys from Never-Never Land.
I remember being overwhelmed one night at some of the capers that were going on. All these overtly sexual—and, frankly, homoerotic—hijinks. Just constantly grabbing each other’s asses—and much worse than that. I went into an office with Al Franken, and he explained to me that when a bunch of guys are marooned on an island together, as was the case with that show, you get this kind of behavior. It happens at boys’ prep schools, on submarines. There was a sketch Jim Downey wrote on the old show, “The Adventures of Miles Cowperthwaite.” It was about this young boy trapped on a ship with all these pirates, and it was all about manly men being manly and doing manly things at sea to prove their manliness—and they all turn out to be gay. Everything these kids were doing was like that.
JIM DOWNEY:
It became more of the atmosphere of the show, because you had this critical mass of young guys. I always went to all-boys schools, so I have to admit it’s something that makes me laugh, you know, when it’s done right. Chris would burst through the double doors of the writers’ room with his pants around his ankles and his privates tucked back between his thighs doing the thing from Silence of the Lambs. He’d start rubbing his breasts and saying, “Am I pretty?” It was just so balls out, so to speak. I mean, you had to give it up for that.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
Comedy people, when we’re alone and insulated, just get more and more shocking, and it doesn’t play to the rest of the world. It’s the same way to this day. I’ve seen worse before and since. A lot of it was disgusting, but in the context of this place it was always funny. We were just constantly thinking, oh, this is s
o damn funny, but if anybody saw it we’d all be arrested.
JIM DOWNEY:
It’s hard not to laugh even if you think it’s encouraging irresponsible behavior. Sometimes, to get Chris to stop doing something, we’d talk among ourselves while he was out of the room and agree not to laugh no matter how funny it got. Chris’d get perplexed, and eventually frustrated, because no one was laughing. Then he would just escalate more.
Farley liked to do this routine where he would jokingly hit on waitresses. He’d say, “Well, little lady, I’ve got a problem. I’m in from Moline, Illinois—work with a grain elevator outfit out there—and I’m in town for a couple days on business. And darn it, if I don’t use my whole expense account the home office’ll be liable to cut me back. So, how’s about you and me do this town up right.” And so on, using all this weird, Jazz Age lingo. You’d be like, Chris, what the hell are you talking about?
One night we were at this Mexican restaurant in Midtown named Jose’s. It was one of those places where you buzzed downstairs and they let you in and the entire restaurant was up on the second floor. One night, Farley was doing his goofy routine with the waitress all night, and she was kind of rolling her eyes, like, “Yeah, yeah, buddy.”
The rest of us, I suppose, were not giving him enough attention, so he felt he had to take it up a notch. He jumped up, scooped her up in his arms, and ran down the stairs and out of the restaurant. I turned and looked out the window, and I saw him dashing up Fifty-fourth Street and getting into a cab with her. We all hung back, staying in the restaurant, like, “We’re not going to bite. We can’t give him the satisfaction.” Then I said, “Jesus, we could all be sued.” I was acting in loco parentis with these kids, so I ran downstairs after him. But Chris liked to do that, do big put-ons with strangers who didn’t know who he was. In most cases people realized it was a joke and were happy to be a part of it.
NORM MacDONALD:
Chris would do things with girls, like a kid would do. He’d always be like, “You shure are purty. Can I touch your leg?” It was all for the comic effect of how you’re not supposed to approach a girl. It was all harmless, but obviously because he had a lot of money, some extra came on the show and decided this amounted to sexual harassment.
JIM DOWNEY:
The second-to-last show of the ’93-’94 season, I had written a piece about Bill Clinton called “Real Stories of the Arkansas Highway Patrol.” We had to go upstate and do some outdoor filming. Some women were extras in the piece, and one of them went up in the car with us. It was me and her and Schneider and Farley. It was a limo, with that wide space between the two rows and seats facing each other. Schneider and I were sitting together, and Farley was next to this girl. He was doing his usual “Hey there, little lady!” shtick. And he was poking her and hugging her, but if you knew Chris you knew it was all playful. I finally told him to knock it off—not because I thought it was assaultive behavior but because it was getting annoying.
Well, this girl went to the talent department and complained, hinting at some sort of legal action for what Chris had done. But Chris never did anything wrong. I know because I was sitting there, and as the producer of the show I never would have allowed it. My impression, honestly, was that she was mostly complaining about the size of her part. She thought she had several lines, and it actually wasn’t a speaking role. I think we paid her for a speaking part instead of as an extra, and that was the end of it.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
Nothing ever came of it. It was actually a very minor incident. It became a much bigger story in people’s minds because of the prank that followed, more so than because of the incident itself.
JIM DOWNEY:
So the next week it’s last show of the season. Farley came in, and we decided to have some fun with him. It was just completely random and totally unplanned. He came by, and I said to him very casually, “Chris, you know about the lawsuit, right?”
“What?” he said.
“You know, the sexual harassment suit. Anyway, you’re not going to do any jail time. That’s—don’t worry about that. I mean, it’s not one hundred percent you won’t, but it’s at least a sixty to seventy percent chance you won’t do any jail time.”
“Wh-what are you talking about?”
“You know. The girl from the limousine. Anyway, it’s too early to tell, but NBC’s lawyers are all over it.”
He was really starting to shake and sweat. Then the other writers started gathering around. Mind you, I’d seen Farley do plenty of similar put-ons to other people, so in no way did I think this was unfair. And also, I thought that he needed to learn a lesson, that the kind of outlandish behavior he pulled in the limo can have consequences, even if it’s harmless and well intentioned.
I said, “Now, Chris, I used to be a process server, so I know how this works. If you’re walking down the street, for the next two . . . well, for the next several months, if you’re walking down the street and someone approaches you, do not wait to find out who it is—you run. You flat out run.”
And then Ian Maxtone-Graham chimed in, “Oh yeah, I was a process server for a whole summer. If they even touch you with the document, you’ve been served. If it touches anywhere on your person.”
Eventually, everyone’s getting in on this, giving Chris advice on how to hide out and things like that. I don’t know what happened with Chris in the intervening days, but we went to the prop department and had them make up a subpoena, and I had one of the writers I knew from Seinfeld serve Farley with a lawsuit at the end-of-the-season party. He was devastated. A couple of people were coming up to me, saying, "C’mon, that’s cruel. He’s close to tears.”
NORM MacDONALD:
Chris was just ashen, and the even crueler part was that they didn’t let him in on the joke until an hour or two later. To make it that much worse, his mother was standing right there beside him when it happened. It was really terrible.
MICHAEL McKEAN:
It was a really shitty thing to do.
JIM DOWNEY:
And I was like, “Now, wait a minute. I’ve seen Chris put many a waitress through the paces before. He’s a big boy.” But finally I said, “Okay, let’s end it.” I went over and talked to him. It took me about a half hour to convince him that it was a put-on. As far as I heard, he was never mad about it, because he liked to put one over on other people, too. I talked to him a few days later and I reminded him, “You’re a celebrity now, and people will be on the make. You should keep that fake subpoena as a reminder not to do anything that could be misconstrued.”
And he said, “I don’t have it. I burned it.”
It was like he had to destroy the evidence of the whole thing.
FR. MATT FOLEY, friend:
Chris was very much a man’s man. There were girls who were his friends, but anyone who was being honest would say he did some pretty inappropriate things with women. He was often mean to them. It was weird. It was the trust thing: Will you love me for who I am?
Chris used to say that every girl he went out with before he got famous looked like him with a wig on. Not to slam those women, but it’s probably true. Then, all of a sudden, he’s famous and these hot girls are all over him. So obviously, sexual issues, relationships, were very difficult things for him. I think he trusted God implicitly; I don’t think he trusted people. “Why do these women want to go out with me?” He was very confused by that. He didn’t trust them. He didn’t know who to trust.
TIM MEADOWS:
That was something we talked about quite a bit. He’d always say, “How could any beautiful girl love my fat ass?”
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
One of the real differences between John Belushi and Chris Farley was that John Belushi was married, whereas Chris was sort of the opposite of married. I wouldn’t even put him in the category of “single.” He wasn’t single; he was the opposite of married.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
He went out with this girl named Lorri—her
nickname was Kit Kat—this really hot girl. I was in New York one weekend and Chris told me, “I really like this Kit Kat girl.” I saw her on the set. She was this five-foot-ten Victoria’s Secret model, long legs, just hot. They clearly weren’t going to talk about second-century world history together. Chris said, “What should I do? I don’t know if she likes Spade or not. I want to ask her out, but I’m so confused.”
I said, “Well, Chris, why don’t you go to work today and ask David if it’s okay if you ask her out?”
He did, David said it was okay and he asked her out. So here we are on a date, Chris, Kit Kat—and me, his priest. The next night we all went to a movie together. It was just bizarre as hell. It was like I was back in eighth grade.
DAVID SPADE:
Lorri lived directly across the street from me. I’d see her at the deli. She was this Victoria’s Secret girl, who I eventually realized was one of the Victoria’s Secret girls back from when I used to look at Victoria’s Secret and found her quite striking. She was very friendly. I invited her to the show, and we started talking. I didn’t have a whole lot of friends in New York outside of SNL, so it was nice to meet someone to hang out with.