God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem

by Darrell Hammond

  On Tuesday, people started coming in around noon. Tradition dictates that the host visit with the writers in their offices to talk about proposed sketches. A lot of the writers are Emmy winners, and it’s really an honor for the host as much as anything. Meanwhile, the writing began in earnest, so a lot of people would end up staying all night working, including Lorne. The cast members conferred with the writers, and each one participated in putting together anywhere from five to ten sketches.

  My role on the show was a little different from the rest of the cast’s. I wasn’t very good at coming up with sketch ideas, but that’s not why I was there. I was a field-goal kicker. You need a voice? I was the guy who could kick that football. I didn’t know how to punt, pass, or tackle, but I could kick. So I came in on Wednesday mornings around 10:00 a.m. Sometimes I’d have gotten a call Tuesday night that would be a tip-off: “Can you do this guy?” But lots of times they would simply assign a role to me, and I would walk in having never heard the voice. That first week they gave me Ted Koppel in a Nightline sketch in which Koppel interviews Republican presidential candidates Colin Powell (Tim Meadows) and Bob Dole (Norm Macdonald). I usually had four or five hours to study videotapes I got from the research department and cobble together some semblance of a voice before read-through with all the cast and crew, which happened Wednesday afternoon.

  You know how they open the gate at a rodeo and the bull comes out seething with energy and fury? That’s the kind of mindset you have to have at read-through, because that’s how hard it was. But it was all part of it, and as a performer you wouldn’t have it any other way. A tennis player expects Wimbledon to be tough, and it is. Anywhere from thirty-five to fifty sketches were presented, which is three or four times what we’d end up with. It took a few hours to get through them all.

  After read-through, Mariel complimented me on my Koppel impression. I thought, This is all pixie dust.

  Right after the meeting, Lorne and the head writer and the producers met with Mariel to make the first cut, based chiefly on how many people laughed at each sketch during read-through. Lorne and the host had the last word on what stayed in and what got tossed.

  Between read-through and picks, you might find yourself loitering around with hosts like: Robert De Niro, Senator John McCain, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Sir Ian McKellen, Snoop Dogg, and Derek Jeter. For starters.

  Later that night, an intern came by all the offices and yelled, “Picks!” That’s when we found out which ten or twelve sketches had survived. It was always a drastic cut that day, and, per usual, a few people took a hit to the solar plexus, but there was no time to nurse hurt feelings. Costume and makeup started getting designed Wednesday night after picks. On Thursday, the writers revised or reworked the sketches that needed it. “Weekend Update” started to get pulled together based on what was in the news that week. On Thursday and Friday we blocked the show—that’s figuring out the physical part of the performance, where everybody stands and how they move—while the writers oversaw the costuming and set design of their sketches. The writers also worked on Mariel’s monologue.

  Saturday afternoon we did a run-through for Lorne, during which the writers made notes for further changes—to dialogue, costume, blocking, and set design. The cast was usually in at least partial costume—wigs and costume, if not full makeup. In the two or three hours between the end of the run-through and the dress rehearsal at 8:00 p.m. (which is done in front of a live studio audience, although not the same one that will be seated for the live show at 11:30), the sketches were tweaked yet again, and new scripts distributed; each version of a script was a different color so everyone knew which was the most current. Sometimes the order of sketches was changed; often, sketches were cut. I went back to my dressing room to refine my Koppel impression and grab some dinner and a nap.

  For dress, the cast got into full costume and makeup. The writers paid a lot of attention to how the audience reacted. The show was running at two hours, so when dress was over at ten o’clock, everybody headed up to Lorne’s office on the ninth floor and waited for “Meeting!” to be called. This was when Lorne and the writers made the final cuts to get the material down to ninety minutes, as well further tweaks to the surviving sketches.

  When the meeting ended, it was nearly eleven o’clock, so the cast hustled back downstairs to get back into hair and makeup (to make sure we didn’t ruin the costumes or the handmade hairpieces, we would take them off between performances throughout the day). The writers got to work on making the changes. A posse of interns hits the bank of copy machines to churn out the revised scripts.

  It’s incredibly confusing, and the frenzy continues all the way until 1:00 a.m. If the show is running long, further sketches might be cut while we’re on air. And adding to the stress, for me at least, was the constant presence of seriously famous people who came by to say hello to Lorne and watch the goings-on from a discreet spot on the floor. Over the years, a who’s who of boldfaced names stopped by, but the audience can’t see that Paul McCartney is standing right in front of you, watching you do your sketch, or that Yankees All-Star A-Rod is there with Kate Hudson, looking at you with an expression that says, Be spectacular. Be like us. The audience also doesn’t know that you may not have seen the script before now, that it might have been rewritten on the way downstairs from the ninth-floor meeting to the eighth-floor studio.

  Not everyone can take it, but Lorne picks people who can operate in this biosphere. He doesn’t just hire talented people, he hires fast people. Some really fabulous players were on for only one year, and some fabulous people didn’t make it even that far. The late Bernie Brillstein, who was my manager as well as Lorne’s, once told me that Lorne has the greatest mind in comedy. And the truth is, at the heart of the show’s greatness is a mystery that really only Lorne understands.

  Intimidated as I was, I was deliriously happy to be along for the ride.

  During Mariel Hemingway’s monologue, she wandered backstage to introduce both new and returning cast members. I was one of several new people that year, along with Jim Breuer, Will Ferrell, David Koechner, Cheri Oteri, and Nancy Walls, plus returning players Norm Macdonald, Mark McKinney, Tim Meadows, Molly Shannon, and David Spade. Mariel had recently had a guest-starring role as a lesbian on The Roseanne Show, so in this bit she breezed by all the men and kissed all the women full on the mouth, even the show’s new director, Beth McCarthy. It was pretty hot.

  Right after the monologue, there was a pretaped gag commercial for A.M. Ale that had me sucking down a 40 with my breakfast. How fitting for my first day on national television.

  Later in the show I debuted my Ted Koppel, which, regardless of Mariel’s lovely words after read-through, didn’t get a single laugh on air. I got his voice dead right, but it turned out that was exactly the problem: I did it as a straight impression. Most of the voices I’d learned over the years had been in the context of obvious jokes, but I was intimidated by the seeming seriousness of the Nightline sketch. Lorne used to say, “Start accurate, and then exaggerate the impression to make it funny.”

  By the time we reached the good nights, it felt like I’d been through a year of my life in the last twelve hours. There were hundreds of hurdles and little pitfalls and artistic souls littering the halls like umbrella carcasses along a New York street after a hard rain.

  But it didn’t matter. This was nirvana. Standing on the stage next to Mariel Hemingway at the end of the show, waving to the studio audience, I thought, This is just as good as playing for the Yankees.

  I was so revved up that I went right back in to work Sunday morning, when the offices were empty, and worked on my Koppel. I didn’t know if I’d do him again, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  The following Saturday, I was in my first cold open. I played sportscaster Bob Costas, although I didn’t say “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” I had the flu and it didn’t go as well as I wanted, which he needled me about good-naturedly the first time I met h
im. Mariel Hemingway must have had a great time when she hosted, because she came back for a cameo that week (she served Lorne coffee). When I took the stage with my fellow cast members and original cast member Chevy Chase, who was hosting, for the good-nights at 1:00 a.m., it was my birthday. I was forty years old, older than most people when they left the show; this was just the beginning for me.

  A couple of weeks later, I did my first Bill Clinton on air. It was during a sketch about Halloween in New Hampshire during primary season, and all the candidates showed up at someone’s door during trick-or-treating hours to pitch themselves. Norm Macdonald did his killer Bob Dole. David Koechner did Phil Graham, and diminutive Cheri Oteri did her hyper Ross Perot. When it was Clinton’s turn to ring the bell, I grabbed handfuls of candy and shoved them in my pockets. I had no idea at the time that this was the character that would largely define my time on SNL. All I could think was how I was bloated from the lithium, but I guess that made for a convincing pre–South Beach Diet president.

  It’s hard to say why that character hit so well. I think part of it is that the guy himself is so endearing in his charm and obvious human frailty—thank you, Paula Jones. Clinton was brought back the next week in the cold open. The sketch, written by the current junior senator from Minnesota, Al Franken—I didn’t see that coming either—had me sitting in the White House kitchen in the middle of the night, stuffing my face with whipped cream from a can and hot-fudge-covered hot dogs while calling people to apologize for being a failure. I could relate, and I guess I got a little carried away during dress. Afterward, Lorne said I was taking too much time with the eating. “This needs to pick up. It’s not a one-act play.”

  Clinton’s self-esteem was so low, he asked the pizza delivery guy, played by Tim Meadows, to yell “Live from New York” for him.

  I finally got to yell that famous line in the seventh episode, in character as Jesse Helms. I would go on to do it more than sixty times over the years, more than any other cast member in the show’s history. (Dana Carvey held that title before me.)

  But the first season was pretty tough for me. I had to learn how to be on the show. (I wasn’t there long before I was given my own office because I had to practice, and Colin had to write.) What I found really unnerving was that sketches could play well at read-through, get a lot of laughs, and still not make the cut. Since I was new to live television, I had no idea there are a million reasons, technical reasons, why something might not be chosen for air. But time went by, I kept showing up, and I watched other cast members to see if I could pick up any pointers for SNL survival.

  I was also going to the Comedy Cellar pretty regularly to try out new impressions. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, I’d go downtown to work on Donahue or Clinton or whomever I was expecting to play in upcoming shows. It was at the Cellar that I first tested out Clinton biting his bottom lip and giving the thumbs-up, and it was a hit. The first time I did it on air, the audience loved it. After that, any time I got a Clinton script, it would include a note, “Does the thumb and lip thing.” For the record, I never actually saw Clinton do those at the same time. I made it up.

  I didn’t really start making it on the show until writer Adam McKay, now one of Will Ferrell’s partners along with Chris Henchy and Judd Apatow in Funny or Die, the brilliant comedy video website, took an interest in me. When failed presidential candidate Steve Forbes hosted in April 1996, Adam wrote a sketch in which I played Koppel interviewing Forbes, playing himself, about whether he was the author of an anonymous political novel in which the lead character is a handsome ladies’ man named Teve Torbes. At one point, after Forbes, in a fit of giggles, denies yet again that he is the author, I ad-libbed, “C’mon!” Ad-libbing was verboten as a rule—as Lorne has said, it’s hard enough putting a show together in six days without introducing surprises—but the audience applauded loud enough that I had to pause for a moment before saying my next line. Suddenly I had this half-assed sense: I think I have a hit character.

  In total that season, I managed to establish a number of impressions good enough to recur: Phil Donahue, Koppel, Clinton, Richard Dreyfuss. When I did Jesse Jackson on “Weekend Update” the first time, Norm Macdonald, who was anchor then, broke up when I yelled at the end of a largely nonsensical rant, “Say it with me: Yabba Dabba Do!” It was one of the few times something I wrote made it into the script and on air.

  I even got a little make-out action that first season. I did one cold open as Jay Leno performing for the troops in a USO show. During the bit, I brought out Tim Meadows dressed in drag as RuPaul. Leno starts to say how beautiful RuPaul is, then goes in for a big lip lock. Tim runs offstage in mock horror (at least I think it was mock), and I turn back to the audience, my face covered in his smeared lipstick. In another episode, I played veteran 20/20 anchor Hugh Downs, who ends up pulling coanchor Barbara Walters, played by Cheri Oteri, behind the desk in a hot clinch.

  Veterans and newcomers spent all season trying to figure out how to work together as an ensemble. Toward the end of the year, we started having great shows. It took time to turn it around, but suddenly SNL was happening again.

  I got a call from someone at NBC saying, “Great year. We look forward to having you back.”

  I thought, Impossible. I could not have gotten here from where I started.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Golden Years

  Melbourne, Florida

  The 1960s

  When I was very little, maybe four or five years old, I used to sit in our little one-story house on Wisteria Drive, overwhelmed with the sense that I was surrounded by evil. When the sun started to go down in the late afternoon, I was filled with foreboding, and everything was scary—the walls, the furniture, the rug, the very air was scary. I’d hear the branches of the hibiscus bush outside the kitchen window thump thump against the glass and feel something was coming to get me. Outside, the trees, the grass, the asphalt in the driveway, seemed alive and threatening. I had to make it through the night until our maid Myrtise arrived in the morning.

  My mother described Myrtise as looking like a young Cicely Tyson. I only knew her from a small child’s perspective: she smelled like the wind and wore sleeveless dresses that showed her arms, which were pretty, surprisingly strong, and—significantly, in the largely racist neighborhood where we lived—brown. I was entranced by the sight of my little white hands in her warm, encompassing brown ones. I knew that we lived among people who used the N-word, but I didn’t know that my father’s grandfather had belonged to the KKK and ran moonshine back in Georgia during Reconstruction. It was very confusing for me because I adored Myrtise. The only real affection I got during the first few years of my life was from her. How was I was supposed to disparage her at the same time? I only knew that when Myrtise held me, I was safe.

  Melbourne in the late 1950s and early ’60s was a long way from the colorful playground of Disney World or swank Miami Beach. But Melbourne is one of those places—Florida is filled with them—that’s not really anywhere. Squeezed up against the Atlantic Coast, with big brother Orlando to the northwest and the “real” city of Palm Bay just to the south, in those days Melbourne only impersonated a real city. Nevertheless, it somehow manages to pack in a cool 75,000 people, most of whom have jobs and spend their weekends heading out to the beach, or the barrier island that manages to keep the worst of the ocean weather at bay, literally. If you wanted to, you could drive the whole barrier island all the way down Route 1A—it’s nearly 100 miles of beach road, dotted here and there with fun things like cuddly Patrick AFB and my personal favorite, Big Starvation Cove.

  I guess the highlight is that Melbourne is smack in the middle of the Space Coast, less than an hour south of Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, which was established the year I turned seven. That’s where the Apollo moon missions, the Hubble Telescope, the space shuttles, and the International Space Station were all launched. Nearby Cocoa Beach is where Major Tony Nelson lived with Jeannie Saturday nights at 8:00 p.
m. (If you’re under age ninety, you probably didn’t get that, but bear with me.)

  I think it was thanks to my love for Myrtise that I was always oddly proud of the fact that Melbourne was founded by slaves after the Civil War. And the fact that freed men established my town seemed to offset the fact that it was boringly named after the first postmaster, an avowedly white Brit who actually spent most of his life in Melbourne, Australia. His actual name was Archibald Corncraker McTavish; or maybe it was Tarquin Bartholomew Bungle. No, no: Kevin. That was it. Kevin. Okay, no, it was really Cornthwaite John Hector, and I’m sad that more people aren’t named Cornthwaite.

  But living in Melbourne was more like living in the Deep South of my ancestors than in the Florida of picture postcards. The people lived lives that were all but prearranged—marriage, mortgage, kids, church—and they all seemed to suffer a kind of lower-middle-class desperation. My parents were no exception.

  In those days, especially in the South, if you were a woman with aspirations, you might as well be a whore. My mother, Margaret, who looked a bit like Annette Bening with luxurious auburn hair, was trapped in that world, which dictated that she become a wife and mother. She told me on my wedding day years later that she only married my father, Max, because her own father had threatened “to beat the living daylights” out of her if she didn’t.

  Wisteria Drive sounds a lot more picturesque than it was. Our house was one of many one-story tract houses on small plots lined up one after the other. Most people tried to keep a lawn, but in the Florida climate most of the lawns were sad, sandy affairs sporting more brown than green. A few people put up white picket fences, but mostly the yards were left to the elements. The Florida East Coast Railway, a 350-mile stretch of freight line between Miami and Jacksonville, ran right behind our house.