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

  You have to go through it for a while to realize Lorne didn’t hire you for no reason. He knows what he’s doing, and he wants you there. The writers are trying to get you in the show, even if they can’t always do it. Maybe the set wouldn’t come from Brooklyn in time. Maybe the host wanted to say “Live from New York.” Maybe the musical guest couldn’t act. There are a hundred reasons you might still be in your dressing room biting your cuticles instead of on the stage when 11:30 rolls around.

  There were times when I felt good about the work that I’d done after the fact. I felt like a hitter going to bat with two outs in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series every week. You don’t get up in the morning doing joy jumps, thinking that’s what’s going to happen today. I rarely did character sketches except for occasional bit parts, I only did impressions, so that about cut in half my ability to get on the air. Some of the cast developed partnerships with certain writers—Will Ferrell had Adam McKay, Adam Sandler had Tim Herlihy. Given the special nature of what I was doing there, I didn’t have that special kind of relationship with any of the writing staff. No one’s bad, that’s just how it was.

  I might wake up Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. and think, Oh my God, I just figured out how to do so and so. The smallest trifles in the world could improve a piece of four-minute theater. So I’d go in early and try to get those changes made. How do I get something rewritten? Who do I go to? I’d like to add a line. I’d like to subtract a line. I have a new voice. I figured out a way to do the voice I couldn’t do last night, but I can’t get in touch with the writer. All the sketches need to get to the cue cards around noon, and the cue card guys only do rewrites at certain times during the day, so I had to find out when that is.

  Also, I was horrible at reading cue cards, which were there because the material changes so much up until air. And you have to play the cards but look like you’re not playing the cards.

  That’s when I realized one of the reasons SNL is so difficult is because you’re playing for two audiences in two vastly different places—the studio, and at home. My tendency was to make what I was doing play for the camera, which meant make it small, keep the gestures simple. A camera is so sensitive that you can think something, like, I’m annoyed, and it will show up on camera. With the camera there, it’s very difficult to fake it.

  On Thursdays and Fridays, all the writers gather in the writers’ room to look at each script and suggest improvements. Everybody rewrites everybody else’s material. Somehow, it was never contentious. Everybody behaves. You have to take it with good cheer when you get a shot to the teeth and your sketch is nixed. You have to keep trying. If you don’t have that kind of personality, you can’t be there.

  On the wall outside the writers’ room where we had our read-throughs are photos of cast members that, taken together, trace the history of the show. In addition to household names like Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey and Jane Curtin, there are lots and lots of talented people on that wall who couldn’t deal with hitting a ball into the seats but not being allowed to run around the bases, which was what it felt like when a successful sketch didn’t make it to air. It happened to everyone.

  When a player is first on the show, the makeup department makes a mold of your face and head. If you walk down the SNL hall by the dressing rooms, there’s a shelf with blank mannequin heads marked with current cast members’ names, as well as those of frequently recurring hosts like Alec Baldwin and Tom Hanks. It felt like I spent more time in the makeup chair than other people, given all the impressions I did, although to be honest I never timed it and I have no idea if that’s objectively true. There were some shows when I’d appear in four or five different sketches, which usually meant four or five different wigs and as many putty noses. I used to have the most painful rash blossom on the side of my face after shows because they’d rip a wig with, say, Sean Connery’s sideburns off my head fast to get me ready for the next sketch as Rudolph Giuliani. My face got pretty burned up over the years.

  It wasn’t uncommon that I’d go home empty-handed Wednesday and not get handed an impression until much later in the week. I’d call in to see what was going on, but it could change three times between Friday and Saturday. Back then, when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, those were torturous days.

  From the minute I got the phone call that I got SNL, I knew I was living on another planet for the rest of my life. This was a different world, a world where dreams come true and every club you play now, they’re paying attention. Since it’s too physically demanding to do more than two or three live SNL shows in a row, there are a lot of dark weeks during the season. For me, that was time to hit the road with my stand-up act. And I wasn’t relegated to the bowling alleys and honky-tonks and roadhouses anymore. Now it was the Punch Line in Atlanta, Cobb’s San Francisco, Zany’s Chicago, Improv Chicago. I played some splendid clubs all around the country.

  I also got called to appear on Letterman, Leno, Conan, shows that had rejected me just a few years earlier, before I got SNL. And when I finally did debut on Letterman, I did the same set that I’d been doing all long. When I was first invited to sit down with Dave after my set—which is the equivalent of knighthood for a stand-up comic—he asked me to do Donahue. Before I did that appearance, knowing that I’d probably be invited to the couch, Norm Macdonald said, “If you get jammed up out there, just say anything. Dave will turn it into a laugh.” So I tried it.

  “This is easier than I thought it’d be.”

  Dave said, “Speak for yourself.”

  Big laugh.

  “You didn’t have to interview Cybill Shepherd earlier.”

  Bigger laugh.

  Applause break.

  Cut to commercial.

  Genius.

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when I received an invitation to Clinton’s second inauguration in January 1997, although the White House might well have rescinded it if they’d seen the sketch I did two days before, in which Clinton stood in a pantsless police lineup for Paula Jones and yelled “Live from New York!” with a paper bag on his head.

  Going to Washington for the inauguration was pretty heady stuff. I flew down on the shuttle with Katie Couric, who was then cohost of The Today Show, and other big shots from NBC and was booked into the first five-star hotel I’d ever been in, the Jefferson, which is only a few blocks from the White House.

  I walked into my room feeling humbled and on top of the world at the same time. And then I saw a display of Grand Marnier.

  This is how fast my brain did it: I don’t think I’ve ever had Grand Marnier.

  Click.

  Next thing I knew, I was watching Katie do an interview at the night-before party when someone came up to me and said, “You’re going home.”

  The next thing I knew after that, I was lying on the floor of National Airport in my tux, and I could not stand up. People kept coming up to me and asking, “Are you okay?”

  Each time, I said, “Yeah.”

  Finally I asked someone to help me up, and I guess somebody did. I don’t know if it was the same person or someone else who walked me to my gate. When I got there, I couldn’t find my ticket.

  I’d had diamond studs in my tux, and they were gone.

  Apparently sensing my distress, a woman, who I can only imagine recognized me, came up to me and said, “Are you going to New York?”

  I somehow indicated that I was and that I didn’t have a ticket.

  “I’ll buy you a ticket.”

  She sat next to me on the plane back to New York, and gave me money for a cab. If I’d been more coherent, I’d have gotten her name and number so I could thank her properly when I sobered up. But if I’d been more coherent, I wouldn’t have needed her help.

  By midnight I was back in Hell’s Kitchen, drinking a quart of Budweiser. The next morning, the forty-second president took the oath of office, and I wasn’t there.

  So it wasn’t just in my professional life that other
people kept saving me. It seems like my life was filled with angels who walked into my own personal purgatory and conducted me safely out of there. It’s how I ended up living this long.

  I was still going to meetings, trying to be sober, but after the two suicides of people I loved, it was really hard. I’d stay sober for months at a time, and then I’d get drunk. I wasn’t a guy that drank for days on end. I usually got drunk as fuck one night, and then I’d go back to meetings and I’d stay sober for a few more months.

  It was surely thanks to whomever it was that got me out of the inaugural festivities before I caused any damage that I subsequently received an invitation that April to appear at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I should clarify that it wasn’t Darrell Hammond, the person, who was invited—it was Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton.

  The dinner is a Washington institution, where the White House press corps gets to hang out with the subject of their daily attention in a collegial setting. The president always makes a funny speech, and there’s usually a comedian who pokes fun at all the luminaries on the dais and in the audience. That year, Norm Macdonald had that honor.

  I was called in to play Clinton’s clone because a few days before the event Clinton had fallen downstairs at golfing great Greg “The Shark” Norman’s house in Florida. Clinton had to undergo surgery on his knee, and he was still on crutches. Before the dinner, I went to the White House to meet him in the Oval Office—in full Clinton drag, the white wig, the fake nose, the works.

  As I shook his hand, I could feel the flush of shame on my face. “I have to admit, Mr. President, I feel foolish.”

  He smiled that magnetic smile of his and said, “I think you look terrific.”

  The dinner starts with various awards given out to journalists, and then the president makes his speech. A few minutes into Clinton’s, he complained that his leg hurt, so he called on his “clone” to take over at the podium.

  “Bill, will you come out here?”

  As I walked out from backstage, with “Hail to the Chief” playing me on, I thought, There are too many powerful people here. Anything could go wrong. This ain’t like blowing a set at a bowling alley in Daleville, Alabama.

  The White House wrote my material, which alleviated my jangly nerves, if only a little, when I stepped up to the microphone. “Mr. President,” I said in Clinton’s voice, “have a seat.”

  The first time I ever performed an impression in front of the person I was imitating, and it had to be the most powerful human on the planet? Really, God? Couldn’t we have started with someone a little less, I don’t know, able to have me deported?

  In the end, the worst thing that happened was CSPAN misspelling my name “Darryl” in the broadcast that aired later.

  I was invited back as the featured entertainment for Clinton’s eighth and final White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2000. That was way scarier than my previous appearance. For starters, I wasn’t in character this time, I was just me. And I had to come up with my own material. By then the nation had endured the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the graphic details delineated in the Starr Report, and the president’s impeachment—the first time that had happened since Andrew Johnson in 1868. (Nixon probably would have been the second if he hadn’t jumped ship before the House got a chance to vote.) For a comedian, that kind of stuff is gold, but it’s a different beast when you’re standing next to your victim and he has the power to have your taxes audited back to the Stone Age.

  The previous year, in the spring of 1999, Ms. Lewinsky had made a cameo appearance on SNL in a sketch with me. In it, the soon-to-be-ex-president dreams about his postpresidential life as a playboy in Malibu, tethered to Monica, the new Mrs. Clinton. And yet here I sat on the dais with the honored guests of the evening, about five seats away from the actual president.

  (Incidentally, my mother called me after the Lewinsky episode to say, “You didn’t really kiss her, did you?” Yeah, Ma, we all know where her mouth has been. Thanks for reminding me.)

  Clinton himself broke the ice when he had a go at me. “Poor Darrell,” he said. “What’s he gonna do when I’m out of office?”

  There was one joke I told that I worried about. I was talking about what it would be like to have Clinton’s incredible magnetism as he says to a woman, “If you would only take your clothes off and let me see you naked, there would be no more racism.” In my mind, there was a deadly silence in the room as everyone waited to see the commander in chief’s reaction. In truth, he guffawed louder than anyone, and gave Linda Scott, an African American news producer seated to his left, a big hug for added effect.

  As I said during the show, the president of the United States laughing at my jokes—amazing.

  Despite my outward success, I was still struggling to understand the sense of torment I felt. The treatment I’d been under, both therapeutic and pharmaceutical, wasn’t helping, and neither was the drinking, so I went to a new psychiatrist.

  He said, “I want to talk to you about multiplicity,” doctor-speak for multiple personality disorder. “I want to talk to you about losing periods of time.”

  Who said I was losing periods of time? I never said I did. No one’s ever come up to me and said, “Hey, remember the day you were in the Santa suit, and we went to Yankee Stadium and then we flew to Alaska?” Or, “I saw you on the corner of Twenty-seventh and Third yesterday,” and I have no recollection. Sure, I blacked out sometimes when I was drinking, and yes, I’m good at assuming different voices, but what am I now, Sybil?

  CHAPTER SIX

  God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked

  The Bahamas

  1993

  There have been a few times in my life where I felt I was touched by God. The first was in high school after the condom broke while I was having sex with Miriam Bonaparte on the beach in Melbourne. Instead of immediate terror, I felt this sense of calm, that it was okay. (And it was.) The second time happened when I was walking to work in Orlando when I was twenty-nine, and I felt God saying, This is all going to work out. The third time was in 1993 when I heard a Bahamian judge say, “Will the defendant please rise?”

  In the early 1990s, my manager got me some gigs for cruise lines. I started with Carnival, then I went to Norwegian, then I did a few for Disney. The money was great, and the talent was treated very well. I don’t think I paid for anything on the ship, and most of the time I was left to my own devices, since I only had to do two thirty-minute shows in a week.

  The average age of the passengers is about 103. They’ve been herded around like baby geese all day. They’re sunburned. They’re ornery. They’re wondering if the trip was worth the goddamned expense. Since most of my material was filthy then, it was tricky cobbling together clean jokes, so I did impressions, which is perfect. It’s ten o’clock at night, liquor’s on the house, they’ll laugh at just about anything—as long as the material is broad, derivative, and shitty.

  I didn’t think anything of it when this old guy in the audience fell asleep during my show. I’d seen plenty of people in audiences catching a nap, and these were old folks with more rich food and liquor in their systems than they were probably accustomed to. I once did Macbeth in summer stock, the straw-hat circuit in Rhode Island, and people would routinely snooze during the show. The actors weren’t bums, they were talented people. The guy playing Macbeth would be up there doing his most stentorian baritone, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . . It is a tale told by an idiot.” And you’d hear snoring from the seats. So when the geezer went face-first into his scampi, I was just grateful that his snores weren’t drowning me out.

  It wasn’t until my set was done and the lights came up and the old dude didn’t move that one of the waitresses went over and tapped him on the shoulder to wake him up. When she didn’t get a response, she looked over at me and said, “I guess you killed.”

  Uh, that’s not what I had in mind.

  The ship’s bar might as well have been the crew’s quarters. A
lot of those people had given themselves to the sea years ago. They were career ship guys. There were comics and croupiers and staffers, all kinds of folks who got lured into the idea of room and board for five years and good money and health insurance, and never left. I could see why. The ocean is hypnotic. But the isolation of being out there working as a comic and not knowing anyone on the whole ship can cause a person to, shall we say, compensate.

  On one cruise, I was introduced to a cocktail called the B52. I don’t even know what’s in a B52—Kahlua, ouzo, cream, Clorox, rifle cleaner—but it’ll set you right. The night I had my first B52, I joined the band for a rousing rending of “Honky Tonk Women,” in which I did a fair-to-middling Mick Jagger.

  There were a lot of English people working on the ships, and I was enchanted by them. I loved their manners, the way they spoke, especially the ones whose accents leaned a little toward cockney or North London. That accent was deliriously wonderful. I’d hear them refer to their mums, and think, I’m actually experiencing another culture for the first time. I used to want to go up to them and say, “Can everyone in your country act? Like all of them?” But I never did. Instead I drank B52s.

  After my second or third B52, I danced, and I don’t dance. There’s a reason for that. One day when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I was hanging out in my room listening to the radio when some great song came on, Smokey Robinson or James Brown or the Supremes, and I started moving to the groove. My father suddenly loomed large in the doorway and glared at me as if I were responsible for the Black Death. I never danced after that. (A few years ago, I was invited to be a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. I called my agent and said, “Tell them I’ll be happy to do the show as long as there’s no dancing.”)