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

  My mom discovered that if you want to control someone, you have to make them beholden to you. Relieve them of their fear, relieve them of their pain. In my case, she had to give me the fear first, give me the pain. She made sure that I believed I was the problem, that I was a bad person, and that’s why these things were happening.

  In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck describes a scene that hit home when I first read it. Al Joad is taken aback when he sees his big brother, Tom, for the first time in four years when he’s paroled after killing a man with a shovel. Tom Joad now wears the expression of a prisoner who doesn’t give anything away: “the smooth hard face trained to indicate nothing to a prison guard, neither resistance nor slavishness.” I learned to exist in my house as if I weren’t there at all. I kept my voice a level monotone, my expression flat. I didn’t reveal anger or fear or sadness. If I showed any of those emotions, it suggested that something was wrong in that house, and that made my mother angry.

  After a while, I started to think that if I could make myself cry, she’d lose interest in making me cry herself. If she thought I was already hurt, she might leave me alone. I practiced crying sitting out on those train tracks behind our house.

  What finally worked were the voices. I could win her approval, or at least avoid a beating, by doing this one thing she liked to do. Bob Cratchit and Ebenezer Scrooge spared me her rage. When I demonstrated that genetically we were wired to copy sounds, her eyes would go soft and childlike as I said my line. She would listen to me intently like a mechanic listening to an engine.

  I learned how to do voices from her—they were my only protection.

  As my treatment continued, dredging up these memories, the flashbacks kept coming, like quick and violent snapshots of the past. Sometimes I would see images as two-dimensional drawings. My doctors have told me that sometimes POWs, trauma survivors, incest survivors, remember Picassoesque versions of things.

  In Barry Levinson’s 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes, the teenage investigator looks into a string of deaths seemingly caused by hallucinations. In one scene where Holmes and Watson are tripping, the king of hearts gets up and walks out of the deck of cards on bendy cartoon legs, which freaked me out because I had had visions of my mother exactly like that.

  One night, a friend knocked on my apartment door. I grabbed the lamp beside the bed, ripping the cord out of the wall, and went looking for the sound. Something in my soul was saying, It’s not going to happen to me again. I didn’t even know what “it” was, but the sense of looming danger was unmistakable.

  I was in my apartment one night, stabbing myself in the leg, when one of my pals from the Hell’s Kitchen AA meeting, Big Mike Canosa, knocked on my door. He was a big tough guy who ran around with the Westies.

  “Gimme the knife, Darrell.”

  He told me that staying sober, trying to do the right thing by your family, showing up for work, was far more difficult than drinking half a bottle of tequila and shooting some guy in the back of the head. He said the longshoremen in the neighborhood who were still getting up and going to work every morning and abiding by the law and taking their children to church every Sunday, they were the tough guys.

  When my daughter was less than a year old, my wife and I took her to Tampa, where I was doing a corporate job—a private performance for employees or clients of whatever company had hired me. I was doing as many corporate events as I could in my off weeks to bank money for my kid’s future. My mother and a group of her women friends came to this one. The ladies passed the baby around the table, each one cooing at her in turn, the baby giggling and gurgling with happiness. When my mother picked her up, my daughter’s face went blank. No laughing, no smiling, nothing. It was like she knew.

  Eventually my wife and I tried to live together in a house upstate in Tuxedo Park, New York, a small village on the National Register of Historic Places. Situated in Orange County in the Ramapo Mountains, it is about forty miles north of Zabar’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The ubiquitous penguin suit that men are required to wear at formal functions is named after the place, as it was here that the first sucker, a guy named Griswold Lorillard, had the audacity to wear a black-tie outfit that didn’t have tails to the Tuxedo Club’s annual ball.

  We had a gorgeous Tudor-style home in a secure gated community, two greyhounds my wife had rescued from a track, our beautiful daughter, and for a few years it was lovely. I remember sitting in our leafy yard, reading the Sunday papers, nibbling on these gigantic muffins Elaine Stritch had sent by way of thanking me for getting her tickets to SNL, while my daughter played with neighborhood kids down the street.

  As with all good things in my alcoholic world, our upstate idyll didn’t last. I started staying in the city during workweeks, driving up on weekends after the show. And eventually my wife missed the twenty-four-hour amenities of the city, so she wanted to bail too.

  I started reading books on cognitive therapy that talked about self-fulfilling prophecies, and I began to see that my vision of the world was distorted. It wasn’t true that only horrible things happened, and that death was always just around the corner. That’s the way I had lived my whole life. Now I realized I felt bad merely because of the way I was thinking.

  Tony Robbins said that you should ask yourself what you would have to believe to feel bad about your situation. When I got up each morning, I would write down my disempowering thoughts, the ones that had totally overwhelmed every happiness and success that I’d achieved. Then I’d write down all the positives: I had a fantastic career, a beautiful daughter, a nice home, plenty of money. I began to believe that it was possible for me to have a good day.

  Joel Osteen, who is a very gifted speaker who draws his advice from the Bible, said, “Respect your parents.” And I thought, Until they stab you.

  After several years of trauma therapy and going back through this forest of dark memories, my doctors thought it was important for me to confront my parents with what I was learning. For days I agonized about calling them. How do you bring this up with the people who raised you, the people who presented themselves, publicly at least, as your biggest supporters, the people who allegedly cared more about you than anyone else on the planet?

  When I finally summoned up the nerve to dial the number that had been etched in my memory since I was old enough to count to ten, my mother’s response was simple and heartfelt: “Don’t ever call us again.” Her accent was notably absent.

  I would not see them again until my mother was dying and my father wasn’t far behind.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  What You Didn’t See

  New York City

  2000s

  Minutes before SNL went on air the night of October 7, 2000, I was in my dressing room putting on the expensive suit I was to wear in the cold open when FLASH, the floor turned red. I was playing Vice President Al Gore in the first presidential debate against George W. Bush (Will Ferrell). Suddenly, a year of studying and practicing was down the drain—I couldn’t remember how to do the voice. I couldn’t remember what Gore sounded like or what I’d seen in any of the tapes I’d been studying ever since it became apparent a year earlier that Gore was going to be a front runner in the millennial election. I couldn’t remember what he looked like or why I even wanted to do the voice.

  I had to do something.

  I got out the gauze pads and tape, and popped the top of a razor.

  I made a thin cut across my left forearm. It wasn’t horribly messy, and I wrapped my arm fairly carefully, because I knew I had to wear that nice suit for the sketch. (At SNL, whatever the person you’re impersonating wears, you wear, no cheap imitations.) The point was to buy me enough focus so that I could go out there and do what I wanted to do with that character. Luckily Jim Downey, who wrote the sketch, had been giving me line readings during the week, so I knew what I had to do by muscle memory if nothing else.

  In the sketch, I ramble on and on in Gore’s peculiar southern drone about the “lo
ckbox” he planned to put Medicare and Social Security in. He had talked about this metaphor for protecting the country’s senior citizens during the actual debate earlier in the week, and Downey elaborated on the idea to make it seem more literal—with keys to the lockbox, and an explanation of where the keys would be hidden, including one under the bumper of the Senate majority leader’s car. I had also devised an awkward stiffness in my movements in caricature of Gore’s real posture.

  Will ended the debate with the word that Bush felt would describe a Bush presidency: strategery. The word became so entrenched in the public psyche during the real Bush’s presidency that people thought he’d really said it.

  I said, “Lockbox.” A reporter for U.S. News & World Report said I lost the election for Gore. I felt terrible.

  Will and I received an International Radio and Television Foundation Award in 2001, which honors outstanding communications professionals for their accomplishments. There was a big banquet at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and the award was presented by Tim Russert. Past winners of that have included Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Charlie Rose, and David Letterman. And now us?

  Let me be clear: I don’t say this to brag, I say this to point out how seriously some people take clowns. I mean, we made fun of George W. Bush and Al Gore, that’s it. Perhaps the pundits would have felt differently about me if they’d known what this “expert” was doing to prepare for the sketch that supposedly did Gore in.

  In the middle of all this hilarity, my old acting roots started gnawing at me, and I started thinking about returning, at least part-time, to serious drama. I fortuitously ran into Valerie Harper at NBC, and she told me about an acting coach named Harold Guskin, whom she had worked with. I went to him, and he had me read a monologue from Death of a Salesman. Partway through, he interrupted me.

  “You have to hear it before you say it, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “That kills it. You’re obligating yourself to a sound, and obligation is the death of art. I’m going to work with you on what you’re saying, not how you say it.”

  He gave me a line to read.

  “I ran up eleven flights of stairs.”

  “How many?”

  “Eleven.”

  “How many?”

  “Eleven!”

  “How many?”

  “ELEVEN!”

  “That’s it!” he said.

  The following week, I auditioned for an episode of Law & Order: SVU, and I got it.

  I have always been careful to write jokes that will make everybody in the room laugh, Republicans and Democrats both. As a result, everyone thought I was on their side. That’s why the newly installed Bush administration invited me to perform at W’s first White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2001, even though I had twice appeared at the same event during Clinton’s presidency.

  For me, the main difference was that at this dinner, I was even more nervous than I’d been in the past, so I had strategically consumed a bottle of wine beforehand. I suppose that’s why I thought my performance went so smashingly well. As I told Chris Matthews, who graciously came up to me after the event to compliment me (I’d done him during my routine), it’s unnatural to have that many powerful people in one room. At SNL, there are only 300 people in the studio audience, but at the Washington Hilton, there are 2,600 of the nation’s most important players in politics and the media.

  A few minutes into my act, I gave the new president a baseball glove and invited him to play catch, which he seemed to enjoy. He even forgave me for all the Gore material I did that night. I reprised some of the lockbox sketch, which went over very well on the Republican dais, so I turned to Mr. Bush and asked, “Can I do some more of him? I worked a year to learn the damn guy, and then you beat him.” I was supposed to read some telegrams, but I had so many pieces of paper on the podium—oh, and that bottle of wine before—that I couldn’t find them. I guess it really was a good performance, though. At the end, the audience gave me a standing ovation. Or maybe they were just getting up to go to the bathroom.

  A month later, the SNL team decided to put together a Mother’s Day special. The other cast members invited their mothers to appear on air, but I, obviously, did not. The writers thought it would be fun to have me play my mom instead.

  Using photographs my sister supplied, the hair and makeup folks got to work. I’ll never forget sitting at the mirror when the makeup artist began to paint my mother’s face on my own before dress. When the hair person lowered the wig on to my scalp, I could hear my mother saying, “I saw what you did, and I know who you are.”

  I started vomiting right there in the chair. I was rushed to the infirmary, where my blood pressure was recorded as dangerously high. It was as though my body had said, “It would be preferable to die than to let this continue.”

  The show went on without me.

  By the time 9/11 happened, I was barely functioning. But the entire city was in a state of grief and bewilderment; we were the same then. So many had died. A great chunk of downtown had been removed from the skyline by those planes—literally, in the space of two hours, removed, gone, disappeared, the people, the buildings, everything—and those who remained were scared out of our wits.

  The season premiere of what would be the show’s twenty-seventh—and my seventh—season was less than three weeks away. Nobody in the cast or crew, let alone the rest of New York, knew how to behave. How do you put on a comedy show when there’s so much destruction and fear and sadness in the air?

  Lorne invited Mayor Giuliani, who was in the process of becoming “America’s Mayor” for the deft way he handled the crisis, and a bunch of NYPD and NYFD, still in uniform and covered in dust from Ground Zero, to be onstage in front of an enormous American flag, while Paul Simon sang “The Boxer” in tribute to New York City.

  At the end of the song, Lorne turned to Mayor Giuliani, thanked him for coming to the show, and asked, “Can we be funny?”

  Giuliani said, “Why start now?”

  It was a stroke of genius. It allowed New York and the rest of the country to laugh again.

  On the Friday night before our third show of the 2001–2 season, NBC News announced that anthrax had been found in NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw’s office and in the post office in the basement of 30 Rock. It wasn’t the first incidence of the deadly white powder turning up around the country—a guy had died in Florida already, and the National Enquirer’s offices had been shuttered because of it—so people knew exactly how to respond when they heard: they left the building.

  Host Drew Barrymore, whose new movie Riding in Cars with Boys was about to be released, had already debated whether to fly in from Los Angeles for the show (she was hardly alone in the country in being afraid to get on a plane then). The anthrax was almost more than she could bear, and she vacated the premises too.

  But me, I felt strangely calm. I guess I had become somewhat inured to the presence of danger, to the sense that something bad would probably happen. I already understood the notion that the danger you’re guarding against is already inside. No need to lock the door, it’s already in. And that was more true than we realized. By the time we found out about it, the anthrax had already been in the building for a couple of weeks. Apparently, some assistant to an assistant opened the envelope addressed to Brokaw, thought nothing of it, brushed the powder into a wastebasket, and went about her business, but not before she passed the letter to the real assistant to deal with. That assistant had it on her desk long enough for Brokaw to see it and joke, “If he thinks he’s going to threaten my life, at least he could be grammatical.”

  Once it was determined that the danger was limited to the parts of the building where the anthrax had been discovered, Drew and everybody else got it together and returned to the studio. In her monologue that Saturday night, Drew thanked the studio audience for being brave enough to come to the building when it was all over the news that there was deadly powder drifting around. She also thanked h
er then-husband, Tom Green, for supporting her—and the camera cut to him sitting in the front row, wearing an enormous gas mask.

  The show went off without a hitch, and, as SNL has always done when there’s a big news story, the writers simply incorporated the anthrax scare into the show. I did the cold open as Dick Cheney. Ever since 9/11, the real Cheney had been in hiding, and there was endless speculation about where he was. Neighbors of the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s official residence, complained about noise that suggested they were perhaps constructing a secret bunker there. So he might have been there. It was later said that one of the compounds where he hid is called the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, Site R, near the Pennsylvania/Maryland border, a few miles north of Camp David. Apparently when you drive by, you might see the two enormous metal doors in the side of Raven Rock Mountain, like something out of an Austin Powers movie. On top of the mountain there’s a ton of communication antennae and towers and stuff, making it easy enough to find—they might have thought of that. Inside, the compound even has its own water source—some huge lake or something. They built the whole thing during the Cold War in case the Russians nuked Washington—at least a few top officials could survive while the flesh burned off of the rest of us.

  But since we didn’t know any of that at the time, everybody was guessing. In the sketch, Cheney “reveals” that he’s really been hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, personally hunting Osama bin Laden, because “old Uncle Dick is gonna make sure you don’t have to worry about opening your mail come Christmas.”

  A few days later I went to Washington, D.C., where I was scheduled to play one college in the afternoon and another at night. That afternoon I got up in front of all these people, and here I was, this guy who made fun of politicians. No one wanted to make fun of the people who stood between us and the next attack, let alone hear someone else do it, and here I was, my whole act based on exactly that. My act was invalid, but it hadn’t occurred to me before I went on. The afternoon set went horribly. Nobody laughed.