The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (19 page)

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“The Chris Farley Show,” that was Chris.

That was Chris.

That was him.

He was basically playing himself.

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.

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.”

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.

Actually, I think Chris was the one who was adamant about doing it with McCartney.

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.

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.

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 that 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.

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?”

“Green.”

Great fucking idea. Green footprints, that was Chris.

I would write songs and musical numbers for
SNL
, and when Kelsey Grammar was host I wrote a sketch called “Iron John: The Musical.” Chris sang in that one, and he came up to me after the performance and said, “I love those musical things. I just love them. I really want to do more of them.”

Musical numbers are very emotional things, and it’s a very childlike desire to want to have that kind of honest, sincere outlet. He wanted to share as much of himself with the audience as he could. He was not a great singer, as I recall. During the rehearsals, beads of sweat would literally drip down his forehead as he was trying comically hard to hit all his cues and hit all his notes. He so much wanted to succeed. And when you see a young guy working like that, with sweat running down his forehead, that’s kind of a wonderful thing. When the old cast would get laughs, we were practically counting them. We were very calculating. Chris wasn’t a calculated performer. He was out there for the love.

They have a meeting with the host every Monday night, and there were always two jokes that we used to do every single week. Let’s say Kevin Bacon was the host, and Tom Arnold was set to host the next week. Lorne would announce, “Everyone, this week’s host is Kevin Bacon.” And everyone would applaud.

Then Al Franken would say, “ And next week: Tom Arnold.” And everyone would applaud much louder. That was the little icebreaker they’d do to set the host at ease and poke fun at him a bit.

The other thing that would always happen was that at the very end of the meeting, Farley would jump in—kind of like that determined kid on the football team that’s never won a game—he’d jump in and say, "C’mon, let’s
do it
this time!” It was always very funny and sort of combined his childish eagerness with great comic timing and a great sense of the moment.

When you were on the set with Chris, he’d be giggling and pinching you and saying, “Where you want to go after the show, man?” It was like being in homeroom in high school. There’s a quotient of people at
Saturday Night Live
for whom the show is like operating an elevator. We go up. We go down. What’s the big deal? Then there were the people like Chris who made it their mission every week to make it the best show possible, and enjoy it.

Just seeing Chris at the door of my office would put a smile on my face. He radiated this earnestness, and he really
believed
in the work that he did. Chris was also unique among comedians in being so open about his faith and spirituality. Most people in this industry are so caught up in being sarcastic or casually ironic that they’re loath to admit that they actually care about anything. Admitting that you believe in God is the same as admitting that you like Bob Seger. Okay, even I’m not crazy about Seger. But I like Springsteen, and even Bruce is just too earnest for lots of comedy writers to give it up for.

There are a lot of us in comedy who are a lot more Catholic than anybody knows. Our Catholicism is sort of under our skin. People were surprised at the depth of Chris’s faith; to me it made perfect sense. A lot of people think that they’re mutually exclusive. How can you be dancing in a Chippendales thong and going to mass at the same time? But if you’re Catholic you think,
of course
that’s how it works.

Pretty early on, Chris told me he’d found this church, St. Malachy’s. “They call it the Actors’ Chapel,” he said. He totally ate that up. In his mind it was this place where all these old Broadway stars and vaudevillians had come to mass and prayed and found guidance. The first time I went with him, these old ladies who were sort of scattered about the pews would break out with the most beautiful voices during the hymns. They’d really belt it out, and you could picture them singing in their old musicals and operas. It was really special for Chris in that way.