The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (8 page)

I was there the day that Chris came to audition. I forget what the scene was, but as part of it he fell out of his chair and—
smack
—landed on the ground. I thought he’d really had a heart attack. My first reaction was: Is the theater insured for this? What’s going to happen? That’s how convincing this fall was.

Elaine and I didn’t want him in the company. He seemed like a wild card, and he didn’t seem very focused. But Dennis said, “This guy is really talented. He should be in the group.” We formed a company called Animal Crackers, and Chris performed with them.

I had never met anyone like him before. He had such incredible enthusiasm in everything he did. One thing that gets lost a lot is that when it came to the work, he was always very serious about it. He was always on time for rehearsal. In fact, he was usually there before everybody else. I never, ever remember him being late for a show.

I don’t know if Chris had ADD, but people who have a lack of focus, when it comes to something they’re passionate about, they hyperfocus. Chris was certainly like that when it came to acting. Our group’s shows were mostly short-form, game-oriented improv with a lot of audience suggestions. But we also did some sketch-type stuff, and Chris was great with both of them. He was just a blast to work with from day one.

One thing that always amazed me was his ability to do things that if I had done them would have put me in the hospital, and then he’d get right up from them. He could slam into walls and slam down on the stage. He was such a natural athlete. He was almost like a ballet dancer. Even though Chris is known for being a great physical comedian, some of my favorite things were the subtle little characters he would do.

The Motivational Speaker appeared onstage for the first time at the Ark. It wasn’t the same as on
Saturday Night Live
, but it was there in its infant form.

The Motivational Speaker actually started back in high school and was based heavily on our coach, Joel Maturi, who would go off on these inspirational speeches. He’d be prepping us for the game, briefing us on the other team’s defense and all that, and Chris would be right there behind him, imitating him, making all these faces and forcing us all to laugh.

The Motivational Speaker is based in part on me; there is some truth to that. Mostly some of my mannerisms, the hiking up the pants, the spreading the legs and crouching down to get serious. I was pretty vocal with the pep talks and the Knute Rockne speeches. Those kinds of things. I think the more philosophical side of the character was actually based on his dad.

We taught Chris the basics of improv and scene work at the Ark, but the natural talent he had was already present. As a performer, he was just there in the moment, like Johnny Carson used to be on the
Tonight Show
. What Carson was so brilliant at was just reacting and responding naturally to the environment around him in a way that made you laugh. Chris had those same instincts. He just knew what to do.

He could do the same thing fifty times and somehow always make it funny. If a pretty woman walked by he would drop and start doing push-ups, starting out “. . . 198 . . . 199 . . . 200.” I’d seen him do that lots of times. It shouldn’t have been funny to me anymore, yet it always was. It’s hard to explain why it was; it just was. You could videotape it and analyze it with a computer, like you would a golf swing, but you still wouldn’t understand it, and you could never hope to replicate it.

One night after a show we went to this bar, and Chris was making this middle-aged couple in the bar laugh. He was dancing with the guy’s wife and doing these cat-eye things with his hands. The husband was laughing so hard that he was actually falling off his bar stool, and he eventually said to Chris, “What’s your name? I want to be sure and remember it. I’ve never laughed like this.” It was strange. Everyone sort of sensed that there was just something unique about him. Chris wasn’t famous, but it was the same reaction he would get years later after he left Madison and became a movie star.

Chris and Brian Stack had just started rehearsals on
Cowboys No. 2
, a Sam Shepard play that we were going to put on. And Chris, meanwhile, had been taking trips down to Chicago here and there with his father. Then it became clear what all those trips to Chicago were for.

When Chris decided to leave, it was pretty upsetting. He loved the Ark, but he was bursting at the seams to get out, and Chicago was the first step. I think Dennis was happy that Chris was leaving to pursue his dream, but he seemed kind of angry on his last night.

I was happy for him, but at the same time I thought it was too soon. I thought that he needed to be more in contact with the source of his creativity before he went to try at the professional level. I always knew he would make it, but I don’t know that he was grounded enough in the technique of acting to have something to hold on to. He was immensely talented, but that talent was sort of at the whim of whoever needed the next laugh.

The experience he had at the Ark told him he had to get out of Madison. Plus, he couldn’t take the job at Scotch Oil anymore. As much as he wanted to please Dad, after a year of selling asphalt even Chris was like, “I gotta get out of here.”

Dad had made the ultimate sacrifice. He would have been a great lawyer, smartest man you ever met. Dreamed of going into politics. But he had given all that up to raise a family. And so he wanted everyone to stay in Madison, because that was what he’d sacrificed everything for. Years later, Chris had to cry for this scene when he filmed
Black Sheep
. So he turned to me and he said, “Johnny, make me cry.”

I said, “Well, Dad’s all alone in Wisconsin with two ladies. All his boys have gone and moved on with their lives.”

He really got angry that I had said it. Somehow it had triggered the wrong emotion.

When Chris was working for his dad, he called me up one day and said, “I gotta talk to you about something.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I have an opportunity to go to Chicago to study at Second City. What do you think?”

I really wasn’t sure about taking risks like that. I said, “Chris, you need to just work with your dad. Establish a solid career and maybe do this stuff on the side.” That was totally my mentality. Finally, I said, “Well, what does your dad say about it?”

And his exact words were, “My dad says I should definitely take the opportunity and go for it. He’s gonna back me one hundred percent.”

I said, “Well then there’s no conversation here. You have to go.”

We thought Chris would come running home in six months, and he never came back.

In June of 1987, Chris left for Chicago. He moved into a small apartment off Armitage Avenue, just north of Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. There he rejoined his Marquette rugby and acting friend Pat Finn.

The yellow porch light of Second City had led Chris to Chicago, but he quickly found that the doors of the renowned comedy institution did not immediately open for untrained unknowns fresh off the bus from Wisconsin. Forced to look elsewhere for a place to learn and perform, he found it at ImprovOlympic.

Today, ImprovOlympic has become an industry mainstay in its own right, producing a steady stream of bankable film and television stars, among them Mike Myers, Vince Vaughn, John Favreau, Andy Richter, Tina Fey, Steven Colbert, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and director Adam McKay, not to mention a healthy chunk of the writing staff at
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
.

But when Chris arrived, ImprovOlympic was still a fledgling outfit of vagabond comedians looking to make the funny anywhere they could. Teacher and director Charna Halpern had founded the group in 1981 with several goals in mind. Second City used improv as a means to create sketch comedy. Halpern wanted a curriculum in which improvised performance was the end in itself. At Second City, only a handful of seasoned performers trickled up to the main stage. Halpern gave ImprovOlympic a communitarian ethos, allowing even new and less-experienced students the chance to practice and learn in front of a paying audience.

In 1984, comedy guru Del Close joined Halpern’s cause. As a director in Second City’s early heyday, Close had trained and mentored a who’s who of comedy, from John Belushi to Harold Ramis to Bill Murray. He was instrumental in shaping the forms and conventions of the Chicago school of improvisation. Perhaps his most notable contribution was the Harold, a long-form, fully improvised performance in which a whole cast works together off of a single audience suggestion to create a cohesive, continuous series of scenes.

For Close, the goal of improv was not to get laughs but rather to find the real, emotional truth of the characters that created those laughs. He found the perfect instrument for that in Chris Farley. With Halpern’s instruction and Close’s inspiration, Chris began his comedy education in earnest. Some expressed doubts about his raw, unschooled talents, but those doubts quickly vanished. Chris, performing full throttle at night and bumbling through a comical parade of semiemployment by day, proved to everyone that he was destined for a life onstage.

After I graduated from Marquette, I went down to Chicago. Chris followed about a year behind me. We had no jobs, and we had no idea what we were doing. He moved into his place off Armitage, and we went from there down to Second City one day around two in the afternoon. We just kind of paced around in front of the theater, back and forth. In our minds, the scenario literally went something like this: Somebody up on the second floor would say, “What? We need two more people for the Second City main stage? Where are we going to find— Oh, wait! What about these two people out front? They look
hilarious.
”

That was about how far we’d thought things out. Then, after about ten minutes of pacing around, Joel Murray—Brian and Bill Murray’s brother—walks by. He was at Second City at the time, and he and I had gone to the same grammar school, so I knew him a little.

Chris said, “There’s Joel Murray. He’s Bill’s brother. You should talk to him.”

“I don’t know, Chris.”

“You got to! C’mon. That’s why we’re here.”

So Joel walked up, and I said, “Joel. Hi. I’m Pat Finn, from St. Joe’s.”

“Yeah. Little Finn,” he said. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Um, nothin’. This is my friend Chris. We wanna get into comedy.”

He just kind of looked at us. Chris’s eyes had this look like the next thing out of Joel’s mouth was going to be the keys to the kingdom. And, actually, it turns out it was.

So one day here’s Pat Finn, who I haven’t seen since high school, standing there with this big guy. I could tell that the big guy was restraining all of his energy to just listen and be attentive to what I was saying. But I basically told them, “Go find Charna Halpern and Del Close at the ImprovOlympic and study with them, and then see if somebody’ll let you paint the bathroom at Second City.”

It was funny, knowing Chris later, just to watch him holding it in, trying not to be an idiot.

ImprovOlympic didn’t even have an actual theater at the time. We performed at Orphans, this bar on Lincoln Avenue. We had to be out by ten o’clock so the band could come on. We got kicked out of Orphans, and we moved around to like fourteen different spaces. It was an insane time. But I kept attracting these really brilliant people—Farley and Pat Finn, Mike Myers, Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Andy Richter—and the shows kept getting better and better. But even though we were getting thrown out of these places, the audience was following us. It just kind of kept snowballing, getting bigger and bigger, and that was what it was like when Farley showed up.

I went down to Chicago to visit him at ImprovOlympic. He was taking classes, but Charna hadn’t let him go up onstage to perform yet. After the show, he was pacing outside, and I could just see he had all this pent-up, frustrated energy that had nowhere to go. You could see how he was bursting at the seams, how he
needed
to get up onstage.

One night after a couple of weeks, Chris came up to me with Pat Finn and said, “Let me go onstage! Let me play tonight!”

“You?” I said. “God, no. You’re definitely not ready.”

He started getting violent. He was banging his fists on the wall above me, like, “Let me go! Let me go onstage! I’ll be great! You’ll see!”

“I’ll tell you when you’re ready to be onstage,” I said.

He was just not hearing it. After a good seven minutes of his badgering, I finally got fed up myself. I said, “All right, I’ll tell you what. You can go onstage and play tonight, but if you’re bad you will never ever get on my stage again. Do you wanna take that chance?”

Before I even finished my sentence, he was bounding out into the room to tell the guys he was going on. Everyone was looking at me like, “Are you crazy?” But he got up there and was absolutely hilarious.

The good thing about it was that when he got back to class, he started to calm down. Once I’d let him go onstage, he’d lost that need to prove something. From then on he was really willing to learn and get better.

From that point on, he just committed a hundred and ten percent. We took classes with Charna. Then we got classes with Del. There were two improv teams that got assembled around that period. One was very cerebral—that wasn’t us. We were the physical group, called Fish Shtick. People wanted to watch them because they were so smart and heady, but then they’d want to watch us because we were just off the wall.