Gasping for Airtime (18 page)

My second season, I wrote what was undeniably the funniest Update piece I had in me. At the time, the gubernatorial race was heating up in New York. The race was getting an incredible amount of press because Howard Stern had announced that he was going to run. Howard was way ahead of his time. We know now with the election of Jesse Ventura and the like how fed up voters had become with the standard bipartisan bullshit. Preliminary polls had Howard Stern pulling up to 30 percent of the vote, and it was beginning to look like he had an outside shot at actually becoming governor. New York State law requires all candidates to release full, comprehensive records of their incomes and properties. Calling this requirement ridiculous and in no way, shape, or form relevant to an election, Howard pulled out of the race. There was now no third-party candidate running for the office. That was when I stepped in.

I wrote my Weekend Update piece. My sketch was my announcement that I, Jay Mohr, was throwing my hat into the political ring and running for governor of the great state of New York. In the piece I admitted to knowing next to nothing about politics or even the state of New York’s needs or problems. My only platform was that I thought it would be a cool gig, and that if you voted for me, I would get you laid. That was it. Vote for me for governor and I will see to it that you get laid. I explained that I knew that there were a lot of ugly voters out there who weren’t being accounted for. I went on to explain that I knew a lot of hot chicks, and because I worked in television, I could afford a lot of prostitutes.

I also told the voters that I knew they were probably wondering how a twenty-four-year-old New Jersey native could legally become governor of New York. I conceded that inasmuch as these were valid points, the people who enforce such election rules want to get laid, too. I told the voters that if I was elected, they could be assured that crime would be at an all-time low. Who wants to go out and commit crime when you could be staying inside getting laid? I confessed that in four years, when my term was up, the city would be a mess. The streets wouldn’t be paved, taxes would be out of control, and nothing would’ve been accomplished. But no one would care—and we all know why. I finished the segment by saying: “So when you go to the voter’s booth, know one thing, ‘If I vote for Jay Mohr, I’m going to get laid.’ See you at the polls!”

The piece made it to dress rehearsal, where it played well. All day Saturday I never once worried about whether my piece would get on. It had to. It had killed at the table read, and people were coming up to me and talking about it in the hallways on Thursday and Friday. Not once on Saturday did I look in the margin of the show rundown to see what my competition was. I couldn’t be denied this time.

Shortly before the live dress rehearsal the supervisor for Weekend Update, Herb Sargent, said he needed to see me. Seventy years old, Herb had thick white hair and big glasses. He looked as if he should have been on CNN hosting
Crossfire
. I still don’t know what it is exactly Herb did for a living, though that was due mostly to the autonomy of Weekend Update. Herb told me that we had a problem. My Update piece couldn’t be on the show. I was stunned. When I asked for a reason, he told me that the NBC censors had come down hard on him because of the content of the piece. I asked him to elaborate, and he said that you couldn’t say
get laid
on television.

I stood there with my mouth hanging open and asked him if he was joking. He assured me that he wasn’t. He repeated that
get laid
was never going to get past the censors, so the piece had to be pulled from the rundown. I was livid.

“Isn’t this the same show that twenty-four years ago Chevy Chase called Richard Pryor a nigger?” I asked.

“I don’t see what that has to do with this,” he replied.

“It has a lot to do with this!” I interjected. “You want me to believe that you can say
nigger
on
Saturday Night Live
, but a quarter of a century later you can’t say
get laid!
”

My anger didn’t exactly make him want to circle the wagons for me, and I had a feeling that the censors and Herb had never even spoken to each other about my sketch. To this day, I don’t believe you can’t say
get laid
on television—especially since I’ve probably heard it said more than a hundred times since.

I had put all my eggs in one basket that week and had not written anything else. If I wasn’t going to be on Update, I wasn’t going to be on the show again. For the first time in weeks, I went back to my dressing room and just sat there. I sat there during the live rehearsal and I sat there during the show. I sat there during Good-nights, too. I didn’t scribble on the walls or put my feet up against the door. I just stayed still and wondered long and hard why I had ever been hired.

As her visit preceded a break, I flew back to Los Angeles with her. On the flight, we didn’t talk about the show at all. When I left the building, I could no longer speak of the show. No matter who asked me about it or when, my descriptions of the show would deteriorate into a series of whines and groans. I was a great complainer. Even when I mentally reminded myself to act polite, I would soon be bitching and moaning. The people I complained to were either amazed or annoyed. There was seldom a middle ground.

The show was fascinating to everyone I spoke to. When I went on the road to do stand-up, I saw firsthand how diverse the show’s audience was. I would be at a college talking with students and they would tell me who their favorite cast member was. In one town, audience members would tell me they loved Sandler, but in the next town over, they would tell me they hated him. These weren’t shrug-of-the-shoulder types of discussions either. Everyone was overly passionate when they spoke with me about
Saturday Night Live
. They would fall all over themselves to tell me how much they loved the show, and I wouldn’t know what to say next. I felt like a phony.

Nicole and I were about an hour into the flight when I had finished reading the sports page of the
New York Post
. I leafed through the rest of the paper and saw something about the show in the Page Six gossip column. In bold type I saw
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
and I stopped to read the item. The gossip column reported that Tom Arnold had had his birthday party the night before at the strip club Scores. The item detailed how Tom had partied well into the evening with his pals,
Saturday Night Live
stars Adam Sandler, David Spade, Tim Meadows, Chris Farley, and “Jay Moore.” My name was broken up in the margin of the piece so the
Jay
was at the end of one line and the
Moore
was at the beginning of the line beneath it.

I turned to Nicole and showed her that my name was misspelled in the
New York Post
. She read the item and looked at me curiously. “You were with me last night,” she said. She was right. I was with her the entire night, and was never near Tom Arnold or his birthday party at the strip club. I could tell that the false sighting bothered her, but my name being misspelled bothered me more than the false sighting. I laughed to myself. I was getting free publicity that wasn’t true, and my name had been spelled wrong.

R
ICKI
L
AKE
ended my drought. It was the twelfth show of the season, and Tim Herlihy had done more than look out for me. He sat down in his office and stayed up all night writing with me. This was the first time one of the writers had actually sought me out, sat me down, and declared that we weren’t leaving the room until we finished the sketch. When Tim’s phone rang, he would answer it and tell the person on the other line that he was busy and hang up. When someone walked into his office, he brushed them off with a “not now.”

In the sketch, I played Ricki Lake. I dressed in drag and wore thick lipstick. Bob Newhart played a couples counselor, and as Ricki Lake, I had him give advice to all the freaks in the sketch. Being on the same stage as Bob Newhart was surreal. I had spent every Monday night in high school watching
Newhart
on CBS. My parents and I never missed an episode. After I started doing stand-up comedy, I bought
The Buttoned Down Mind of Bob Newhart
and memorized it. The Ricki Lake sketch got good laughs, and I felt like it had a chance of being on the air again. I wanted to hug Bob Newhart for not telling me that he was being typecast and cutting it.

The week after Bob Newhart, Deion Sanders hosted and I was shut out again. What I had at read-through wasn’t funny, and I knew it when I handed it in. I had two lines in a three-card-monte sketch. At this point, when I had only a few lines, I would rather have not been on the show at all. I was going to ask out of the three-card-monte sketch, but on Thursday I was added to another sketch. Since that sketch had Farley in it, I didn’t care how many lines I had. I was there.

It was a hilarious sketch about commandos going into a spaceship that had landed. Each time some of the commandos would charge into the spaceship, they would reemerge with their clothes ripped off and tell the commander they had been raped. Deion was the commander, and he told us to keep charging in. When Spade came out of the UFO, he had the word
bitch
written across his chest in lipstick. It was great.

Eventually it was Farley’s turn to storm the spaceship. Chris looked at Deion, cocked his assault rifle, and said he was going to go in there to kick ass and take names. Chris barreled up the stairs into the spaceship. As he bent his head down to enter, his pants fell down, leaving his entire ass bare on live television. When Chris reached around to pull up his pants he was laughing and bumped his head on the doorway of the spaceship. He screamed out, “Son of A!” and wrestled with his pants.

It didn’t matter what happened next—the show was over. Even during the last sketch of the night, the audience was still giggling and murmuring about the commando sketch. Farley had done it again. He had taken an ordinary show and turned it into watercooler conversation. I still wonder if his pants fell off by accident.

Moments like Chris’s pants falling down made the show the greatest job that ever existed. As down as I got, I was sometimes picked up by the sheer magic of what happened around me. When Tom Petty performed, he brought Dave Grohl to be his drummer. Grohl recognized me from when Nirvana was on and said hello to me. When I asked him how it felt playing drums “for one of the old-timers,” Grohl’s eyes grew big as saucers, and he replied, “Dude, it is an honor.” Petty rocked the place, singing “You Don’t Know How It Feels to Be Me,” and the musical message addressed my mood.

I was sure I wasn’t imagining things when the band Live came through and performed a fantastic version of “I Alone.” David Hyde Pierce hosted that show and it was one of the funnier ones of the season. At the after-party, everyone was feeling really good about everything and was chatting and drinking when something amazing happened. Live walked into the restaurant and everyone stopped what they were doing and greeted the group with a standing ovation. It was the only time during my two years that this ever happened. They deserved it. I, on the other hand, was feeling fortunate even to be invited to the after-parties. I was doing nothing again, and the thought of having another drought scared the shit out of me.

After “Ricki Lake” aired, I sat out the next two shows. I forced myself to write. I became a terrible human being. The more I tried to write, the more of an asshole I became. I argued with everybody. I asked people flat out if they would add me to their sketch. I begged. I also did something that I never thought I would ever do. I did something I still feel sick about.

I stole.

The executives at the mouthwash company were trying to show the clients how clean and fresh it was. In the middle of the sketch, Tim Meadows knocks on the door and begins making out with Molly Shannon. The sight of a black guy and a white woman going at it is supposed to shock everyone. I sat there the entire time in a near state of panic, scanning the cue cards for my line. Every character’s lines were in a different color on the cue cards. Chris Elliott’s lines were green, Paul’s were brown, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what color I was. It wasn’t until the band began to play that it dawned on me that I had no lines.

That was also the week I took Rick Shapiro’s act and wrote it down word for word and submitted it as my sketch. Rick Shapiro was a comic in Greenwich Village. In his act, he did an impression of an Irish bartender who shouted at his customers. The skit was hilarious, and long before I got on
Saturday Night Live,
my friends and I had quoted it to one another. In the routine, a customer would approach the bar and inform the bartender that his drink order was wrong. The bartender would be polite and say, “Aw, I’m awfully sorry.” He would continue: “Here’s another drink you’ll love. It’s called, ‘Get out! You’re fired!’” Another patron in the routine would tell the bartender a joke and the bartender would say: “Aw, that’s a great joke! You like jokes, do ya? Here’s one for ya…Get out! You’re fired!”

When the sketch was picked to be on the air, I was officially fucked. Rick Shapiro’s Irish bartender sketch sailed through the Wednesday selection meeting and coasted smoothly through rehearsals on Thursday and Friday. It cleared the dress rehearsal on Saturday and wasn’t cut after the live dress rehearsal that night. The show that had been selected in Lorne’s office between dress rehearsal and air ran as scheduled, and the Irish bartender sketch was broadcast live across America. For a few weeks after the show aired, I avoided going to the comedy clubs for fear of bumping into Rick or any comic who had ever seen him perform, which was all of them.

Three weeks later, on Saturday night during the live dress rehearsal (the night that Courteney Cox hosted and I did my second “Good Morning, Brooklyn”), the show’s supervising producer, Ken Aymong, called me over. I was on my way to the stage dressed as James Barone when he asked me to follow him. He led me to a room behind the control room that I had never been in before. In the room was a table with a few chairs and a small cabinet. On top of the cabinet was a television and a VCR. Sitting in front of the television was Lorne Michaels.

Ken asked me if I knew a guy named Rick Shapiro. I told him I did not. Ken then pressed play on the VCR, and in front of me on the monitor was a video of Rick Shapiro doing his act. On the tape in the VCR, he was doing the Irish bartender sketch. He was doing it exactly the way I copied it. Ken let the tape play a while. Finally Lorne asked me, “You’ve never heard of this guy or seen his act?” I replied that I had not. Lorne nodded his head and Ken Aymong turned off the VCR. Lorne looked at me for a second and said, “Okay.” And I walked out of the room.

Later, I found out that Rick and his manager were suing the show. Why wouldn’t they? I don’t know the particulars but a settlement was reached, and in the settlement the Irish bartender sketch was edited out of all of the reruns. Undoubtedly I should have been fired, but I wasn’t. I never saw Rick Shapiro again, but if I did, I would have acted as if I didn’t see him. What I did was inexcusable, and no apology in the world could ever make up for it.

Whenever someone would ask me about the sketch and point out that it was in Rick’s act, I would tell them that five different people had written the sketch and I was just put in it. Nobody bought it, and the reputation for being a thief followed me for quite a while in the only place I had ever felt comfortable: the comedy clubs.

The week after Paul Reiser hosted, John Goodman and Dan Aykroyd cohosted and Bill Murray was floating through the hallways on Saturday, too. It was an exciting week for all of us. John Goodman was always a great host, and having the old-timers on the show was incredible. The reason we were all there was standing next to us at the coffee machine. What I noticed most about Aykroyd and Bill Murray was how much bigger they were than I had anticipated. They were both over six feet tall and looked as if they could hold their own in a bar fight if they had to. I wasn’t in any sketches, and I was really disappointed. Nothing would have been cooler than to stand next to Bill Murray or Dan Aykroyd in a sketch.

Two weeks later, I came up with an original character and a sketch titled “Rock and Roll Real Estate.” In it, I played a real estate agent who used to be the lead singer of an eighties metal band. I screamed all of my lines at the top of my lungs as if I were onstage in a giant arena. I submitted it in week eighteen when Courteney Cox hosted. I had both “Good Morning, Brooklyn” and “Rock and Roll Real Estate” on the board that week, so I was looking really good. I was hoping that two original characters on one show might take the taste of Rick Shapiro’s lawyers out of Lorne’s mouth.

But “Rock and Roll Real Estate” was cut after dress rehearsal on Saturday afternoon. In the meeting, I was told by Lorne to make sure I resubmitted it the following week, which I did. Again, it was chosen for air. Bob Saget, an incredibly funny guy, was the host. He also had the most disgusting sense of humor of any human being I’ve ever met. He would be talking about raping his mother and having sex with his daughter—no, he’d say, I was having sex with someone’s else daughter and then I brought her home to have sex with my daughter, but first I took a shit on them.

The only host who came close to Saget’s toilet talk was Emilio Estevez, who was easily one of the coolest people I met during my
SNL
years. Every joke Emilio told was about his rosebud (which he taught me meant asshole), but he told them in the funniest way with a real quick wit. I’d ask him what he was doing later and he’d launch into a riff like “I don’t know, licking your rosebud. You sleep on your stomach, don’t you? Okay, then, I’ll be over at ten.”

I thought the sketch worked better with Bob than it had with Courteney Cox because Saget was funny playing the straight man to my screaming metal head, but “Rock and Roll Real Estate” was cut again on Saturday after dress rehearsal. Again, Lorne told me to make sure I resubmitted it the following week. I complied and for the third consecutive week, “Rock and Roll Real Estate” was chosen to be on
Saturday Night Live
.

It was the last show of the year and David Duchovny was hosting. Everybody was very loose all week, and the pickup basketball game was particularly competitive that week. Another season was ending. Critically, it had gone much better than my first one. This meant that instead of headlines like “Saturday Night Dead,” the
New York Post
now wrote nothing. We all knew the show was funnier than it had been the previous year, and it also seemed that everyone definitely had more fun.

In the “Rock and Roll Real Estate” sketch, I wore a big blond teased-out wig, leather pants, and a Realtor’s jacket. My hair looked just like Rod Stewart’s hair; Rod Stewart was the musical guest on the twentieth and final show. After I rehearsed “Rock and Roll Real Estate” on Saturday, Rod was scheduled to do his rehearsal immediately after me. He was standing off to the side during my rehearsal. I wanted to stop and tell him that despite how I looked, I wasn’t doing an impression of him.

When Rod Stewart finished his rehearsal, he had to walk past me to get back to his dressing room. He was surrounded by about ten people who walked with him and formed a circle as he passed. One of the people in the circle pointed at me and said, “What’s up, Rod!” I started to worry that Rod Stewart would have my sketch cut again because I was dancing around like a jackass and screaming while wearing a Rod Stewart wig.

It turned out that Rod Stewart wasn’t too concerned with my possible impersonation, and the sketch made it through dress rehearsal and the meeting in Lorne’s office and onto the show. It was scheduled last in the rundown, just before Good-nights. I stood on the sidelines of everyone else’s sketches and kept checking my watch to make sure the show was running on time. I had to get this sketch on the air. It had already been picked three times, it was original, and it was funny. I knew I had to end the year strong. Finishing up the season with some momentum would help my negotiations over the summer, or so I thought.