Gasping for Airtime (3 page)

I looked around and noticed the number of people in the room had doubled. They were all staring at me. No one except for Steve Lookner was laughing. It was very odd. I wasn’t sure if they were waiting to see how I would react, or if they were wondering if Chris had actually puked in my lap. I emitted a meek “how ya’ doin’,” and everyone went back to what they were doing. There was no acknowledgment that a 300-pound guy had just simulated fellatio and vomiting in my lap. Chris rose to his feet and walked away.

Welcome to the big leagues.

Very early on I noticed that everyone mumbled on the seventeenth floor. No one would look me in the eye or talk to my face either. If someone was walking toward me and I asked him a question, he wouldn’t break stride as he answered me. Every conversation I had was with people mumbling something as they blew past me in the hallway. If I asked them what they said, they would shout the same mumble over their shoulder. Everyone seemed to do it to everyone, so I didn’t take it personally.

Those who weren’t driving their own cars to the retreat were supposed to meet outside the building at noon and ride together on a chartered bus big enough to haul an Alabama church group. At noon, I was still on the N/R subway train. The entire subway ride I knew I was going to miss the bus, miss the trip, and be fired for not having enough class to be on time for my first
SNL
field trip. Since Sarah Silverman and I were neighbors, we took the subway up together so at least we were both doomed.

At 12:10
P.M
., I boarded the bus, panic-stricken about being late. It was empty. Sarah and I were the only ones there. No one else showed up for another hour. For a while we wondered if we were even on the right bus. But one by one people started to wander onto the bus. All of them were writers who I had barely met or not met at all. I didn’t even know what half of the writers looked like, so it felt a lot like being on a city bus. People you didn’t know were getting on and sitting down. No one really spoke, and I wondered if they thought they were on the wrong bus, too. Finally I saw someone I knew: Norm Macdonald.

Slowly and deliberately, Norm lumbered onto the bus. He looked like a cross between death warmed over and a drug addict who had just woken up. Norm stood at the front of the bus for a while and looked out over all of us. He cleared his throat and announced that he had been sick with food poisoning the night before. He provided the name of the restaurant and positively identified the culprit as an avocado. Then he treated us to a blow-by-blow of the havoc that faulty avocado wrecked on his system.

The first sign of trouble, he explained, came when he was crossing the street after leaving the restaurant and started shitting in his pants. He leaned up against a lamppost and puked and shit in the street until he mustered enough strength to hail a cab. He explained that no cabs would pick him up because they thought he was a crackhead puking and shitting in the street.

After Norm had drained his system, a cab stopped and he told the driver to take him to a hospital. When the cabdriver asked him which hospital, he said he didn’t know. Unfortunately, Norm had just moved to New York and didn’t know the names of any hospitals, so he told the cabbie to take him to the best possible hospital. Apparently, the cabdriver decided to put his kids through college on Norm’s dime and drove him all the way up to Harlem. Norm spent the entire ride telling the cabbie that he wasn’t a strung-out druggie, he had just eaten a rotten avocado.

When Norm walked into the emergency room, he was ghostly white and shaking, causing the doctors to immediately put him on a gurney. As they wheeled him down the hall, the doctor kept asking Norm what he was on. Norm said that he kept explaining to everybody that he had food poisoning from an avocado. They pumped his stomach, hydrated him with an IV, and then sent him home.

You could certainly say that Norm was a trouper. He had been up all night vomiting in a hospital in Harlem, and he was still on the bus at one o’clock. I was late, but I didn’t almost die from eating an avocado. I merely overslept.

I was looking forward to becoming one of the guys. I woke up the first morning around 9:00
A.M
. and went downstairs to the lobby to hook up with somebody, anybody. It looked like I was the only person in the hotel. I wandered the enormous mansion by myself for an hour, wondering if I was missing an important meeting. It turned out that the people I went up to Mohonk with, specifically the guys I was looking forward to hanging out with, already had their weekends pretty much planned. Spade, Farley, Sandler, and Tim Meadows had gone to play golf. The writers from Harvard went somewhere to do something, and all of the producers had gone somewhere else. Mathematically, it seemed impossible not to at least run into someone from the show that morning, but I didn’t.

The next day, I passed Steve Lookner in the mansion and asked him if he wanted to shoot hoops. To my surprise, he accepted. Little did I know, but Lookner was a high school basketball star who had played a lot of intramural hoops at Harvard. The first game we played, he beat me 11–3. The rematch was 11–3. After he schooled me in the third 10–0, I quit. On the final point Lookner threw a move on me and dunked in my face. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he could have jumped over the trees if you asked him. I stormed off the court and cursed at him for hustling me. He couldn’t believe I was quitting. He offered to spot me some points, which pissed me off even more. I went back to my room and convinced myself I was glad that no one was around and I could be by myself.

Later that night, all the writers and cast members huddled around a television in one of the banquet rooms to watch the premiere of
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
. Conan had been a writer on
SNL
for several years, and many of the new guys knew him from Harvard. You could tell from the excitement that Conan was popular when he worked on the show.

After Conan’s first episode, everyone in the room broke out into applause and started giving out grades. Someone started out by saying, “I’d give him an A minus.” Another person gave him a B plus. Someone generously awarded him an A plus. I have been on Conan’s show eight times and have always had a wonderful time. I watch the show often and really enjoy it, but I thought the premiere episode was a disaster. To me, Conan looked really overwhelmed and nervous. I didn’t laugh at all the jokes like the other guys. I said to no one in particular, “I give him a C.” It was definitely the wrong grade. Everyone in the room looked at me cross-eyed as if to say “Who let this guy in?” and then went back to their conversations. That was the first time I noticed that my sense of humor was very different from that of the other writers.

On the way home from My Hunk, I bummed a ride with Dave Attell. Sarah Silverman, who had gotten the flu, rode along with us. For two hours we drove back to the city in silence. When we reached Manhattan, it was raining. We got out of Dave’s car at 30 Rock, but couldn’t get up to the offices because none of us had our elevator cards yet. Confused, we all stood in the rain for a while. Then we shrugged our shoulders and went our separate ways.

When I arrived at my apartment, my roommate was sitting on the couch reading a book. He asked me how Mohonk was and I told him it was fantastic. I asked him if he watched Conan. “Yeah,” he replied. “I’d give him a C.”

I
T’S IMPOSSIBLE
to say that my lifelong goal was to be a cast member on
Saturday Night Live
because it was unattainable. Julia Sweeney once said that
Saturday Night Live
is “like an uncle you hate paying for all four years at Harvard.” Actually, it’s more like an uncle who touched you when you were seven, then paid for all four years of Harvard. The upside, however, is that
Saturday Night Live
is a much more precious pedigree. Thousands of students show up every year at the doors of Harvard, but how many people walk through the turnstiles each year at
SNL
? A dozen? How many of that dozen, if any, are new performers? Three? Four? Zero?

Even for the best and most well known comics, the odds were so great that I never considered being chosen to join the show. If you do the math, the chances are so remote that it is literally unattainable—until it starts becoming attainable. As a comic, you are working toward so many different avenues of success that you aren’t even cognizant of some sort of master plan. When you are the emcee at a boathouse in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, and you’re getting $25 and the middle guy is getting $50 and the next guy $100, you’re thinking, let me just get to the middle. If you succeed in clubs, that leads to landing an agent, a spot on
The Tonight Show,
and bigger paydays. You live incrementally; you don’t sit around thinking, yep, I’m on my way to
Saturday Night Live.

But like most comics, I had always watched the show. Truthfully, I thought the original shows in the mid-seventies were overrated, and that the only reason they became so beloved was because they were new to the TV-viewing audience; no one had seen anything like them. Twenty years later, they aren’t really that funny. Personally, I never thought the Coneheads or the Blues Brothers were that amazing; I felt they were too obvious. The only exception to the weakness of the early shows is Bill Murray. Regardless of how poorly those early shows aged, Bill Murray was timeless. You could have put him in a show in 1820 and it would have been funny. But the show really caught my attention when Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Jim Belushi were on in the mid-eighties, because those guys could make anything funny.

Being a comic gives you a small leg up because many
SNL
cast members over the years were from comedy theater or famous improv groups, ranging from John Belushi to Martin Short to Chris Farley. I don’t know how noncomics got the job, but as a comic, the formula is quite simple. People who might want to hire you come and watch you perform. They either like you or don’t. In that regard, I’ve always thought comics had it easy. The hard part about comedy is that it’s not something that can be taught. A stand-up is a lot like a crackhead. They both know exactly what they want. And they both know exactly how and where to get it.

I grew up in the small town of Verona, New Jersey. Verona is practically Utopia in terms of raising a family. A middle-class town of about 16,000 law-abiding citizens, Verona comes complete with clean streets, grassy backyards, lots of Little League, and a community pool. Unfortunately, when I grew up there, the kids my age were primarily guidos.
Guido
is the term that the Italians of my youth would use to refer to themselves. Translated literally, I think it means “really Italian.” I’ve always had a very fair complexion with blond hair and blue eyes. When I would go to the mall with a couple of pals, they would have their dark hair moussed up and slicked back and gold chains around their necks; they reeked of Drakkar Noir cologne. Problem was, so would I. At one time I even wore an Italian horn around my neck—you know, for the ladies. It’s safe to say that I looked a little different from the rest of the pack.

When I gave up on my lifelong dream of being Italian, I began to wear my hair the way I wanted, like a normal kid. I began to wear my own clothes and stopped saying words like “mal
ron
.” I threw caution to the wind in my quest to simply be myself. But who the hell was I? I was a comedian. Once I figured out what made me high, I would stop at nothing to get it.

One Saturday morning when I was fifteen, my best friend James Barone (a guido) drove me to Rascals Comedy Club in the bordering town of West Orange. There was an ad on public access television that week that Rascals was searching the country for teenage comedians. Heck, I lived right down the street. I don’t remember much of what I said that day, but I can assure you it was awful. Regardless, I had been given a precious glimpse of Technicolor that day. I couldn’t wait to see it again.

After I finished high school, I planned to attend community college, but when I reached the parking lot on enrollment day, I turned the car around. I was going to be a comic, and the only school for that was in the clubs. I continued doing one-nighters—as they are called—earning $25 here and $50 there. Through persistence, I met Barry Katz, who agreed to manage me. I made the rounds of the New York clubs—the Boston Comedy Club, the Comic Strip, the Comedy Cellar, and the now-defunct Village Gate—and soon I was approved to do backup at Catch a Rising Star’s Princeton club. Though I was being paid $50 to sit around in case one of the comics on the bill didn’t show up, this meant that I would have a chance to become a featured performer there, which paid $500 a night. Forget community college, I was going to Princeton.

My big break came when I auditioned to become an MTV veejay and was hired to host the show
Lip Service,
a lip-synch game show. Instantly, I became more marketable on the college circuit because I now had 600,000 television viewers. I knew I had made it when I was hired to perform at my grandmother’s alma mater, a women’s college in Denton, Texas, for $750—which represented the entire balance of my checking account. For me, the family connection was huge. I proudly showed my mom the contract—though she was more shocked than sentimental because I was going to be paid $750 to tell jokes.

After thirty episodes,
Lip Service
was canceled, but it gave me a lead item for my résumé. I was soon hired to do a pilot for an ABC sitcom called
Camp Wilder
that costarred Hilary Swank and Jerry O’Connell, which would air for twenty episodes. For the pilot, I was flown to Los Angeles and put up at the Century Park Hotel. I was nineteen, and the room had a minibar. My first afternoon, I sat on my balcony, looking out over the swimming pool and the city of L.A., downing beer after beer, thinking, I will never be more successful than this.

The Boston Comedy Club isn’t exactly a suit-and-tie joint. It’s located on the second floor above an Irish pub that has live music. Regularly, you will be onstage and hear “Auld Lang Syne” pumping through the floorboards. The club is also next door to a fire department. Now, I don’t think it’s asking too much for people to call the fire department in between shows, but like clockwork, every other weekend you could count on being onstage at the exact same time someone called in a three-alarm fire. Off the fire engines would race—if you were lucky—but more likely they would sit in the thick Greenwich Village traffic with their sirens blaring, for once, thank God, drowning out the sounds of “Auld Lang Syne.”

The Boston Comedy Club is also a rough room. People in the Village on weekends get really drunk, and some wind up sitting in the room. Slurred heckling ensues, and if you don’t have your thick skin and your A game, they will bury you. There are lots of things to do in Manhattan, and they know that you know it. White, black, or Hispanic, young or old, it doesn’t matter, they will all sit there with their arms folded, telling each other “This guy better be funny.” In short, this is the last room you would choose to have a showcase for
Saturday Night Live
. But it was, in fact, on one particular summer evening in this room that I had mine.

My manager drew up a schedule of eleven comics. I was batting third. Marci Klein, the
SNL
talent coordinator, and a few others from the show were sitting in the back of the room with the dreams of eleven human beings in their beautiful, shiny,
Saturday Night Live
hands. It was about 99 degrees outside; it was also the night that the air conditioner at the Boston Comedy Club broke.

Heat definitely rises. As people got loaded and danced in the pub downstairs, their body heat mixed with the 200 or so people sitting shoulder to shoulder in the comedy club. The room became unbearably hot, and comic after comic performed in front of some very uncomfortable customers. The heat in the room reminded me of when you go into the attic of your house in the summer as a kid. As the mercury rose, Marci Klein and company became increasingly irritated.

I went on third, and the
SNL
group all left immediately after my set. Eight comics busted their chops that night, not realizing that the people they were showcasing for were long gone. They had probably tipped two different cabdrivers by now and were no doubt sipping apple martinis someplace with a powerful air conditioner. They watched three comics that night, and I was one of them. Seriously, what are the odds? They’re so tough that when Jim Carrey auditioned long ago, he wasn’t picked.

Barry pulled me aside that night after my set and told me that Marci really liked me and wanted to see me again, the next time with Jim Downey and some of the cast and writers. I foresaw a tremendous problem falling asleep that night, so I began to get blissfully shit-faced.

I would meet Buddy on the set of the film
Paulie,
and my friendship with him became one of the great treasures of my life. For some reason, Buddy took great pleasure in giving me bits of advice and insights into stand-up comedy. I couldn’t think of a better comic to be dispensing advice. Buddy truly believed that stand-up comics were special people—not special in their individual talents, but special in our capacity to provide happiness to others. Buddy also believed we as comics had a brotherhood: We were an amazing circle of people with a responsibility to take the stage and give 100 percent every night to make others’ lives brighter. He sure made mine brighter.

One day Buddy asked me what my monitor onstage was. I asked him what a monitor was. A monitor, Hackett explained, was the number of distracting thoughts in your head when you’re onstage. Thoughts such as “What’s that sound?” “Why is the waitress talking so loud?” and “Why aren’t those people laughing?” are all part of the negative and counterproductive side of your monitor. Basically, any thought that inhibits the projection of your natural self is a piece of your monitor.

Buddy’s theory was that the first time a comic goes onstage, his monitor is almost 100. Standing onstage is so foreign and standing in front of a live audience is so frightening that being yourself is the hardest thing to do. Yet in spite of nearly everything in your brain working against you, you still earn applause. Even though you had used less than 1 percent of your natural talent, people still saw a spark in you and wanted you to come back. Buddy went on to explain that as you do more comedy and spend more time onstage, your monitor naturally begins to decrease, and eventually it becomes so small that you can stand onstage and give the audience nothing but your true, funniest self. (Inevitably, I asked Buddy what his monitor was. I assumed, of course, that it would be zero. Buddy replied, “One.” “One? Why not zero?” I asked. He then leaned close to me and whispered, “I always figure out where the fire exits are.” Then he added, “After that, though, it’s 100 percent of 99 percent for the rest of the show!”)

At the time of my second showcase for
Saturday Night Live,
my monitor was about ten. I thought about all the other comics on the show, about how they were all wearing their “funny” shirts and had groomed themselves to near perfection for their sets. I figured I would be the guy that didn’t primp and iron; I wanted them to see what I looked like before the shower. I went to the gym that night around 8:00
P.M
. and showed up at Stand-Up New York around 9:30
P.M
. I was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and I was still sweating. Sure enough, every other guy there looked like it was class picture day. I ordered a beer and joked around with my roommate Mike DeNicola, a comic from Brooklyn by way of Wisconsin. Mike and I drank beer and hit on girls until I was in the on-deck circle.