Gasping for Airtime (6 page)

But as the weeks went by, I began to imagine that the orange card with “Good-nights” on it was my sketch. Every week it would be there, like a franchise. Most shows, Good-nights was the only time I was on camera—until I stopped showing up for Good-nights.

After hearing me quote the Christopher Walken/Dennis Hopper scene from the movie
True Romance,
Rob Schneider approached me on my second Monday evening and suggested that we write up a Christopher Walken sketch. I was excited about the collaboration, mostly because Rob knew what the hell he was doing and I didn’t. He told me he had three other sketches he was working on, but he definitely wanted to write up a Walken piece on Tuesday once he cleared himself some time.

On Tuesday, Rob showed up for work around midnight. He quickly prioritized the sketches he was writing, and due to the fact that I didn’t spot him the minute he arrived and couldn’t find him for several more hours, mine was last. At around 3:00
A.M
. on Wednesday morning, we began to write. At 5:00
A.M
. Rob said he was fighting a cold and needed to go home.

“When will we finish the sketch?” I asked.

“In the morning,” he said over his shoulder as he walked to the elevators.

At noon the next day, there was no sign of Rob. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I called him at his apartment. He was sleeping—and very pissed that I woke him up. “When are we going to finish the sketch?” I asked. This elicted a long pause, followed by “When I get there.” And then he hung up.

I expected him to arrive momentarily. Apparently, however, my wake-up call was successful because Rob returned at three in the afternoon, carrying a large Starbucks coffee. With read-through just two hours away, I was a madman. I ranted and raved. How fucking dare he? Rob seemed rather nonplussed. Before he had finished his coffee, the sketch was finished. Rob then quietly walked me through the hallways to the then mysterious drop-off place for sketches. It was a half hour to read-through and we were in the game.

The sketch was entitled “Psychic Friends Network.” Though it didn’t generate many laughs at read-through, I wasn’t concerned. I knew we had something. I don’t think anyone at the table had ever heard a Christopher Walken impression before. After read-through was over, Rob kept assuring me the sketch would get on. I’m sure I annoyed the hell out of him—but I figured the time I had spent watching the sun come up while waiting for him made us even.

After an eternity, Lorne’s door swung open. The moment of truth had come. I walked into the office and looked up at the corkboard and there it was. Directly above “Good-nights” was “Psychic Friends Network.” Hallelujah!

I rushed to my office to call my parents. With each step, my shoes squeaked “kiss…my…ass.” As quickly as I could, I spread the word to every person I knew: Don’t miss this week’s show! I told everyone every joke in the sketch. I even read the sketch aloud over the phone to some very patient friends.

That week’s host was Shannen Doherty, who played Sean Young in the sketch. The basic premise was that a lot of crazy celebrities you wouldn’t want in your head were offering psychic advice. At the time, there were reports of Sean Young doing nutty things, like showing up at
Batman
movie director Joel Schumacher’s office dressed in a catsuit in hopes of winning the role. Though Ms. Doherty wasn’t crazy about mocking Sean Young, the sketch was rewritten—i.e., shortened—and rehearsed, and the host’s hesitancy was pretty much ignored.

As the week progressed from Wednesday’s read-through, I started getting uneasy vibes that things weren’t going to roll my way—even though no one was verbalizing any warning signs. Nevertheless, the sketch was still in the lineup on Saturday. David Spade was to play Crispin Glover, Tim Meadows was to play Todd Bridges, and wardrobe had made a slinky, sexy catsuit for Miss Doherty. We all performed the sketch at dress rehearsal, which occurs at 8:00
P.M
. in front of a live audience. (The audience is then switched before the live show begins at 11:30
P.M
.) Upon seeing the catsuit, the crowd whooped it up.

After dress rehearsal, Lorne’s office door would be sealed shut again and some sketches would be removed from the corkboard to make sure the show timed out at exactly an hour and a half. When the door to Lorne’s office reopened that Saturday night, “Psychic Friends Network” was no longer on the show. I don’t know where it went, but it was not on the fucking corkboard.

I found the veteran producer Mike Shoemaker and asked what had happened. Shoe told me that Shannen Doherty was uncomfortable making fun of Sean Young. “Are they friends?” I asked. He told me he didn’t think so, and walked away. With only an hour to go before air, there wasn’t time for a debate. I couldn’t believe it. All Shannen Doherty had to do was say two lines, which she didn’t want to do because she was afraid of offending Sean Young. Maybe she was afraid that Sean Young would show up at her house wearing a catsuit.

Not only was my sketch not on the air, I was no longer on the air. I had already asked to be taken out of a courtroom sketch where I played a bailiff with no lines. I would rather not be on camera at all than be on camera doing nothing except standing there like the spear-carrier in the school play. I had called hundreds of people and told them to watch my sketch. Now it was vaporized. I couldn’t possibly call them all back at eleven at night and say, “Oops.” I certainly wasn’t going to beg to be reinstated as a mute bailiff and then call my friends and tell them to tape the show and use their slow-motion VCR replay to see me on it.

To put it mildly, I sulked that entire evening. Every time I made eye contact with Shannen Doherty, I looked at her like I was going to kill her. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t exist. I sat in my dressing room and watched the show from an armchair.

I decided to make a statement and not go onstage for Good-nights. Not exactly Gandhi’s hunger strike, but I somehow had to protest. On my first show, I hadn’t been sure whether or not to go onstage for Good-nights. I had written the opening monologue sketch for Charles Barkley, but I wasn’t ever on camera. I was standing off to the side while the cast filed onstage during the final commercial. Mike Shoemaker nudged me and said, “Go on!” If he hadn’t, I’d probably still be standing there.

The only person who even noticed when I skipped the Good-nights was Shoemaker. When Shoe passed me in the hallway after the show and asked me why I wasn’t at Good-nights, I told him I was boycotting. “You should really be there,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.” I basically told him that the fact that I wasn’t on the show didn’t look too good either. I figured I didn’t have enough time to tell him about how humiliating it would have been to stand onstage with everyone in the studio audience—not to mention the friends I had called—staring at me, wondering who I was and what the hell I was doing up there with everyone else who had performed on the show.

That night I went to the wrap party with one mission: to get loaded. I hoped that getting incredibly drunk would alleviate the flow of panic that was constantly and erratically rushing into my body. I would self-medicate! It had to work. If I could just get myself to pass out, I would no longer have to deal with wanting to kill someone until I woke up. The more I drank, the more numb I became.

Amazingly, with next to no motor skills at my disposal, the volcanic churning inside my stomach persisted. Barely able to keep my eyes open, I was acutely aware of the fact that my plan was not working. I was alarmed at my own self-awareness. As I reached new lows of numbness, my self-consciousness was at its peak. My insides felt like I had put a blanket over a kicking horse. This anxiety could be cured only by drinking more. So drink I did. I drank until the sun came up—ironic, considering that the whole point of self-medicating was to pass out.

I don’t remember going to sleep that night, but I do remember waking up. It was six o’clock at night the following day when I got out of bed. More significant, it was dark outside. I met some friends for “lunch” that Sunday evening at a restaurant called Coffee Shop. The entire time I sat in the restaurant, I fought the urge to run. From or to what, I didn’t know. When our meals arrived, I went into the bathroom and puked. This certainly would be a normal reaction for someone who spent six hours drinking beer and scotch, but I wasn’t feeling hungover.

Shortly before throwing up, I became morose over the fact that that day, for the first time in my life, I had not seen daylight. This bothered me greatly. Every day starts with the sun coming up, and I had deprived myself of even that. It didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right. You’re not supposed to wake up at night. I came out of the restroom and told my friends that I thought I had the flu and needed to go home.

I didn’t tell them that I was going to run the entire way.

K
ELSEY
G
RAMMER
has two half brothers who were eaten by sharks. I know this because it was in Kelsey’s bio when he hosted the show.

Every Monday when you walked into your office, the biographies of that week’s host and musical guest would be on your desk. These were courtesy of the phenomenal research department that works on
Saturday Night Live
. You could walk up to any one of them and say, “I need video of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon,” and they would have the tape for you in about three minutes. No matter how obscure your request was, they would find it for you. The research department always made sure that you had every conceivable piece of information on that week’s host.

When I first started at
SNL
, I read these bios voraciously. I was looking for an edge. I devoured the host’s information looking for ideas. After a while, however, I grew complacent about finding an edge and stopped reading the bios. Well, for some reason I read Kelsey’s. Dave Attell read through it as well, and we sat and wondered aloud if that was how they became his
half
brothers. Our mood turned sardonic, and we pondered the odds of two of your family members getting eaten by sharks.

The pitch meeting with the host took place on Monday night, somewhere around eight. The writers and cast would all gather in Lorne’s office, along with director Dave Wilson, several producers, and assorted technical personnel to say hello and pitch ideas to that week’s host. If that sounds like a lot of people to be huddled in one office, it is.

Lorne’s office was by no means elaborate. It was one room with a beautiful wood desk and two old leather chairs. To the left-hand side of the desk was a small bathroom with a shower and hotel-style bathrobes hanging on the wall. Toward the rear of the office was a couch that comfortably seated four people. There were a few pieces of art on the walls alongside some great black-and-white photos of the show. It was a very nice, classy, mellow office. It certainly was an odd choice for him to have thirty-five people stand around and sit on the floor for two hours.

The host would sit in one of the comfy leather chairs; Jim Downey occupied the other one. The rest of us would form a semicircle around Lorne’s desk. People would lean against the wall immediately to the left of the desk next to the bathroom door and then fan out around the walls toward the couch and wrap around to the other side of the desk. If you didn’t get there early, you didn’t have a shot at the couch. If you weren’t on the couch, you either had to lean against the wall, afraid to touch anything, or sit on the floor and stare at the host’s crotch for the entire pitch meeting. One by one, the cast and writers would greet the host and pitch their ideas.

After the semicircle of ideas was complete, Lorne turned to Downey for ideas. “Downer” always took his time and really had fun with it. He looked like a guy who derived great pleasure from sitting in an expensive leather chair searching for funny sketches. After Downey was finished, Lorne would always ask the host if he or she had any ideas. Usually, the host would say not really and gracefully defer to the staff. Most of them had never been there, and no matter how famous they were, they were on our turf. Sometimes, however, they brought ideas of their own. Sometimes they would have some great ideas; sometimes they would make fools of themselves. Most fell somewhere in the middle.

Mike Myers once told me a story about Christopher Walken pitching ideas. As the pitches went around the room, Walken sat stone-faced, with an almost angry expression. Idea after idea hit the floor like a bowling ball. Walken didn’t budge. After everyone in the room had finished, Lorne asked Walken if he had any ideas of his own. Walken paused to gather his thoughts. “Bear suits are funny. Ape suits as well,” he said. Uh, okey-dokey, meeting’s over. Let’s get cracking on the bear suits and ape suits, people!

John Travolta thought he had some funny ideas.
Thought.
What worked against him was the fact that this particular week was one of the funniest pitch weeks I can remember. Every person in the room was on fire, and Tom Davis refrained from asking him to tap dance for chicken. We pitched him everything from the Sweathogs to
Saturday Night Fever.
At the end, Lorne asked Travolta if there was anything he had on his mind.

Travolta pulled out a yellow legal pad filled with pages of notes. Slowly and methodically, he read us his ideas. At the time, he was coming off
Pulp Fiction,
so he was inarguably the man. We all listened as his ideas just kept pouring out. We sat there for forty-five minutes as he flipped through the pages and giggled at his own pitches. We were trapped. The one that he was most jacked about involved him as a Hasidic private detective, complete with a tallith over long sideburns. Without exception, we all thought it was retarded—though in hindsight, it does sound funny. The problem was the meeting should have been over and we should have been back in our offices, but it wasn’t. It was being prolonged by John Travolta.

Sometimes the host could blow you away, which is exactly what Nicole Kidman did when I laid eyes on her. To the point, she is the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. She has these crystal blue eyes. When she looked at you, it was like you were getting laid that night. Of course you weren’t, because she came with Tom Cruise, who stood in the back of the room wearing jeans, a peacoat, motorcycle boots, and a Notre Dame cap. Tom didn’t say anything. He just blended in until he looked at you and smiled. There was no denying that movie star smile: If the guy pumped gas in South Dakota, he would still be Tom Cruise. In my case, Nicole wasn’t a sexual fantasy, anyway; she was someone associated with the show who was looking me in the eye when she talked to me. (“How are you?” she’d say. “I’m good,” I’d respond.
“How are you?”
Wow!) People who spoke back to me in the office during my first season on the show were the most fascinating people in the world.

When Sally Field hosted, she gave me a shoulder massage at the rewrite table, but that wasn’t nearly as exciting as her tearing Ellen Cleghorne a new asshole. Ellen pitched Sally Field her recurring character Zoraida the NBC page. Ellen started off by telling Sally Field about how Michael Jordan had done it. Then she explained some of the things they could do together. Through it all, Sally Field smiled politely and nodded. Then, in front of all of us, she took out a (metaphorical) knife and sliced Ellen up.

After Ellen finished, Sally looked at her coldly and said, “Oh, I know, that’s the sketch where you have all the jokes and I just stand there like an idiot and do nothing.” Icicles formed on the walls and we all huddled together for warmth. It was, to say the least, a little uncomfortable to hear the host verbally dis one of the cast members. To her credit, Ellen took the high road and gave Sally a pass. Too bad. That could have been the greatest catfight not seen in a Russ Meyer film.

Bob Newhart took issue with a sketch I wrote for him that survived the pitch meeting, but he was a little bit more easygoing about it. When he hosted, I was genuinely excited because I had religiously watched his show growing up. I first saw him that week on Monday afternoon sitting in Marci Klein’s office, sipping a scotch. He wasn’t drinking per se, he was just chilling with a scotch. Hey, it had to be five o’clock somewhere in the world.

In the sketch I wrote, Newhart played a doctor who was a former pediatrician who diagnosed everything in preschool language. If a patient had a urinary tract infection, he’d say, “It seems like your pee-pee has a boo-boo.” After about half a dozen pee-pees and doodees, Newhart deadpanned, “I hope you all, you all realize that you are witnessing the actual…the actual…end of my career.” Everyone laughed. I wasn’t angry or disappointed at all. Because it came out of the mouth of Bob Newhart, it was like being knighted.

But there was nothing like being prepared to meet the host, like Dave Attell and I were when Kelsey Grammer was there. In the pitch meeting, Kelsey made it clear to us that he would love to do a James Bond sketch. That week, there were about eleven James Bond sketches at read-through. Apparently, Dave and I were the only two people who had read Kelsey’s bio, because in about nine of the eleven Bond sketches, the sketch ended with Kelsey getting eaten by a shark. As if that wasn’t horrible enough, in some of the sketches he had to scream things at the shark as it was mauling him. Kelsey, ever the trouper, read through all of them, sometimes yelling things like “Back, you demon of the sea! Stop eating me!”

Dave and I sat next to each other with our faces in our hands, tears running down our cheeks, laughing uncontrollably like idiots at the odds of a guy who lost two family members to shark attacks hosting
Saturday Night Live
and reading aloud sketches in which he gets eaten by a shark.

Once you were in Downey’s office, you never had his full attention. His office is like a garage in which you can’t fit the car. There’s a grill, a couple of tennis rackets, and a stuffed marlin hanging over the door. His desk looked as if it had been hit by an avalanche of sketches, letters, and newspapers. Downey would switch from sorting the papers on his desk to lying down on his couch. He was always moving, never looking you squarely in the eyes.

Downey was like a conglomeration of five different people. From week 1, he would always say to whoever was in the room, “I really want to put Jay in a sketch and make him a teen idol,” meaning a Joey Lawrence type with an album who takes himself too seriously. For two years, he would tell me how young and good-looking I was and would repeat: “Jay as a teen idol. That just cracks me up.”

He could also be sadistic. Once when I arrived with a sketch that I wanted him to read, he put out his hand and said, “All right, let’s have it.” Instead of grasping the ten or so pages, he let them lie flat in his hand, and he weighed the pile. Then he handed the sketch back to me and said, “It feels a little long.” He asked Rob Schneider for his sketch and he performed the same weighing technique. “That feels just about right,” he said. He asked for my sketch again, placed it on his palm, and rendered the final verdict: “Yeah, Jay, that’s definitely too long.”

Most of the cast would leave the pitch meeting and begin lobbying for support from the writers. This, I learned over time, was invaluable. These were writers. Any help I could get from someone who knew anything about turning an idea into a sketch, I welcomed. A problem I faced was, Who really wants to stay up all night helping the new guy? They all had their own weight to pull, and now you’re asking them to help pull yours. So from office to office I would go, literally until the sun came up, searching for help.

Several of the guys synced up naturally. Rob Schneider took Lew Morton under his wing. (Maybe we shouldn’t have run Morton out of our office after all.) There just was no one for me to latch on to. It would have been so foreign to say to Dave Attell, “Okay, you be my writer.” Dave wanted to become a performer, and to get his sketches on the air, he had to write them for Farley and Sandler. In times of desperation, I did beg him to put me in a couple of his sketches. I’d look at the sketch and say: “See right there where it says Spade. All you have to do is erase it and write Jay.”

Writers generally had a knack for certain cast members’ voices. Tim Herlihy, for example, would write two sketches a week with Sandler. Like clockwork, at least one of those two would get on. It was maddening and frustrating to watch Sandler because you could stay up all night writing a sketch that you thought was great, and then the producers would tell Sandler at read-through to write a song for Weekend Update. Adam would return ten minutes later with “Left thumb, you’re the one, I like you better than my right one,” and the crowd would go nuts. He was the guy who, if we were down five runs in the bottom of the ninth, you could tell to grab a bat and put us back in the game. The crowd would applaud no matter what he did.

Equally as funny were the sketches that Fred Wolf would write for Spade and Farley. Fred was born to write for Spade and Farley as a team. (He later wrote the movie
Tommy Boy
for them.) He was also a great writer, period. Fred wrote one of my favorite sketches, which was entitled “How Much Ya Bench?” The sketch centered on a public access show with a bunch of steroid freaks bragging about how much they benched. Emilio Estevez was the host that week, and nearly all the male cast members were in the sketch. We dressed in giant steroid-freak body suits and had prosthetics on our faces to make us look like apes. Our legs were hidden as we knelt in chairs, and there were twiglike mechanical legs rigged under our torsos that contrasted with our steroid-ridden upper bodies. As we spoke to one another, our little legs mechanically kicked back and forth. Fred’s added twist was that Spade didn’t have mechanical legs because his were already so skinny.

Fred and Herlihy always looked out for me. They would always at least throw me a bone and give me a line or two in their sketches, though they never considered me a principal lead. Other writers had a really hard time just writing my name down on a piece of paper. Fred, who walked around with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, always took care of me. Most of the sketches I had two or three lines in were because Fred had written me into them. I never knew why he didn’t use some of the other male cast members for his bit parts, but I wasn’t going to try to change his mind.