Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  As I was talking to Mike Shoemaker, Jim Downey, the show’s head writer, walked out of his office. Downey, who had a cherubic Irish look about him, was wearing khakis and a polo shirt, and his toothbrush was in his mouth. Shoemaker attempted to introduce me, but Downey stopped him in midsentence by holding up his index finger and pointing to the toothbrush. He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. When Downey returned, he said nothing and proceeded to walk back into his office and close the door.

  Shoemaker then led me into the writers’ room. All the lights were out and there were six cafeteria tables pushed together in a haphazard rectangle to form one big table. Every newspaper in print was lying on this table. That was something I always loved about working at SNL. On any given morning I could walk in and pick up the Dallas Morning News or the Washington Post. I sat on one of the couches at the far end of the writers’ room for about twenty minutes, alone with the newspapers.

  I would soon learn that my new job would require lots of waiting. As I sat waiting for Jim Downey, the room began to fill up with people. At one point, Shoemaker walked in with a kid who looked a little like Björk and said: “Jay, this is Lew Morton. He’s a new writer. You guys are sharing an office.” Uh…hi. The veteran writers came and went while the new ones sat around on couches and tabletops waiting for instructions.

  Dave Attell and Sarah Silverman, two comics I knew from the clubs who were also new to the show, had arrived and taken a seat next to me on the couch. Sarah is from New Hampshire, and she is so “one of the guys” that you forget sometimes how beautiful she is. But when you first meet her, wow, you notice! Sarah and I were both hired as featured performers and writers, but Attell was hired as a writer only. Attell not being hired as a cast member, let alone a featured performer, was a crime.

  I had always looked up to Dave as a stand-up, so I was glad that we would being sharing an office. But I also felt a little uncomfortable. I thought Attell was fifty times the comic I was and that he deserved to be on camera, too. He might be the funniest living stand-up comic, and he will perform anytime in front of any mike. Sometimes he’ll perform at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village in front of nine people at two-thirty in the morning (his preferred time slot, by the way). Whenever he’s onstage, you’ll also see other comics, me included, huddled in the back of the room to watch Dave spinning out zingers like “I have this blow-up doll that I fuck all the time, but I fill her up only halfway and I make believe she’s a model.” Attell was also a chain smoker. He smoked anytime, anyplace. Since I was an utter slob, our office looked like it was under construction in about a week.

  We shared the small office meant for one person with Lew Morton and Steve Lookner, two Harvard guys. Whatever the rhythm was on the seventeenth floor, Lookner and Morton picked up on it pretty quickly. They always seemed to know what time to come in, what time to go home, where to hand in sketches, and most important, who to ask for help. All that separated the nonsmoking side from the smoking side was a couch in the middle of the room. Within a couple of weeks, we had smoked them out. I have no idea where they went. One day they were there, the next they were gone. I can’t say that I blamed them, but Dave and I were happy for the additional space. Besides, those two Harvard guys were bringing us down with all that goddamn work they were doing.

  To complicate matters, Dave and Sarah had dated each other and had only just recently broken up. Regardless, the three of us had a strange bond now. We were new. We were ready. We were clueless. And we were all waiting for Jim Downey.

  Another hour passed and it was early evening. Finally, Downey arrived. “Downer,” as Adam Sandler affectionately called him, was actually a great guy. He had a bit of a belly, and he always seemed to have a smile on his face. Downey had written for David Letterman, where, I was told, he had created the Top Ten list, and he had also written for SNL in the 1970s. He was harassing some of the guys as they arrived when suddenly I felt a rumbling in the hallway.

  Farley was coming!

  When I say I felt a rumbling, it’s in no way a reference to Chris’s weight. Rather, it’s a compliment to his presence. Chris Farley was the most beautiful human being I ever met. When you met Chris, you smiled. You had to. For God’s sake, it was involuntary.

  From the minute Farley walked into the room, the mood changed. “Ahhh, now we’re cookin’,” Sandler announced.

  I stared at Chris and thought about what a dork I would look like if I jumped up from the couch and introduced myself to him. He might have just become my colleague, but I was still a fan. As far as I was concerned, he had reset the bar for funny with the first Motivational Speaker sketch that he and David Spade had done with Christina Applegate, where he hitched up his pants, crossed his eyes, and made her laugh so hard that she had to cover her face with her hair like Cousin It.

  Farley and Downey exchanged hugs and then Downey fondly needled Chris. “What have you been doing, Chris? Where have you been? You were supposed to be here.” A serious look came across Farley’s face and all he could muster was a “huh.” “Look at us,” Downey prodded. “We’re all here. Even the new guy Jay Mohr is here.” Downey then pointed at me and said, “Chris, that’s Jay Mohr. He’s a new writer and featured performer.”

  Farley looked over at me through a pair of blue-tinted prescription sunglasses. His hair was slicked back and he was wearing a black suit jacket over a starched white shirt. His enormous stomach stretched against an old black belt that held up a pair of blue jeans that hung over a pair of old black combat boots. My first thought was that he looked a little like Jack Nicholson.

  He started walking toward me and shouted, “How are ya, young fella?” Then he fake-tripped and landed about a foot in front of me facedown on the floor. Slowly he pulled himself up onto his knees and then buried his face in my crotch and pretended to puke in my lap six or seven times. He sold the puke so hard that even I had to peek to make sure he was just fooling around. Chris looked up at me. His glasses were in my lap. “Oh, man, sorry,” he said, wiping his mouth. Not exactly hello.

  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.

  A few days after I arrived at 30 Rock, the SNL cast and writers went on a three-day retreat together. This is something of a tradition, where everyone circles the wagons a week or two before the show starts and heads up into the mountains for some R&R. In the mornings we would play some golf, swim, and shoot some hoops, and in the afternoon we would all meet for writing sessions. The retreat was in upstate New York at a place called Mohonk Mountain House. I had never heard of Mohonk, and I kept thinking everybody was saying Mohawk or My Hunk.

  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.

  Mohonk is a huge, stately manor in the Hudson Valley that reminded me of a cruise ship inside a mansion. As I checked in at the registration desk, I looked around and noticed that the average age there was the day before death. It was like a place where Wilford Brimley and Bea Arthur would go to rent a paddleboat—but then here we came and now Chris Farley was running down the hall with his pants around his ankles and Adam Sandler was whacking his ass with a pool cue from behind while Farley yelled, “Look at me! I’m a horse!”

  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.”

  Two

  Dude, How Did You

  Get on SNL?

  IT’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 was definitely born a comic. By the time I was seventeen, I was lying in bed at night wondering whether my parents would notice if I stole their car to drive to a gig. I never had to mull over the idea of whether I should go to a comedy class. What’s the old expression? “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” How is a guy with a polka-dot tie going to tell me what’s funny? What if he sucks? Even worse, what if he doesn’t like the Three Stooges? Keith Richards once said that the first time he heard a Chuck Berry record, his life went from black and white to Technicolor. I felt the same way when I first stood onstage clutching a microphone. I was fifteen years old, and up until that moment, my life certainly had been black and white.