Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  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.

  As everyone left Lorne’s office after pitching the host, some of us would mill around and wait to talk to Jim Downey. Getting five minutes of Downey’s time was like getting time with the Dalai Lama. The line to Downey’s office started early and lasted long. I’m talking hours and hours.

  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.

  Herlihy, who had given up a career as a successful lawyer to become a writer, taught me the rules of sketch writing. On the show that Newhart hosted, near the end of my second year, Herlihy sat me down and structured a Ricki Lake sketch. It turned out that there was a whole vocabulary for writing sketches that I had never heard. You don’t want to tip the sketch, meaning give away the reason for the sketch in the first thirty seconds so there is no reason to keep watching. The shows in the seventies routinely tipped the sketches—the cast dressing up as bees and doing The Honeymooners; the moment you see the bee suit the joke is over. There was also an entire art to revealing the host. If it’s The Rock in drag, the question becomes, when do you see that? Him being in the sketch isn’t the reveal; him being in drag is. You also don’t want to make it too jokey, Herlihy explained, or hit it too on the head. You just want to knock out the beats—the jokes—and make it work.

  Some of the cast were amazingly self-contained and didn’t need much help from anyone. Mike Myers was at the top of that list. I never saw him around the offices for more than twenty minutes after the pitch meeting, let alone watched him go from door to door asking for input. He was a strange bird because he was the model of efficiency. Rhythm, shmythm. The Mike Myers sketch was a science, and he perfected it.

  Myers wrote his sketches alone. He knew exactly how they should sound and how long they should be. The sketches were always funny, they made the host funny, and they were often franchise sketches. At no time in my two years did any of his sketches ever need rewriting. He would hand in a “Coffee Talk” sketch and it would be flawless. The Harvard writers in particular really disliked seeing one of his sketches on the table. One night Dave Mandel was reading a “Coffee Talk” sketch full of Yiddish, and he threw up his hands. “I don’t even know what any of this means!” Mandel yelled. Duh, that was the whole point. I remember once asking why Myers’s sketches even needed to be rewritten. No one responded or even gestured. You can respond to an eye roll or a shrug of the shoulders, but not to a blank stare.

  One of the few true collaborations I experienced was when Travolta hosted. The sketch was “Welcome Back, Kotter Directed by Quentin Tarantino.” The Sweathogs were Travolta as Barbarino; Tim Meadows as Washington; Mike Myers as Kotter; David Spade as Horshack; Sandler as Epstein; Janeane Garofalo as Julie; and I played Mr. Woodman, the principal. Dave Mandel, Al Franken, and I were hammering out the beats late one night in Franken’s office and things were clicking. We weren’t tipping the sketch or making it too jokey, and it felt great.

  Mandel knew Reservoir Dogs the best, Franken knew the show, and I know both well enough to round out the beats. All the lines I suggested were good, and they were met with positive reinforcement. Franken would throw his head back, slap his knee, and bellow with laughter. There was a slight hesitancy on my part, thinking that he might just be fucking with me. I didn’t know how to react to someone actually liking my ideas. We hammered that sketch out in
six hours. That was an evening of quality.

  The sketch opened with Myers (as Kotter) asking, “Did I ever tell you about my uncle Sid?” Then it launched into a rendition of “Little Brown Bags,” the Reservoir Dogs theme song. This was followed by the Sweathogs walking in slow motion to “Little Brown Bags.” I enter the room as Mr. Woodman and complain about the noise, at which point they all tie me to a chair and pour gasoline over my head. Travolta then dances toward me with a razor. Just before Travolta cuts off my ear, the door flies open and special guest Steve Buscemi bursts into the room brandishing a gun. The Sweathogs all pull their guns. It’s a Mexican standoff. Finally, all the guns go off at once and everyone drops dead.

  Mondays quickly became my favorite night of the week because each one brought with it hope and opportunity. I would meet the host, who was usually one of the hottest stars in the country at the time, and afterward the host and a few people from the show would all go out to dinner. After dinner, we would all pile into cabs to go play basketball together. The dinners with the other cast members were when I felt the best. I was one of them. More important, I was one of them in public. It was amazing to sit in a restaurant next to David Spade and across from Chris Farley. Other patrons in the restaurant would point and ask for autographs. Even though no one ever asked for mine, I didn’t care. I was with them when they signed their autographs, and I would be with them when they shot their first basket. I would also be with them on Saturday night with the world watching.