by Mohr, Jay
I’ve never seen a performer showered with love as Farley was in the “Little Women” figure-skating sketch when David Hyde Pierce hosted. The characters (played by Pierce, Farley, Spade, and Janeane Garofalo) were all dressed in costumes from the 1800s. As they took turns on the ice rink, doing figure eights and showing off, Farley criticized them with foppy lines like “I think you should pay more attention to your schoolwork.” At the end, as everyone argued with everyone else, Farley went out to skate and broke the ice. When Farley fell through the trapdoor into the ice-cold water, he screamed, “Shut the hell up, you stupid whores, and get me out of here!” As the little women came to his aid, he pulled them all in the water with him.
At the end of the sketch, everyone climbed out of the water quickly to escape the cold—except Farley. He didn’t pull himself out until the show had gone to commercial and the band began to play. When he emerged from the hole, his coat had fallen off and he was clutching the soggy garment in his hands. He was standing directly under the cantilevered balcony seats and in front of the people seated on the floor in front of the stage where the sketch had been performed. Dripping wet, Farley held his clothes over his head like a cross between an ancient gladiator and David Lee Roth. He was an absolute god and a sopping wet mess, and the crowd went berserk.
What was true for the audience was true for the performers: If you were in a sketch with Farley, you were going to have some serious fun. You never knew what craziness Chris was going to pull out of his bag of tricks. Even though the sketch’s lines and all the parts were written on cue cards, Chris always managed to come up with something fresh and new. He also had the uncanny ability to make everyone else in the sketch tremble while holding in his own laughter. It was as if Chris was on a mission; if he didn’t make you laugh, he had somehow failed.
Martin Lawrence was hosting the show near the end of my first season, and a “Motivational Speaker” sketch had been written starring him and Chris. The premise was based on the Scared Straight! program. I was only about eleven years old when I first saw Scared Straight! It was the first time I had ever heard swearing on television. Wayward kids were assembled inside a jail in front of a group of prisoners. Each kid thought he was pretty hot stuff, and because they were chosen for the Scared Straight! program, you could bet they were capital B bad. The prisoners would take turns screaming in the kids’ faces about busting open their assholes and breaking the little motherfuckers down. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was watching network television unsupervised and being treated to a feast of vulgarity. Now, ten years later, I found that the mere premise of parodying Scared Straight! made me laugh out loud. Better yet, I was also going to be in the sketch.
In fact the entire cast was in the sketch. Phil Hartman played the warden who told Meadows, Spade, Sandler, Schneider, and me that he was going to introduce us to his hardest inmates. First Martin came onstage wearing a cornrow wig and flashing an enormous gold tooth. Martin delivered the speech and then told us he was going to bring out the baddest homeboy he knew, a man named Matt Foley who was in jail for failure to pay child support (Farley).
In dress rehearsal, Chris played it pretty close to the script. He never touched Martin Lawrence’s wig and he stuck to the cue cards. I wondered to myself what adjustments he would make between dress rehearsal and airtime to make us all laugh. At the end of the sketch, Chris was supposed to dance around to make a point and accidentally crash through the wall of the jail. After Chris made the hole in the wall, all of us were to get up from our seats and escape through the hole. Then Chris would reenter and deliver his final line.
But Sandler came up with an idea to give Chris a taste of his own medicine. For all the times Chris made us laugh during a sketch, we would get him back at the end of this one. Instead of all of us running out through the hole in the wall, Sandler decided that we should all fall down on top of Chris so he wouldn’t be able to get back up to reenter and say his final line. Though everyone signed off on the plan, I secretly wondered if we would actually go through with it.
The dress rehearsal of the sketch went off as scripted. There was a large gymnastics mat on the other side of the wall for Chris to fall on. We all sat on the mat after escaping from the jail and peeked back through the hole at Chris delivering his line. We laughed offstage, knowing that what Chris was saying wouldn’t be said again on the live show.
Martin Lawrence provided enough of a distraction so that no one was focusing on what high jinks Farley might toss in. Knowing that the dress rehearsal wasn’t being aired on TV, Martin delivered an X-rated monologue. It lasted four minutes long, and most of it was about going down on a woman who tastes nasty. When he finished, we all waited for Lorne to say something to Martin about making sure he toned down the monologue for the live show. Lorne droned on and on to every conceivable technical employee. People whom I never noticed worked on the show were getting notes about the sound being too high or the lights being a bit low. Camera angles were dissected and re-dissected. At one point, the wardrobe people were asked to make sure the costume changes were timely. After thirty minutes, Lorne told us all to have a great show. As we got up to leave and prepare for the show, Lorne looked across his office at Martin and said, “Martin? Are we okay?” Martin nodded his head and that was that. I couldn’t decide if Lorne was afraid to confront Martin, or if Lorne was being classy by not confronting Martin with the cast in the room.
The live show started and Don Pardo shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen…Martin Lawrence!” We all held our breath. Some of the cast had gathered in the studio to watch Martin and listen to what was going to come out of his mouth. That was the beauty of live television: Whatever was said was said, and there were no second takes.
Amazingly, Martin’s opening monologue was very similar to the one in the dress rehearsal. He talked about women being funky down there and suggested that they might want to insert a Tic Tac in their ass. He never actually swore, but the content of the monologue all but ensured that the show would never be reaired or shown as a repeat. Considering it was a show I was actually a part of, I found that slightly upsetting. But the upside to knowing the show was now a lame duck was that the repercussions wouldn’t be as harsh for us pinning Farley to the ground and ruining a sketch.
It was a commercial break and the “Motivational Speaker” sketch was scheduled to be next. We were all changing into our hoodlum clothes that the wardrobe people made sure were properly and promptly hung in our dressing rooms. As I changed, I discovered a terrifying error. The pants I was supposed to wear in the skit didn’t have any pockets, which meant that I had nowhere to put my extra tablet of Klonopin.
I had been carrying extra medication with me everywhere I went in case I started to have a panic attack. I had taken to wearing blue jeans because of the extra square Klonopin pocket above my right thigh. When I had to wear slacks or a police uniform in a sketch, I always found a place to hide my extra pill, usually in the back left pocket. I had also worked out a plan. If I started to have a panic attack on live TV, I would wait until the camera was on somebody else, slip my hand into the pocket, and quickly swallow the pill. I never anticipated that the wardrobe department would outfit me with clothes with no pockets. How could they? How hard is it to give a guy pants with pockets in them? I froze in my dressing room and looked at my blue jeans on the floor at my feet. I made an executive decision to wear the jeans in the sketch.
But just as I started to unbutton my wardrobe pants, stage manager Joe Dicso’s booming voice came over the intercom. “Thirty seconds to ‘Motivational Speaker.’ Thirty seconds. We gotta go, we gotta go!” I wasn’t going to make it. There was no way I could change out of the wardrobe pants and into my jeans and then run onto the stage in thirty seconds. I jammed my fingers into the small pocket of my jeans and fished out two Klonopin pills, and then I ran through the hallways of the eighth floor, rebuttoning my wardrobe pants and clutching two pills in what was now a very sweaty hand. I was going to have to hold the pi
lls in my hand during the sketch. As I took my seat in the makeshift jail set, my hands were sweating so profusely that I was worried the pills would dissolve in my palms in the middle of the sketch. Logically, I could have taken the pill as a preventive measure, but there is no logic to panic, so that thought never crossed my mind. Besides, what if I needed them in the middle of the skit?
We came back from commercial and the stage lights went up. As I sat in my seat, I swiftly transferred the pills to my left hand, out of view of the camera. Phil Hartman began speaking and I hung my arm motionless at my side, trying to leave small cracks between my fingers to ventilate my palms so the pills wouldn’t dissolve. I had to be careful not to make the cracks between my fingers so wide that the pills rolled out between my knuckles onto the floor.
Phil finished his bit and introduced us to Martin Lawrence with his cornrows, his gold tooth, and his prison blues. As Martin began speaking, I started to become short of breath and feel the urge to jump from my chair and walk off the set. If I walked off the set on live television, I thought to myself, I’ll never have to return. I could just spend the rest of my life somewhere else wearing pants with pockets in them. It almost seemed like a fair trade-off.
My mind wandered. I remembered the doctor telling me that no one in the history of medicine had ever died of a panic attack. I remembered her telling me about desensitization exercises, and thought that they seemed pretty drastic. I also thought of how incredibly unfair it all was. Why couldn’t I just be like everyone else on the show? That’s all I wanted. I wanted to be able to sit in a chair during a sketch and watch Martin Lawrence explain to us how in prison young punks like us could be sold to other inmates for a pack of cigarettes.
In an attempt to refocus, I stared at Martin’s gold tooth and watched his mouth form words. I wondered how long it would take me to become a lip-reader, and I wondered why I wasn’t already unconscious. I was now clutching the pills firmly so I could feel them in my palm, which made me feel marginally better. I no longer cared what happened to the pills. If they were crushed or dissolved in my hand, I would simply lick the Klonopin dust from my palms in front of America.
Then Farley happened.
I didn’t actually hear Martin introduce Matt Foley (Chris) into the sketch, but he must have, because the door to the cell opened and Chris exploded onto the set. He was wearing prison blues and eyeglasses, just as in dress rehearsal, but as he entered, something about his appearance was drastically different. Prior to his entrance, Chris had taken the time to make gigantic sweat stains stretching from his armpits all the way down to his waist on both sides of his body. Gigantic pit stains! That was it. We all immediately burst out laughing. The audience started laughing because we were laughing, which only made us laugh harder.
As Chris fiddled with his belt and waited for the applause to die down, the stage lights glistened off his pit stains. I wondered at what point he decided he would add the pit stains to the sketch. It didn’t matter; once again, he had us all by the balls. We were helpless. Martin’s character had explained to us the bartering of young punks for cigarettes, and when the applause died down, he made a grand gesture of handing the cigarette he was holding to Chris, signifying that we were now the property of Matt Foley. He had no idea how right he was.
As Chris spoke to each of us individually, he timed when the camera was off him and on us. When the camera was on me, he said all of his lines cross-eyed. When the camera was back on him, he straightened his eyes and went back to being normal, which, for him, was being the funniest man alive. As he made his way down the line of young punks, he repeatedly crossed and uncrossed his eyes. We were all laughing out loud and nothing could stop us. It was sheer comedic brilliance. Despite the fact that the cameras were over his shoulder and twenty feet away, Chris knew the exact moment that the camera switched shots. I had never laughed like that before in my life—and I had no idea I was about to laugh even harder. Farley filled the stage, leaving no room for panic. The sun was out and the shadows were gone.
Whenever Chris or Martin said a line, they would make a grand gesture of passing the cigarette back and forth, the way the boys in Lord of the Flies used the conch. Farley finished his first paragraph of dialogue and handed the cigarette back to Martin. Chris’s line (I know this because it was written on the cue card) was supposed to be: “Sold! Five bitches to the homie in the cornrows.” But what came out of his mouth instead was: “Sold! Five bitches to the cornie in the homie rows!” He then paused, looked directly into camera, and said “Oops!”
I was never so grateful or appreciative of my coworkers as I was at that moment, because thankfully, they were all laughing as hard as me. I would have stood out if I wasn’t laughing. Even Phil Hartman was smirking, and I had never seen him come close to breaking character on the air.
As the sketch was nearing the end, Chris began dancing around and making his way toward the wall that he was going to fall through. He tripped over his own feet and obliterated the breakaway wall, falling onto his back on top of the gymnastics mat. The rest of us started running for the hole in the wall—and it wasn’t lost on me that we were now literally escaping the madness of Farley and the powerlessness he incited in us.
But instead of going through the wall one by one as scripted, we all raced to be the first one out of the sketch and on top of Chris. Five of us threw our bodies through the hole, and as we landed on Chris’s chest, we began screaming and squealing like children. We finally had him where we wanted him. There was now close to a thousand pounds of laughing idiots on top of Chris Farley on the gym mat.
No more than one second passed before Chris realized what we were doing. Chris didn’t panic, get angry, or even laugh. He simply picked us off of his body one by one like we were leaves. When we dove back on top of him, he removed us two by two. He then started throwing us aside like trash bags so he could be back onstage in time to deliver his line. With time to spare, he was on his mark, finishing the sketch, while we lay on the gym mat rubbing our bumps and bruises and gasping for air. We peeked through the hole in the wall just as we had done in dress rehearsal—except this time it was with a sense of awe at what we had just witnessed.
To this day, I don’t know what happened to those pills.
In my second season, Farley struck again in a “Motivational Speaker” sketch. I was only in the sketch because Spade had been trying to score at a party full of models. He thought his chances were good, so he had called Downey and asked to be removed from the sketch. He then wouldn’t have to return for rehearsals that night. After Downey told me about Spade, it became a running joke between us. Whenever David would call and say he wasn’t making rehearsal, Downey would hang up and give me Spade’s part in the sketch. The more famous Spade became, the better his odds to score a model became, and the more sketches I got in.
In this “Motivational Speaker” sketch, Michael McKean was playing a wealthy Spanish father of two. He explained to his kids, who were played by Morwenna Banks and me, that he had called the United States to enroll the help of a motivational speaker (that is to say, Farley as Matt Foley). Chris’s part was written entirely in Spanish. America had probably seen Matt Foley ten times—but never speaking Spanish.
Farley entered the stage, shouting at the top of his lungs: “Hola, mis niños! Me llama señor Matt Foley!” Keeping a straight face was impossible. The audience erupted when Chris delivered the money line for the first time in Spanish: “Van cerca del río!”
McKean’s character explained to Señor Foley that both he and his children spoke excellent English, so speaking in Spanish was not necessary. Chris as Matt Foley responded, “Padre, donde por favor and ferme ton grande YAPPER!” That’s when I was supposed to say my line. It was simple. All I had to do was open my mouth and say, “Señor Foley, where did you learn your Spanish? Taco Bell?”
The problem was that Chris had screamed his line so loud into McKean’s ear that he covered him in spittle, causing him to move back a step
. I struggled to keep from becoming a member of the audience myself. Although I was in the sketch, I was being treated to an incredible performance. I bit my tongue and tried to think of things that weren’t funny. I thought of dead babies and naked grandmothers, but resistance was futile. Chris was standing on the stage, but he was also taking up all of the space between my ears. Finally I decided that if I was a teenager and Matt Foley was in my living room in Spain, screaming into my father’s ear in terrible Spanish, I would think it was funny and most likely giggle. I said the line and laughed at the same time, making it barely audible.
Then Chris sauntered across the set toward me and put his hand on top of my head and began to tussle my hair. To the audience it looked endearing—but we all knew better. As he shouted, “Muy cómico es el Paul Rodriguez?” he continued to rub his hand back and forth until my black wig was now draped over one of my ears.
For the rest of the sketch I was delusional. I didn’t know whether to fix my wig or just to continue with the wig hanging on the side of my face. The audience watched the entire process unfold, and an entirely different dimension of laughter filled the studio. Chris had all of us by the jugular. I should have been at least a little prepared. In dress rehearsal, Chris had tugged gently on the hair on my wig, making it come loose but not off. I giggled through that exchange as well. In the meeting in Lorne’s office between the dress rehearsal and the live show, Lorne looked at me and said, “Jay, do you think you could do us all a favor and not laugh through the entire sketch?” I said of course, but I knew that was a lie.
