by Mohr, Jay
Interestingly, when Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn were on the show, there were never any articles about the show hating women. The reason was elementary: Jan and Nora were two incredibly talented women who wrote their own sketches. I cannot remember a Saturday Night Live episode during the time they were in the cast that they weren’t on the show. They produced, and they were given airtime because they were brilliant.
Perhaps Janeane’s complaint should have been about the lack of female writers on the show. Nobody could argue with that. Out of twenty-two writers, only three were women. The female cast member ratio was only slightly better. My first season, the female cast members were Ellen Cleghorne, Melanie Hutsell, Julia Sweeney, and Sarah Silverman. My second season, Sarah left and Laura Kightlinger, Morwenna Banks, and Molly Shannon were added (along with Janeane in midseason). Out of this group, perhaps because she was new, Sarah Silverman wrote the most. Julia, who was a real sweetheart, kept bringing back her androgynous Pat, but while it was great in its time, there was no longer anything the least bit funny about it.
Though I didn’t feel personally betrayed by Janeane because I wasn’t the direct target of her complaints, I did work at SNL, and her bitching certainly wasn’t helping the value of the property on which I wanted to build my dream house.
For some reason, Weekend Update pieces aren’t chosen on Wednesday night with the rest of the show. In most cases, it wasn’t until Saturday afternoon when you learned the fate of your Update piece. When the rehearsal schedule was printed up on Wednesday night, all of the Weekend Update pieces submitted would be listed in the margin with the performers’ initials printed next to them. Shortly before dress rehearsal on Saturday, one of the producers would approach you and tell you your piece was going to be rehearsed.
After you were given this news, the piece would quickly be written out onto cue cards. You were never told in advance exactly when during Weekend Update your piece would be performed. If more than one piece was submitted, you would be told the order in which they were being done, but that was it. You would have to stand off to the side of the Update desk as Norm Macdonald or Kevin Nealon read the news. Suddenly, Bob Van Rye, the stage manager, would whisper “Go,” and you would slide into the chair next to the news anchor as quietly as possible. If none of the Update pieces at read-through were picked to be on the show, Adam Sandler was usually asked to come up with a song in ten minutes, and that was what they would go with.
The key to a Weekend Update piece, I learned, was that it had to be from the news. I remember Sarah Silverman doing an Update piece about her sister’s wedding and Rob Schneider being furious that it was picked. When I defended the piece as funny, Schneider shot back: “It’s not fucking news! It’s the Weekend Update desk. A Weekend Update piece should be news.”
I wrote a great Update piece that I never submitted my first season. It was a travel piece about England, and it went like this: “Hi, I just got back from England and they are still mad at us because they lost the Revolutionary War. Who could blame them? There were only nine of us. But hey, it’s not our fault that they fought in the white snow wearing bright red uniforms. They were always standing in a straight line, too. Is that fair? They would charge with drums and flute while our guys sat behind rocks looking at each other and saying, ‘I think I hear someone coming.’” It was written the week of the Jeff Goldblum show, and because my idea of his playing a dog had bombed, I chickened out.
I did get to do a “Dick Vitale: March Madness” Update piece. Originally it was written as an eight-page sketch by Steve Lookner. I read it at read-through. Halfway through it, I was out of breath from screaming. On page 6, I actually stopped reading, put the pages down, and reached for a bottle of water. I continued, and by the end I was ready to pass out. People around the table broke out into a sort of golf clap. A few were laughing and giggling. I didn’t know if they thought it was funny or were just impressed I got through it all. Turns out, it was both.
The piece was edited down to a page and a half and submitted for Weekend Update. In it, I dressed up as Dick Vitale and mixed up my Oscar predictions with the NCAA basketball tournament. “Toughest region…best actress,” I began, spraying my words à la Vitale. “No doubt about it, baby, number one seed is Holly Hunter in The Piano. Let’s see her in action.” Over a clip of Hunter in The Piano, I continued: “Look at her act. She’s silent but deadly. She ain’t talkin’ for no one. She’s just playin’ the piano.” I did each of the main categories, picking Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List for best supporting actor because “he does it all—he shoots, he rebounds, he’s a Nazi.”
My second season, I wrote what was undeniably the funniest Update piece I had in me. At the time, the gubernatorial race was heating up in New York. The race was getting an incredible amount of press because Howard Stern had announced that he was going to run. Howard was way ahead of his time. We know now with the election of Jesse Ventura and the like how fed up voters had become with the standard bipartisan bullshit. Preliminary polls had Howard Stern pulling up to 30 percent of the vote, and it was beginning to look like he had an outside shot at actually becoming governor. New York State law requires all candidates to release full, comprehensive records of their incomes and properties. Calling this requirement ridiculous and in no way, shape, or form relevant to an election, Howard pulled out of the race. There was now no third-party candidate running for the office. That was when I stepped in.
I wrote my Weekend Update piece. My sketch was my announcement that I, Jay Mohr, was throwing my hat into the political ring and running for governor of the great state of New York. In the piece I admitted to knowing next to nothing about politics or even the state of New York’s needs or problems. My only platform was that I thought it would be a cool gig, and that if you voted for me, I would get you laid. That was it. Vote for me for governor and I will see to it that you get laid. I explained that I knew that there were a lot of ugly voters out there who weren’t being accounted for. I went on to explain that I knew a lot of hot chicks, and because I worked in television, I could afford a lot of prostitutes.
I also told the voters that I knew they were probably wondering how a twenty-four-year-old New Jersey native could legally become governor of New York. I conceded that inasmuch as these were valid points, the people who enforce such election rules want to get laid, too. I told the voters that if I was elected, they could be assured that crime would be at an all-time low. Who wants to go out and commit crime when you could be staying inside getting laid? I confessed that in four years, when my term was up, the city would be a mess. The streets wouldn’t be paved, taxes would be out of control, and nothing would’ve been accomplished. But no one would care—and we all know why. I finished the segment by saying: “So when you go to the voter’s booth, know one thing, ‘If I vote for Jay Mohr, I’m going to get laid.’ See you at the polls!”
The piece made it to dress rehearsal, where it played well. All day Saturday I never once worried about whether my piece would get on. It had to. It had killed at the table read, and people were coming up to me and talking about it in the hallways on Thursday and Friday. Not once on Saturday did I look in the margin of the show rundown to see what my competition was. I couldn’t be denied this time.
Shortly before the live dress rehearsal the supervisor for Weekend Update, Herb Sargent, said he needed to see me. Seventy years old, Herb had thick white hair and big glasses. He looked as if he should have been on CNN hosting Crossfire. I still don’t know what it is exactly Herb did for a living, though that was due mostly to the autonomy of Weekend Update. Herb told me that we had a problem. My Update piece couldn’t be on the show. I was stunned. When I asked for a reason, he told me that the NBC censors had come down hard on him because of the content of the piece. I asked him to elaborate, and he said that you couldn’t say get laid on television.
I stood there with my mouth hanging open and asked him if he was joking. He assured me that he wasn’t. He repeated that get laid was
never going to get past the censors, so the piece had to be pulled from the rundown. I was livid.
“Isn’t this the same show that twenty-four years ago Chevy Chase called Richard Pryor a nigger?” I asked.
“I don’t see what that has to do with this,” he replied.
“It has a lot to do with this!” I interjected. “You want me to believe that you can say nigger on Saturday Night Live, but a quarter of a century later you can’t say get laid!”
My anger didn’t exactly make him want to circle the wagons for me, and I had a feeling that the censors and Herb had never even spoken to each other about my sketch. To this day, I don’t believe you can’t say get laid on television—especially since I’ve probably heard it said more than a hundred times since.
I had put all my eggs in one basket that week and had not written anything else. If I wasn’t going to be on Update, I wasn’t going to be on the show again. For the first time in weeks, I went back to my dressing room and just sat there. I sat there during the live rehearsal and I sat there during the show. I sat there during Good-nights, too. I didn’t scribble on the walls or put my feet up against the door. I just stayed still and wondered long and hard why I had ever been hired.
Nicole came from Los Angeles to visit me in the middle of my second season. It was a relief for me to have someone close to me witnessing everything I was. I could tell by the way she reacted and behaved that she was seeing many of the things I had told her about.
As her visit preceded a break, I flew back to Los Angeles with her. On the flight, we didn’t talk about the show at all. When I left the building, I could no longer speak of the show. No matter who asked me about it or when, my descriptions of the show would deteriorate into a series of whines and groans. I was a great complainer. Even when I mentally reminded myself to act polite, I would soon be bitching and moaning. The people I complained to were either amazed or annoyed. There was seldom a middle ground.
The show was fascinating to everyone I spoke to. When I went on the road to do stand-up, I saw firsthand how diverse the show’s audience was. I would be at a college talking with students and they would tell me who their favorite cast member was. In one town, audience members would tell me they loved Sandler, but in the next town over, they would tell me they hated him. These weren’t shrug-of-the-shoulder types of discussions either. Everyone was overly passionate when they spoke with me about Saturday Night Live. They would fall all over themselves to tell me how much they loved the show, and I wouldn’t know what to say next. I felt like a phony.
Nicole and I were about an hour into the flight when I had finished reading the sports page of the New York Post. I leafed through the rest of the paper and saw something about the show in the Page Six gossip column. In bold type I saw SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and I stopped to read the item. The gossip column reported that Tom Arnold had had his birthday party the night before at the strip club Scores. The item detailed how Tom had partied well into the evening with his pals, Saturday Night Live stars Adam Sandler, David Spade, Tim Meadows, Chris Farley, and “Jay Moore.” My name was broken up in the margin of the piece so the Jay was at the end of one line and the Moore was at the beginning of the line beneath it.
I turned to Nicole and showed her that my name was misspelled in the New York Post. She read the item and looked at me curiously. “You were with me last night,” she said. She was right. I was with her the entire night, and was never near Tom Arnold or his birthday party at the strip club. I could tell that the false sighting bothered her, but my name being misspelled bothered me more than the false sighting. I laughed to myself. I was getting free publicity that wasn’t true, and my name had been spelled wrong.
Sixteen
Give Me Little Bits
of More Than I Can Take
RICKI LAKE ended my drought. It was the twelfth show of the season, and Tim Herlihy had done more than look out for me. He sat down in his office and stayed up all night writing with me. This was the first time one of the writers had actually sought me out, sat me down, and declared that we weren’t leaving the room until we finished the sketch. When Tim’s phone rang, he would answer it and tell the person on the other line that he was busy and hang up. When someone walked into his office, he brushed them off with a “not now.”
In the sketch, I played Ricki Lake. I dressed in drag and wore thick lipstick. Bob Newhart played a couples counselor, and as Ricki Lake, I had him give advice to all the freaks in the sketch. Being on the same stage as Bob Newhart was surreal. I had spent every Monday night in high school watching Newhart on CBS. My parents and I never missed an episode. After I started doing stand-up comedy, I bought The Buttoned Down Mind of Bob Newhart and memorized it. The Ricki Lake sketch got good laughs, and I felt like it had a chance of being on the air again. I wanted to hug Bob Newhart for not telling me that he was being typecast and cutting it.
The week after Bob Newhart, Deion Sanders hosted and I was shut out again. What I had at read-through wasn’t funny, and I knew it when I handed it in. I had two lines in a three-card-monte sketch. At this point, when I had only a few lines, I would rather have not been on the show at all. I was going to ask out of the three-card-monte sketch, but on Thursday I was added to another sketch. Since that sketch had Farley in it, I didn’t care how many lines I had. I was there.
It was a hilarious sketch about commandos going into a spaceship that had landed. Each time some of the commandos would charge into the spaceship, they would reemerge with their clothes ripped off and tell the commander they had been raped. Deion was the commander, and he told us to keep charging in. When Spade came out of the UFO, he had the word bitch written across his chest in lipstick. It was great.
Eventually it was Farley’s turn to storm the spaceship. Chris looked at Deion, cocked his assault rifle, and said he was going to go in there to kick ass and take names. Chris barreled up the stairs into the spaceship. As he bent his head down to enter, his pants fell down, leaving his entire ass bare on live television. When Chris reached around to pull up his pants he was laughing and bumped his head on the doorway of the spaceship. He screamed out, “Son of A!” and wrestled with his pants.
It didn’t matter what happened next—the show was over. Even during the last sketch of the night, the audience was still giggling and murmuring about the commando sketch. Farley had done it again. He had taken an ordinary show and turned it into watercooler conversation. I still wonder if his pants fell off by accident.
Moments like Chris’s pants falling down made the show the greatest job that ever existed. As down as I got, I was sometimes picked up by the sheer magic of what happened around me. When Tom Petty performed, he brought Dave Grohl to be his drummer. Grohl recognized me from when Nirvana was on and said hello to me. When I asked him how it felt playing drums “for one of the old-timers,” Grohl’s eyes grew big as saucers, and he replied, “Dude, it is an honor.” Petty rocked the place, singing “You Don’t Know How It Feels to Be Me,” and the musical message addressed my mood.
I was sure I wasn’t imagining things when the band Live came through and performed a fantastic version of “I Alone.” David Hyde Pierce hosted that show and it was one of the funnier ones of the season. At the after-party, everyone was feeling really good about everything and was chatting and drinking when something amazing happened. Live walked into the restaurant and everyone stopped what they were doing and greeted the group with a standing ovation. It was the only time during my two years that this ever happened. They deserved it. I, on the other hand, was feeling fortunate even to be invited to the after-parties. I was doing nothing again, and the thought of having another drought scared the shit out of me.
After “Ricki Lake” aired, I sat out the next two shows. I forced myself to write. I became a terrible human being. The more I tried to write, the more of an asshole I became. I argued with everybody. I asked people flat out if they would add me to their sketch. I begged. I also did something that I never thought I would ever do. I did
something I still feel sick about.
I stole.
Paul Reiser hosted the fifteenth show of the season. He gave me a Cuban cigar and I chomped on it during our Greek restaurant sketch. I had only a few lines, but I figured that I should look the part. I sat on a stool behind the register looking rather belligerent and chomped and swallowed and chomped and swallowed, intermittently looking up at Paul and saying no. In the next sketch, a commercial for mouthwash, I was an extra in the boardroom and I felt like I was peaking on acid from the cigar.
The executives at the mouthwash company were trying to show the clients how clean and fresh it was. In the middle of the sketch, Tim Meadows knocks on the door and begins making out with Molly Shannon. The sight of a black guy and a white woman going at it is supposed to shock everyone. I sat there the entire time in a near state of panic, scanning the cue cards for my line. Every character’s lines were in a different color on the cue cards. Chris Elliott’s lines were green, Paul’s were brown, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what color I was. It wasn’t until the band began to play that it dawned on me that I had no lines.
That was also the week I took Rick Shapiro’s act and wrote it down word for word and submitted it as my sketch. Rick Shapiro was a comic in Greenwich Village. In his act, he did an impression of an Irish bartender who shouted at his customers. The skit was hilarious, and long before I got on Saturday Night Live, my friends and I had quoted it to one another. In the routine, a customer would approach the bar and inform the bartender that his drink order was wrong. The bartender would be polite and say, “Aw, I’m awfully sorry.” He would continue: “Here’s another drink you’ll love. It’s called, ‘Get out! You’re fired!’” Another patron in the routine would tell the bartender a joke and the bartender would say: “Aw, that’s a great joke! You like jokes, do ya? Here’s one for ya…Get out! You’re fired!”
