by David Spade
But mostly during the Vegas week I was in heaven. One day I snuck over to do some tanning (I know it’s so girlie, why do I admit it) at the Riviera pool. I grabbed a towel and a chair and cranked my Walkman. That was the only “rich” thing I had. I would hold it up for the ladies to see and get horny about. For food I was obviously on a snug budget, but luckily the Improv gave me twenty-one coupons for twenty-one meals in the employee cafeteria that week. It was a dump but I was always there. The only bummer was that my dates didn’t see the “charm” in the place; I’d say “keep quiet and ask Hector the bellman if you can finish his omelet.” On a side note, the comic I worked with the first time at the Riviera had weird hair. Now, I know I have weird hair but this was different. We all thought it was clearly a toupee but he was like twenty-eight and had longish brown hair, so we weren’t sure. But then on Wednesday he came to the show with short hair? He casually mentioned he got a haircut. So wig rumors dissipated . . . UNTIL YEARS LATER when I found out that was his trick! He has two toupees. One long, one short! He would switch every week on Wednesday and say he got a haircut. WHAT A GREAT MOVE! I had mad respect for that fucking scam. I was fully hoodwinked.
It was hard not to hit the casino and blow all my piddly earnings, I have to admit. You have so much free time on the road, and besides that, to get to the Improv stage I had to walk through the whole casino, which was so fucking tempting. Slots, roulette, blackjack, and even baccarat, which I still don’t understand, were five feet away at all times. Every day was a real lesson in restraint. The showroom was right next to Foxy Boxing, which was also tempting. Never nailed a foxy boxer. Still mad about that.
When the week was over, the Riv asked me if I wanted to be paid in chips. Are you kidding me?? Do I look like a moron?! I took the check and I hightailed it, thinking that this was the easiest five hundo I had made in a loooong time. I hung on to that fucking thing for dear life all the way home to L.A.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HBO YOUNG COMEDIANS SPECIAL
It was 1989 and I was still kicking around the Improv, averaging two weeks on the road and two weeks in town trying to get auditions and doing spots. My third attempt to get on to the HBO Young Comedians Special was around the corner. This time I had a foot in the door because Brillstein-Grey was producing the show that year, and Brad Grey is one of my managers, along with Marc Gurvitz. I felt like this gave me a great shot at getting on. When the showcase came around, I knew they were looking for five comics. You forget that they are also looking in Chicago, New York, all over the country—not just Los Angeles. This special was still a huge deal in a world with four networks and barely any cable channels. Even with what I viewed as a leg up, I was sweating it. When the showcase came around, I decided not to do the set I had done the previous two years. I felt I couldn’t repeat it. It didn’t work twice anyway so this seemed like a no-brainer, but a tight set is a security blanket. (It usually is pretty foolproof.) When you’re a comedian, you create a set and you know it works and you sometimes find yourself going back to it. It just happens. You have your go-to six-minute set, your ten-minute set, thirty, etc. For the showcase, the producers usually wanted to see six minutes. I knew I had to shake it up. Even if I had a great thirty-minute set, the six minutes I audition with have to be even better than great, so it is hard to take a risk and gamble with material that isn’t tried and true. This all may sound stupid, but that’s all we comedians think about.
The night came around and when I did my set and I felt pretty good about it, even though I had stepped outside of my comfort zone. I did a newer bit about doctors recommending Nuprin for pain over Vicodin and threw in my Michael J. Fox impression. There are a lot of good comics in the showcase, though, and I knew I had to wait to hear my fate. This was not easy. I started calling my managers every day to get feedback (thirsty!) and at first I heard I had a spot in the special. I was over the moon. Days went by. I started to hear that though I did well, my managers were not sure if I made it or not. Now word gets around of some other guys who got slots. Now I started to shit my pants a bit. Was I getting passed over again? Dennis Miller was hosting that year and he was my favorite comic at the time. I even knew him a little bit, as he was also with Brillstein-Grey as a client. I felt like that was one more piece of the puzzle that should get me on. I should fall into the right-place-at-the-right-time category. Next comes word that HBO is passing. This hurls me into the beginnings of a deep depression. I realize that my career is falling apart. I came out of the gate big with Police Academy 4 (“big” is relative, okay) and then turned down a Fox pilot. (It got canceled after two years, but only because I didn’t star in it. I’m convinced.) My entire career and the possibility of ever getting laid again were riding on getting this HBO slot. I’m in the dumps. I hate showing my face back in Arizona, where half the people don’t want me to do well because they are jealous, and the other half want someone from their city to put the town on the map. It was awful.
I finally got a call. “They liked you, but you are their sixth pick and they only have room for five.” BUZZKILL! (Cue theme from M*A*S*H: “Suicide Is Painless.”) The five who were chosen are Jann Karam, Fred Stoller, Warren Thomas, Rob Schneider, and Drake Sather. I didn’t know how to take this news. Again I was good but not good enough.
Then Dennis Miller and Brad Grey started pushing HBO to use me in the show. They didn’t want to kick someone else off—they just wanted to help me get my slot. Somehow they talked HBO into spotlighting six comedians instead of five. This was the first time that this had ever happened, and it had happened for me. We would all just do shorter sets. No prob! Major relief, actually! So I was on cloud eleven. Mom was happy. And the couple of a-holes back in Arizona who wanted me to fail could suck a dick.
The way HBO did the special was that they would pick a theater, pack it with comedy fans, and tape two shows in one night. Then they would cut those two shows together and use your best material, combined with shots of whichever was the best audience. All of the comics they had chosen were good, and I knew it would be hard to stand out. By the night of the taping I was shaking in my boots. It was like I was back at Arizona State, about to go on at Greek Sing. Actually I wasn’t as freaked as I had been that night. I had Dennis Miller to help me relax this time. Plus, I had just done a weeklong guest stint on Baywatch, so my hair was extra blond and fluffy. I was feeling good about that. Unfortunately, I was also pretty sure I had contracted hep C because I had to go into the ocean for five minutes during shooting. I felt like that was enough time in the sewer to catch something gross. To add to my nerves, one of my all-time rock heroes, David Bowie, was in the audience that night. I don’t know why he was there, but holy shit, Ziggy Stardust in the stands just made everything more terrifying.
I watched everyone else’s set before I went on, and one thing shocked me. Warren Thomas wasn’t that prepared. He went out and just started talking to the crowd, saying things like, “What else is going on?” It seemed like he was finding jokes as he went along. I asked him afterward why he had done that. He said, “I don’t like to prepare it all perfectly. I usually let it flow when I’m at the clubs and see what happens. I’m good on my feet.” I admired the balls of this, but it was something I never would have done or even considered. I had worked on my act for weeks, deciding which lines to say and when, and if something came out spontaneously, great, but I had my seven minutes ready to go. When my turn came, things went my way. The crowd was great to me. I had a strong set and when I saw the show air, they wound up using almost everything I did, which was a gift. I guess they trimmed Warren way back. He was a great comedian but that night the crowd was just not there for him and so he lost something very valuable: airtime on a national television show.
The HBO Young Comedians Special is the kind of thing that can land on the desk of someone like Lorne Michaels. It goes without saying that it is a game changer. A few weeks later, I got the call that some people at Saturday Night Live saw my set. My manager was at th
e Brillstein company, and the legendary Bernie Brillstein had handled Saturday Night Live talent his whole career . . . from John Belushi and Gilda Radner all the way to Lorne Michaels and many in between. Now, to be honest, I was always hoping to get on a sitcom and SNL wasn’t even in my sights. I wasn’t a character guy and it was also too way, way out of reach so I didn’t bother thinking about it. Not that sitcoms were easy to get, but I could picture it more. But now I had a chance and I had better get mentally ready. You basically got one shot with them. Now was my time to strike. If I tanked, I wouldn’t get a serious second look for a very long time. This was for real.
Both Rob Schneider and I got SNL auditions out of the HBO Young Comedians Special. Rob and I were super tight at this point. We had traveled in the same stand-up grooves for years, out in the Valley. We lived close to each other and hung out a lot. So, even though I had a friend in tow, I was still twenty-five and freaking out about flying to New York and having the biggest audition of my life. But a few weeks later, we took our first-class flights from LAX to JFK and were put up at the Omni Berkshire Hotel, a hotel I had actually heard of because . . . they always PLUG IT ON SNL. This was all quickly becoming too much for me. It was a beautiful hotel and we didn’t even have to put our credit cards down when we got there, which was a good thing because I didn’t have a credit card. But I was hungry so this created a bit of an issue. I didn’t want to order food on my own dime, because it was so expensive. But I didn’t want Saturday Night Live to hear that I charged dinner to them, because I didn’t know if they were paying for it. And if they were paying for it, would they get mad that I had a club sandwich twice in one day? I kept warning Rob not to eat too much. He didn’t seem to care at all. The whole time I was like, “Rob, that soup is eight bucks . . . don’t get us fired before we’re hired.” (I hate that Lorne might read this book and realize Rob and I were drowning ourselves in soup and sandwiches and regret hiring us.)
The audition was scheduled at the famous Catch a Rising Star comedy club, where Rodney Dangerfield and many others started. I heard Michael Shoemaker and Marci Klein were coming to watch us. These were two of Lorne’s right-hand men, even though Marci is a chick. Marci is Calvin Klein’s daughter and played a big role in booking the hosts on the show. Michael Shoemaker seemed to be the number two under Lorne. This is what I was able to figure out just by asking around, trying to get some sense of what to expect with the audition. Most important, I knew that both had big votes in picking new cast members. I think Jim Downey, the head writer, was there that night as well. I found out later this was like jury duty to all these guys. They’d rather go to someone else’s kid’s soccer game. Dennis Miller even came as a show of support for Rob and me, which was very cool of him. Obviously we were both entirely panic-stricken at the notion of all these people in the audience. This was not a bullshit table read for Alf. This was SNL.
That night, there was another comic on after us, and the SNL troop was there to see him, too. Tom Kenny was very different from me. He was really funny and very high energy—in fact, he later wound up as the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants. He was a very cool guy, and I sort of got the impression that it was either going to go his way or mine that night. I went on first. We were each supposed to do fifteen to twenty minutes, and when I looked out into the room the first thing I noticed was that New York clubs were much smaller than I expected. I could never get spots like this when I came to the city in my dirty-couch/ottoman-surfing days. I could only get shitty one-nighters in the surrounding towns, so all of this was eye-opening for me. I also noticed that there were not many people in the room, and about 60 percent of them were from SNL. All of this is going through my head as I start dishing my A-level material and proceed to EAT IT.
Dennis Miller had given me a piece of advice a few days earlier that suddenly came to me. “When you audition, you don’t want to kill too hard because that sends up a red flag. They’ll think you’re some polished road act.” So by the time I get to my third joke, I think, Well, I sure am taking his advice! I sure as hell am not killing too hard. I got a few titters, but it was pretty much crickets my whole set. I didn’t even do my full time. I think I left the stage after ten minutes, to try to stop the bleeding. Homemade tourniquet. Rob was next. Same situation. Rob had good jokes and he was a funny performer, but it was like the audience was scared to laugh at him. Rob exited the stage at around ten minutes, too. Cut to: Tom Kenny walks up and kills from beginning to end. I think he did his full set. It was like a fucking Arsenio audience howling at everything he said. Rob and I hung our heads and went back to the hotel and ordered soup.
The next night, Rob and I were back in the club. We were celebrating because we have gotten the call to be hired as writer/performers. Rob was so ecstatic. I was not. I said, “What are you talking about? I don’t want to be a writer. I want to be on the show.” He said, “Well, you start off as a writer like Chevy Chase did, like all those guys did. It’s great news.” I tried to be excited but honestly, I was just scared. I had no idea how to write a sketch. I barely knew how to write stand-up at this point. The scenario I had pictured if I somehow got on SNL involved their brilliant writers giving me funny things to do in sketches. I had no idea how hard the job I was about to get would be. But through that fear fog I finally shook myself and said, Holy fuck, I’m gonna be on SNL.
I flew back to Arizona and was chilling in my Motel 6 room when I got the official offer and terms of my job at Saturday Night Live. I was hired as a writer for the last four shows of the 1990 season, for $900 a week and a $1,500 bump if I happened to land in a sketch on the show. I remember writing all of this out on the Motel 6 stationery and hoping I would never have to stay at that Motel 6 again.
CHAPTER NINE
GETTING ON SNL
It was mid-April of 1990 and I was flying out to Saturday Night Live to start my new job. It was a scary flight mostly because I’m scared of everything, but I was in first class, so that made it a little better. I’m such a first-class whore. After years of flying shitty Southwest flights for stand-up gigs, I couldn’t believe that now I was getting the royal treatment, flying to my fancy new job in Rockefeller Center. It was back in the days where they had a curtain up between first and coach and the stewardess would make sure you couldn’t even see the people in first class. She would tug that curtain shut and whisper a condescending “no peekingggggg” to the panhandlers in coach.
Now all I had to do was come up with ideas for funny sketches. For the past five years, I had spent every waking moment—when I wasn’t staring at girls or freaking about cash—coming up with jokes for my stand-up. But sketch is a completely different animal. I spent the whole flight going through all the characters I did in stand-up, deciding which ones I could put on the table as “my own” before I officially started writing sketches. When you work at Saturday Night Live, you get one free swing when you start to tell them the characters you have and want to own, because the second you walk into the writers’ room, they own everything you come up with from that moment on. This is how it was when I was at SNL, anyway. It may have changed since then, but as I’ve already shared, my strongest characters involved a weak Tom Petty impression with a stolen valet hat. It isn’t my strong suit.
So, on this plane trip, I didn’t have a ton of great ideas, though I felt like this was my golden opportunity to claim an Opera Man or Wayne and Garth or something that might hit big. Skateboard Pizza guy . . . Drunk Astronaut . . . I was grasping at straws, just trying to get something down on paper. When we landed, I headed right for the Omni Berkshire, where they had the great soup and expensive room service. There’s nothing better than having everything paid for. All my life I had been counting nickels, wearing crappy clothes, pushing my car when it ran out of gas. And here I was, living in a hotel for four weeks, for free, after my first-class flight. All I had to do was write something funny, or else this shit would end really quickly.
The first night after I arrived happened to be a Sa
turday, and Rob and I were invited to come see the show before we officially started working on it. Hanging out backstage was really exciting but it was also overwhelming and chaotic. I had no idea how I would fit in. I knew Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon from staying at their houses when I was coming up, and of course Dennis Miller was there, so it wasn’t like it was a sea of new faces. But everyone was running around busy, with a lot on their minds. I met a few other cast members on the fly and a few writers. I remember talking to Jon Lovitz for a few minutes. He seemed depressed so I asked him what was wrong. He said, “I am just kind of bummed. I’m only in two things this week.” I was taken aback. “Wow, that’s crazy,” I said. “I would never think you guys count sketches. I just think you’re funny and I’m glad when I see you.” He said, “Yeah, well, Dana is in five things.” That surprised me. I told myself to remember that conversation, because I never wanted to feel like that. Lovitz was such a big star to me and had such a great job, I couldn’t believe he felt bad about having a light week on the show. Later I would learn just how hard it was to avoid obsessing over those very details.
On Monday, Rob and I went down to work together. I wanted to get there at noon, because I didn’t want anyone saying I was late. Of course, no one gets there before one, which is one of the pluses of working at SNL. The problem is that I’m not a late-night person, and regardless of when I hit the hay I’m getting up at 9 A.M. Staying up all night was the worst part for me, but everyone else on staff totally got off on that. It was total crickets at the office until around 4 P.M., when the important people started to trickle in. I met Jim Downey, the head writer on the show, who was very cool but always had a ton of work on his plate and so didn’t have time to baby the new guys like me. Rob and I were escorted to a tiny room and told, “Here’s a wooden desk and a chair, and this is your office.” There were no computers around back then, so we were told to write out our brilliant sketch ideas on yellow legal pads and then give them to one of four assistants whenever we needed them typed up. (So Mad Men, right?) I met Conan O’Brien, Bob Odenkirk, and Robert Smigel . . . all as nice as they could be for as busy as they were. Eventually I started to meet the cast, and before I knew it, it was the Monday meeting with the host. The host that week was Corbin Bernsen from the then hit show L.A. Law. After that Monday meeting, everyone sort of drifted off to write sketches.
