The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  TOM FARLEY:

  Kevin was very focused, got decent grades. We called him Silent Sam, Steady Eddie. He just did his thing and did it well. John was the gopher. He was so much younger than the rest of us. He was always pleasing people, doing what it took to tag along. Still is to this day. As for myself, I was the brains in the family, which is really kind of sad. But I was Tom Farley, Jr., and everything that that entailed. My dad went to Georgetown, and so from day one the pressure was on me as the oldest son to live up to Dad’s expectations.

  The expectations for Chris were that there were no expectations. He just kind of marched to his own drummer. One day Chris said, “I want to join the hockey team.” The next day he had a brand-new set of hockey gear, never mind that he couldn’t really skate that well. So there was full support for him in whatever he wanted to do, but no real expectation that he should fail or succeed.

  Chris and I were always together, but I was trying my best to toe the line and he was effortlessly crossing over the line, trampling it with no consequences; it annoyed the crap out of me. And because he was always so funny, my friends would want him to hang around. I hated that.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  What was most important to Chris, really, was that he made people laugh. Chris was always the fat kid. Kids can be pretty mean, and humor was his only weapon, from grade school on. He wanted to be a football player, and that meant being part of the popular crowd. He used his humor to do that.

  TED DONDANVILLE, friend, Red Arrow Camp:

  I met Chris at summer camp, with all the other brothers. Tom was actually my counselor, and Johnny wound up being my best friend. You didn’t forget Chris. Even if I’d never seen him again after camp, I’d remember him. During mass, if the priest made the mistake of asking for audience involvement, Chris was right there. His hand would shoot up, and then he’d figure out whether or not he had something to say.

  DICK WENZELL, play director, Red Arrow Camp:

  Red Arrow Camp was established in 1922, and was named after the Red Arrow Army, Second Division, from Wisconsin. It had originally been built as a logging camp in the nineteenth century. Some of the cabins date back to that time. It was a resident seven-week camp.

  TIM HENRY, friend, Red Arrow Camp:

  Chris always had some kind of stunt going. On Sundays they’d load all us Catholic boys into this old school bus and drive us into town. The girls’ camps would come to Sunday mass, too. Now, you’re never allowed to have candy at camp, but somehow one Sunday Chris has gotten ahold of these white tic tacs. He fills his mouth with them, and he’s walking up the aisle for communion so prayerfully, and when he gets in front of the girl campers he rolls his eyes back like he’s going to pass out and then he falls and hits his mouth on the side of the bench and spits out all the tic tacs. They go clattering across this wooden bench, and Chris is yelling, “Oh my God! My teeth!” The girls were just aghast. We were all laughing hysterically.

  HAMILTON DAVIS, friend, Red Arrow Camp:

  It was anything for a laugh, absolutely anything. They gave away all these awards for good behavior and accomplishments and such. Chris didn’t care.

  TOM FARLEY:

  He was our windup toy. You said it. He did it.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  He didn’t win a lot of the awards, but because he was so funny they’d put him in the camp play, and he was the star. Chris would always credit Dick Wenzell with encouraging that in him.

  DICK WENZELL:

  Chris was strictly a jock, but he had a lot of charisma. Once I got him onstage, his connection with the audience was unbelievable. Not only could he project to the audience, he could also receive from them. Chris could take whatever the audience gave to him and build on it. He just did it naturally. Visiting parents would comment on how magnetic he was. And this was when he was ten years old.

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  The camp play was really a bunch of skits strung together. One year they did a takeoff on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Chris played the villain. When they caught him, he told them they could do what they wanted to him as long as they didn’t step on his blue suede shoes. Then he launched into this Elvis impersonation that brought the house down.

  HAMILTON DAVIS:

  Whatever the story was, they’d just drop him in there. He was such a crowd-pleaser that they didn’t even have to have a part for him. Just put him up onstage. One time he did “Hound Dog” dressed up like Miss Piggy.

  FRED ALBRIGHT, counselor, Red Arrow Camp:

  When people ask “Where did Chris Farley get his start?” I say he got it at Red Arrow Camp. As a kid, he was just a miniature version of what he would become. Dick Wenzell used the expression “He was always onstage. ” And that was the case. A lot of it was a diversion, because down deep Chris was one of the most sensitive guys you’ll ever meet. Even though he came across as this kind of rough, gruff, jovial guy, you could hurt his feelings with just a word or two. Incredibly sensitive guy.

  MIKE CLEARY:

  Chris was the very first guy I met at Edgewood. I grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and moved to Madison in high school. Edgewood can be a little clubby. For days, the rest of the kids didn’t even come near me. Then one day I was sitting in the commons, getting ready for football practice. Chris came up and said, “You’re the guy from New York? Hi, I’m Chris Farley.” He was the first person to make me feel comfortable being there.

  ROBERT BARRY, friend:

  At school you always wanted to be around Chris. He was a blast, but his focus was always on you, talking you up, making you feel better. “This is my buddy Robert,” he’d say. “He’s all-state basketball.” He’s this. He’s that. He’s the greatest. It was never about himself.

  TODD GREEN, friend:

  We had the closest thing to what I would call a dream high school situation, where six or seven guys were as close as brothers and laughed their asses off every single day, and Chris was the glue that kept us together. He was such a pivotal part of our high school experience. Chris was the type of person who didn’t see social class, or ethnicity, or anything like that. He came from a lot more money than most of us, but you would never know.

  MIKE CLEARY:

  One time I was visited by an old friend of mine from back east. He’d been a big football player, but he’d had this horrible car accident, and now he was in a wheelchair. A lot of kids could be uncomfortable around that, but Chris just embraced him. He spent the entire day making this kid feel welcome and totally at ease. And the thing is, he did it with no effort. His generosity was so commonplace that it was utterly unremarkable.

  DAN HEALY, friend:

  Chris made people feel good about themselves. Everyone was on a pedestal for some reason or another. He drew people together, naturally, and it was cathartic to be around him. To me, Chris would bat his eye and I would lose it laughing so hard my sides would hurt.

  GREG MEYER:

  People ask me what it was like going to school with Chris Farley, and I say, “You’ve seen him on SNL, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, crank that up times ten.”

  JOHN FARLEY:

  With the birth of the VCR, we memorized Animal House, Stripes, Caddyshack , Meatballs, History of the World, High Anxiety, and Blues Brothers. And I’m not talking about memorizing the lines. We memorized everything, every inch of footage. The foreground, the background, we memorized it all. And Chris pulled from that constantly.

  One of Chris’s favorite bits to do was to put his arms out like Frankenstein and make this monster voice, “Urgggh duugggh!” That was from an obscure scene in Meatballs with Spaz introducing himself to the cabin where, in the background, some fat camper was doing that Frankenstein thing. The whole thing was maybe half a second of film, maybe. But even that we had down. Take the original cast of Saturday Night Live, add in Mel Brooks, and you have our childhood.

  NICK BURROWS, guidance counselor/assistant football coach:

  Every time
you’d walk down to the cafeteria, packed full of three-hundred-plus kids, all you had to do was listen for the roar of laughter and you’d know where Chris Farley was sitting. As I remember, Chris didn’t really tell jokes. It was just who he was. He just was funny, being himself. People just liked hanging around him. I was his guidance counselor, and I liked hanging around him.

  JOEL MATURI, dean of discipline/head football coach:

  His antics were never mean or destructive. Chris did a lot of crazy things, but most of the stories of Chris being in trouble at Edgewood are, unfortunately, fabricated. I say “unfortunately” because they sound very entertaining many years later. There is one hilarious story about Chris and a nun that I know for a fact just isn’t true.

  NICK BURROWS:

  We had a geometry teacher named Colonel McGivern. He was a retired air force colonel. Back then we had a lecture hall where all the kids would go for these huge group lectures while the colonel did equations and theorems on this big overhead projector. Well, one day Chris gets down in the aisle and belly-crawls up to the front of the room. He gets to the stage stairs, waits for Colonel McGivern to turn back to the projector, and then sneaks up and around, behind the curtain.

  Now, Colonel McGivern had this thing called the Groaner of the Day, a really bad, corny joke that he’d use to end each day’s lecture. He’d tell it, and the kids would all groan because it was so lame. So Chris waits, and just as Colonel McGivern delivers his punch line, Chris drops his pants and moons the entire audience, sticking his rear end out between two folds in the curtain. Well, the whole place erupts with laughter, and the colonel—who can’t see Chris—stands there scratching his head, going, “Jeez, I didn’t think it was that funny . . .” And then of course everyone really loses it.

  Some sophomore girl gets offended, and she rats Chris out. I get a call from Joel Maturi, telling me that Chris has done this thing and needs to be punished.

  “Nick, uh, are you familiar with the term ‘hung a moon’?” he asks me.

  “Sure, Coach.”

  "Well, that’s what he did, and we need to get his parents over here and sort this out.”

  So I call Mr. and Mrs. Farley, and they come down to the office. I tell the Farleys about Chris hanging a moon and the colonel and the Groaner of the Day, the whole story. And Mrs. Farley just busts out laughing. She can’t stop. Then I start laughing. Then Mr. Farley starts losing it, too. So here we all are dying laughing, waiting for the dean of discipline to come down.

  Now, Joel Maturi is a real straight-arrow, buttoned-down kind of guy. We all straighten up as he comes in with his yellow legal pad where he’s got the incident written down. “Mr. and Mrs. Farley,” he says, very businesslike, sitting down, reading from his notes. “Ahem. Yes, it would appear, Mr. and Mrs. Farley, that your son has ‘hung a moon’ in his geometry class.”

  Mrs. Farley loses it again. She gets me laughing. Mr. Farley busts out again. And finally Maturi, as stiff as he is, he starts laughing. We’re all roaring in my office. Finally, Maturi takes the legal pad, chucks it on the table, and says, “We’re just going to forget about this one.”

  It should have been a suspension, but he threw it out because, quite frankly, we all thought it was too funny.

  TOM FARLEY:

  Chris would show up in Room 217, the detention hall, on a fairly regular basis, and Coach Maturi always seemed to be laughing under his breath, saying, “. . . dammit, Farley.”

  When Chris was sorry, he was genuinely sorry. He’d be so guilty and remorseful, and he would always take his punishment. He knew it was the price to pay for getting the laugh. But before that apology would come, he had to get a laugh and you had to admit that it was funny.

  Chris’s bedroom was at the other end of the hallway from the bathroom, and lots of times he was just too lazy to get up and go. So what he did was he kept glasses in his bedroom. He’d pee in those, and then take them down to the bathroom and empty them out once he was ready to get up. Well, one time my mom found one of the glasses. We were all sitting at the dinner table the next day, and she had told my dad about it. Dad was so furious he didn’t know what to do. I mean, here was Chris peeing in our drinking glasses. Chris knew that Dad knew, and Dad knew that Chris knew that he knew, and there was dead silence at the table. Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Finally, Dad reaches over to take a sip of his water, and Chris goes, “You’re not gonna drink out of that glass, are you?”

  “Goddammit!”

  Chris knew what was coming, but he had to get the laugh first.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  Chris was such a natural talent that he was always being asked by the teachers to try out for the school plays. But he wouldn’t have any part of it. “That’s for pussies,” he’d say.

  DAN HEALY:

  Madison is sports crazy. They’ll watch anything played with a ball. It wasn’t cool to do drama. In a perfect world I think Chris would have been about six-foot-three and played in the NFL. I remember when we started freshman football. It was a big deal at Edgewood. You knew making the football team was a key part of fitting in. After one of those first practices I heard this voice behind me say, “Well, my brother told me that if I can start on ‘O,’ then I’ll probably start on ‘D.’ ”

  I turned around, and there was Chris. He was already pretty overweight, and he was wearing these saggy gray wool socks with his football uniform. Everyone else was in bright white athletic socks, and here’s this chubby kid dressed kind of funny. I just thought, this poor kid actually thinks he’s gonna play? But he did. And he was great.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  Chris would play noseguard, and because I was his brother he’d want to hit me pretty hard in practice. My God, he hit me good. A couple of times I think I practically blacked out. “God, you really nailed me,” I’d say.

  “I know,” he’d say. “I wanted to.”

  We were really competitive, and he was a really good football player. You couldn’t move him because his legs were so powerful and he was so low to the ground. He was a really good interior lineman. He just didn’t have the height or the NFL build that he needed.

  JOEL MATURI:

  Chris was like Rudy in that way, the kid in that story from Notre Dame. I mean that very honestly. He was all hustle. Chris would be the first one to jump into a drill, first one to volunteer for anything. We were not a great football program. I think his junior year we went 5-5, and his senior year we went 6-4. But Chris always thought the glass was half full. When other kids might have said something was impossible, Chris thought it was possible. He always believed. And that’s why you loved him.

  MIKE CLEARY:

  Around Madison you played against teams with these huge, enormous guys who went on to Division One teams. They’d just steamroll right over you. It was so demoralizing. But with Chris on the field, you’d never let that get to you. He’d never let you forget about having fun, even when these future NFLers were grinding your face into the mud.

  PAT O’GARA, friend:

  When we played football, all the guys would go in to take showers. And of course all these sophomores and freshmen were nervous about showering with the older guys. Chris would be in there, in the showers, buck naked, curling his finger with a come-hither look at these kids going “Want some candy?” It’d scare the crap out of them. It was always an interesting time when Chris would hit the showers. He had a reputation of, well, exposing himself. All the time.

  GREG MEYER:

  He was naked a lot.

  PAT O’GARA:

  Wasn’t ashamed at all. So, junior year, I was sitting in typing lab, practicing, and Chris was sitting next to me. I said to him, “Chris, I dare you to whip it out in front of this girl here.”

  I’m typing away, and Chris just pulls his pants down and lays it out. I don’t think twice about it. To me, I’m just like, “Jesus, what a sick bastard.”

  And that was the end of it. Nothing happened. Then, about a month later, Coach
Maturi says to me, “I understand that you dared Chris Farley to expose himself to this girl.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I said that.”

  “Well, she’s been in therapy for about a month now because she keeps having flashbacks and has had a lot of psychological problems.”

  A prank like that would normally just get you disciplined somehow, but this girl and her parents were making a real issue out of it. Chris wound up getting expelled.

  TOM FARLEY:

  Dad, typically, said the school was overreacting. It was the school’s fault, not Chris’s. So rather than demoting him down to public school, he was sent off to private boarding school, La Lumiere in LaPorte, Indiana, for the rest of the semester. Senior year they let him back in.

  GREG MEYER:

  Chris was really, really pissed at himself, very disappointed to be leaving Edgewood. He’d do that thing out of nowhere where he’d smack his head and go, “Fuck! Idiot! Can’t believe I did that.”