The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  Chris Farley spent a little over eighteen months studying and performing at ImprovOlympic. The young theater was rapidly becoming one of Chicago comedy’s best-known training grounds, but at the time it remained just that: a place to learn. For actors seeking out professional opportunities and a professional paycheck, Second City was still the place to be. Since its founding in 1959, Second City had established itself as the nation’s graduate school of comedy. In the early days, Robert Klein, Joan Rivers, and Alan Arkin all came across its stage. Over subsequent years, dozens of Hollywood stars matriculated there as well.

  Chris auditioned for Second City’s touring company in January 1989 and was offered a position. Most performers would have spent months or even years on the road before joining the main-stage ensemble; Chris made the move in a matter of weeks. Del Close had been offered the opportunity to direct Second City’s spring revue, and he was given great latitude to mold the show and its cast to his own liking. The performer he liked most was Chris. Second City producer Joyce Sloane expressed reservations about the young performer’s readiness and his outsized partying habits, but Charna Halpern insisted that working with Close was exactly the kind of discipline Chris needed. Sloane ultimately agreed.

  And everyone agreed that Chris’s potential was virtually without limit. During his eighteen months at Second City, Chris performed in three revues: The Gods Must Be Lazy, It Was Thirty Years Ago Today, which marked the theater’s thirtieth anniversary, and Flag Smoking Permitted in Lobby Only. Also making the leap from the touring company at that time was Chris’s friend Tim Meadows. Second City veterans David Pasquesi, Holly Wortell, Joe Liss, Judith Scott, and Joel Murray, as well as understudy Tim O’Malley, rounded out the cast. With each show, Chris’s reputation grew. He created a number of characters and scenes that would go down as some of the best in the theater’s history.

  TIM O’MALLEY, cast member:

  I was sitting in the main lobby at Second City. Chris came through the front door, all big and boisterous like he always did. He went upstairs and auditioned. What he did for his audition was he pretended he was late for whatever the scene was, took a running leap from stage left, and landed flat in the middle of the stage. They hired him right away, just on his energy and his commitment. Everyone was like, “You should have seen this guy’s audition. He was fucking nuts.”

  TIM MEADOWS:

  Me and Farley were the two new guys, both coming straight out of the touring company. We bonded over the fact that we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing.

  HOLLY WORTELL, cast member:

  When we started rehearsals, Chris’s inexperience showed. You had to come up with your own scene ideas, and he was not very good at that. One day we were throwing out these social, political, and cultural ideas, and Del said, “Chris, do you have anything?”

  Chris went, “Um . . . yeah. I was thinking, um, that there’s rich people . . . and, uh, there’s poor people . . . you know . . . something about that.”

  And I was like, “What was that?”

  TOM GIANAS, director:

  Chris was a great writer, actually. He just worked on his feet. You gave him a premise, and he’d spin it into gold.

  JOEL MURRAY:

  The first time I had to improvise with him onstage, the suggestion we got from the audience was “the drunk tank.” It was like, okay, there’s a natural. I said to Chris, “Let’s do a two-person scene where I’m your dad and I’m picking you up at the drunk tank, but in actuality I’m a drunk, too.”

  “Yeah,” Chris said. “Let’s go with that.”

  I didn’t know anything about Chris and his father at that point; I just figured he was Irish so he’d know what I was talking about.

  It was a great scene, and the emotions in it were so close to home in some ways, this drunk Irish father in his pajamas picking up his son. He’s coming down on the boy, but everything he says—like “That time your mother left me after I mowed down the hedges . . .”—reveals that he’s a drunk, too.

  So father and son have this meaningful talk about their drinking, and Chris is defending himself, like, “But I’m really good at it.” Like his dad should be proud of him. Of course it winds up with Chris’s character offering to drive home. And the dad, who’s been drinking, says, “Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a good idea.”

  And that became Chris’s big sketch in the first show. What do you do with a drunken sailor? You have him play a drunken sailor. Del Close was in the audience, and he came backstage and said, “Yeah, well, that one’s ready. Script that.”

  NATE HERMAN, director:

  At Second City, a lot of the performers tend to be very verbal. But every once in a while a physical comedian comes along, and when an actor has that rough physicality in such a small setting it really tends to explode.

  PAT FINN:

  When Chris’s first revue opened, he was an instant hit. There was a scene where he played a waiter. The people eating dinner were the heart of the scene, but Chris came out and got a huge laugh with “Can I get you something to eat?” That was it. He went over to the other side of the stage to make the drinks and sandwiches in the background, and every single head in the audience slowly turned to watch Chris. It was the oddest thing. Even if he was doing nothing, you wanted to watch him do nothing.

  JOE LISS, cast member:

  His mere presence would induce laughter. Anything he’d do on top of that was gravy.

  DAVID PASQUESI, cast member:

  Crowds loved him. I don’t think you can find anyone who’ll refute that. That’s not an opinion.

  HOLLY WORTELL:

  On Friday and Saturday nights, we had a break between shows. Chris and I would always dash out and get something to eat, and we’d always run into about half the audience from the first show. We’d both been onstage for the past two hours, but everyone would come right up to Chris and say, “You were so great!”

  Chris would go to great pains to say, “Hey, she was in the show, too. Wasn’t she good?” And that was very sweet of him, but it seemed logical to me that people would notice him more.

  JOEL MURRAY:

  During that first show the cast, minus Holly, went away to Joyce Sloane’s place on Lake Michigan. It was the dead of winter, and we’d brought a whole bunch of “Murray Brothers’ Tea,” this big thing of psilocybin mushroom tea. We wrote half the show that night, just from stuff we came up with screwing around. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.

  JOE LISS:

  We were fucking around inside the house. I started doing this crazy English character. Tim was going on about how he couldn’t feel his legs. The sun was coming up, and we couldn’t find Chris. “Where’s Chris?” “Let’s find him!” We struck out of the house on an “expedition” to track him down. We ran out, and there he was, lying out on the ice of Lake Michigan. “Look,” we said, “it’s a whale!” “No! It’s a boy!” “It’s a Whale Boy!”

  JOEL MURRAY:

  The whole lake was frozen ice, these huge glacier formations, crazy stuff. And at one point, Farley was out there, shirt open, T-shirt over his head, diving like a seal onto the ice, doing these crazy belly flops, his stomach bright red. We riffed on this Whale Boy thing for hours, high on mushroom tea, laughing our asses off out there on the frozen ice of Lake Michigan.

  JUDITH SCOTT:

  We came back to the cabin, and as the drugs wore off we realized that we’d written a scene.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  We had trouble putting it on paper. When we got back we tried to improvise with this Whale Boy character, and there was just too much information. Plus, we all remembered it differently because we’d been tripping. So Nate Herman, our new director, sat down and said, “Each of you tell me your version of the story.”

  We did that, and then a few days later he came in with the whole thing. The story was that we had raised this Whale Boy as a real boy and hidden his true origin from him. The scene was his coming-out party into society. But the tension u
nderneath was that his mother couldn’t stand the fact that this was not her own son. Ultimately, we have to tell Chris the truth: that he’s not our son, but in fact the product of a whale impregnated by radioactive human sperm and medical waste. Once he discovers that, Chris launches into this grand song and soliloquy about reclaiming his true identity.

  HOLLY WORTELL:

  We wanted him to be able to spout from his head like a whale, and so our stage manager took a football helmet, drilled a hole in it, and connected this water hose so Chris could squirt water out of it.

  JOEL MURRAY:

  He looked like a Hummel figurine. When he would come out like a choir-boy and sing the Whale Boy song, the crowd would go nuts.

  The last preview before opening night, he does the song and goes to exit through a door, and he pulls the doorknob off. There’s nothing he can do, so he jumps into the crowd, and he breaks his foot. We’re all like, “Suck it up, Farley. C’mon.” But it turns out he really did break his foot, and he had a walking cast for opening night.

  TIM O’MALLEY:

  Ian Gomez took over, and Chris was out for a good eight weeks. But nobody could stop him from coming in and doing the improv sets. He’d come in and do those on a cast.

  JOE LISS:

  Chris was always “boy.” He was Whale Boy. We did another sketch where he was Caramel Boy. Then of course there was Tommy Boy.

  NATE HERMAN:

  Paul Sills, one of the founders of Chicago improv, used to say, “Out there doesn’t matter. This is the only place that matters. The stage is the only place you exist.” So if the stage is the only place you feel real, it makes sense to make the whole world your stage.

  ROBERT BARRY, friend, Edgewood High School:

  Whatever Chris Farley did in the movies or on TV, that was just Chris Farley. He was never acting. Or, perhaps, Chris was always acting. That might be a better way of putting it.

  CHARNA HALPERN:

  He was always more himself onstage than off. He was more intelligent onstage. He’d step out there, and it was like a light would go on behind his eyes.

  HOLLY WORTELL:

  I remember we’d be in his apartment and he would be really calm. He’d talk about his feelings, things that he would never say around the guys. Then we would walk down the stairs and open that door out onto Wells Street and, literally, the second that door opened he turned into “Farley.” It was like a jacket that he put on when he was leaving the house.

  Chris would tell me a story about his day, like maybe a story about ordering a sandwich from the guy at the deli, and he’d do his voice and the guy’s voice, acting out this little scene. But instead of just saying, “I told the guy, ‘I want a tomato,’ ” Chris was really acting it up, like, “I told the guy, ‘I want a tomato!’ ”

  And so I asked him, “Chris, how come when you speak, you’re imitating yourself ?”

  “What?”

  I said, “When you tell that story about yourself, you’re doing your own dialogue in a different voice. You’re doing a character voice for you.”

  And that kind of blew his mind.

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  Most of the people at Second City, after the show they’d all go out for drinks, and they’d just hang out with you like a normal person. But Chris and Joe Liss, they couldn’t stop. The red nose and floppy shoes stayed on.

  NATE HERMAN:

  His greatest frustration was trying to beat that character that he was becoming. He really seemed like he was uncomfortable being the great, swaggering drunk; it didn’t suit him. I always thought that inside there was this nice kid from Wisconsin going, “I’m really not comfortable doing this, but this is who I’m supposed to be.”

  TIM MEADOWS:

  Chris used to say that he only had one character, and that was the fat, loud guy. But of course that wasn’t true at all. In our last revue, we did a scene where the premise was basically that Chris and I were good friends, we’re hanging out, and then his sister, played by Jill Talley, comes in. She and I really hit it off and I’m digging on her and Chris is really not okay with it.

  JILL TALLEY, cast member:

  The more Tim and I would milk our flirtation, the more Chris would amp up his reactions. Tim was giving me a foot rub, I was laughing at all of his jokes, and Chris was just fuming, bubbling under the surface, which he did so brilliantly.

  Then Chris comes right out and tells Tim, “You can’t date my sister.”

  “Why, because we’re friends?”

  “No, because you’re black.”

  TIM MEADOWS:

  The thing that I loved about Chris was that he was willing to be the racist in that scene. He starts off as my best friend, and then when I exit the stage for a moment he does this really subtle change where he confronts her and tells her he doesn’t like it. Then I walk back onstage right as he says “nigger.” Every night you could hear a pin drop as soon as he said it. People didn’t expect that from Second City, and they certainly didn’t expect it from Chris.

  FR. MATT FOLEY:

  When he was at Second City, he would call me late at night and I could tell he was using, that he was not doing well. He was really struggling; he was so damn lonely. He’d lost some of his anchors, and he was ashamed of his drug use.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  When we were in Chicago, we all drank, and we all did our share of other things. But one night after we did the first show we were getting notes from Del in the back. Farley went into the kitchen, got a bottle of wine, and just started guzzling it straight down. I remember watching him drink that bottle and thinking, holy shit.

  Then, when we would go out drinking after the show, it would never end. His personality changed. He was a messy drunk. He would just get loud and in your face. I would go to one bar with him, and then he’d ask me if I was going to Burton Place, this bar that was open until five in the morning. I’d say, “No, I don’t like that place.” There was just a bad vibe in there, a lot of people who were involved in heavier drugs. I used to call it Satan’s Den, and he would always tease me about that. “You wanna go over to Satan’s Den with me?”

  TIM O’MALLEY:

  When you drank or got high with Chris, it was like corralling a tiger. I was doing coke on a regular basis, and I knew I was an addict. I don’t know if I recognized Chris as being worse off than me, though. Guzzle and pour, guzzle and pour, slobber and puke. That was about it for us. We’d sleep all day. If we had rehearsal, we’d haul out of bed and make it there by eleven. We’d always try and get home by sunrise and get some sleep, but some days we were partying right up through to rehearsal, then try and get a nap and some food in before the show. Then, sometimes, we were just high for days.

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  The first hour of drinking with Chris was fun. The second hour was the best hour of your life. The rest of the night was pure hell.

  DAVID PASQUESI:

  He was taking it as far as someone could while still making it to work, and he was being rewarded all along the way. So there was no reason to stop.

  TOM GIANAS:

  Chris came in to rehearsal one day, and he was really out of it, kind of falling asleep. I took him aside and told him he had to go home. But Chris could always turn on the charm. He talked me into letting him stay. I always regretted that one moment. It was just a minor incident, but it was one instance where I had an opportunity to exert some discipline over him, and I didn’t do it.

  JOE LISS:

  Second City sees itself as a family, and we were a pretty codependent family, too. There could have been a big intervention from the cast, but it didn’t happen. We were all doing drugs.

  The one thing we did crack down on was drinking during the show. That wasn’t okay. One time I caught Chris in between sets. There’s the greenroom backstage, and then there’s another dressing room on the other side with a pass-through between them. I’m backstage, and I look down the pass-through and see Farley at his locker. He looks around, reaches in
to his locker, takes out a big tumbler, takes a big sip, and then hides it back in his locker.

  I’m like, “You motherfucker.”

  So I wait for Chris to leave and go and get a big box of salt from the kitchen. I take the drink, fill it with salt, stir it up and let it dissolve, put it back, and head back to the other room and wait.

  Chris comes back for the next show, reaches into his locker, gets the drink, takes another big sip of it and just does this beautiful spit take, spewing the drink all over. There was no more drinking during that show.

  CHARNA HALPERN:

  We had a couple of meetings with Chris where Del Close told him about the clinic where he went through aversion therapy and stopped drinking. It’s a horrible process, like something out of The Twilight Zone. They shoot you up with this chemical and then they make you drink this watered-down alcohol until you vomit. Then they throw you back in your bed, and a couple of hours later they shoot you up and make you go through it again. They keep doing this until even the smell of alcohol makes you throw up. It sounds futuristic, but it works.