The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  “Chris, who do you think these limos are for?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I saw some guy with a clipboard and walked over to him. “Is one of these cars for Chris Farley?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Right over there.”

  “Wow,” Chris said, “How did you know that?”

  “Because that’s how it works here.”

  MIKE SHOEMAKER, producer:

  The first show he didn’t have much, because nobody knew him to write for him at that point. But that always takes a while. We knew he was going to hit big, and he did it pretty quickly. The “Chippendales” piece was only his fourth show.

  JIM DOWNEY:

  The thing that suggested “Chippendales” was less Farley and more Patrick Swayze being the host. You had a guy who was sort of built like—to the extent that I notice these things—like a male stripper. And he obviously could dance; that was how he’d come up in show business.

  The second element was that nothing made me laugh more than the band Loverboy, whose big hit was “Working for the Weekend.” So you had Patrick Swayze, male stripper, you had Loverboy—just add Farley.

  KEVIN NEALON, cast member:

  I played one of the judges, and my experience was the same as anyone who’s seen it on television. I can’t even think of the word to describe it. Incredulous, maybe? I did everything I could to keep a straight face.

  JIM DOWNEY:

  We didn’t know it was going to be as popular as it was. You never do. In read-through Chris is just sitting fully clothed at the table while Lorne reads stage directions. We didn’t know until he did it at dress.

  MIKE MYERS, cast member:

  I knew in rehearsal that a star was born.

  DOUG ROBINSON, agent:

  Adam Venit and I were agents at CAA. We’d known about Chris from Chicago, and we had been talking to Marc Gurvitz at Brillstein about signing him. At CAA, you have to get a consensus from the entire group of agents if you want to sign someone. All we did was show everyone a video of the “Chippendales” sketch, and it was done. We signed him right then.

  BOB ODENKIRK:

  I didn’t like the fact that the first thing he became known for was that Chippendales thing, which I hated. Fucking lame, weak bullshit. I can’t believe anyone liked it enough to put it on the show. Fuck that sketch. He never should have done it.

  TOM DAVIS, writer:

  When you get laughs like that, there’s nothing wrong with what’s going on onstage.

  ROBERT SMIGEL:

  It was a fantastic sketch—I’d say it’s one of the funniest sketches in the history of the show—because of the way Downey wrote it. If the sketch had been written that a fat guy was trying out for the Chippendales and everyone was making fun of him or acting like it was crazy, then yes, it would have been just a cheap laugh at the expense of a fat guy. But the way it was constructed, with everyone sincerely believing that this guy has a shot, the judges studiously scribbling notes on his dance moves, that’s what makes it original and completely hysterical.

  JIM DOWNEY:

  My overriding note to Chris was, “You’re not at all embarrassed here. They’re telling you, ‘Our audience tends to prefer a more sculpted, lean physique as opposed to a fat, flabby one,’ but your feelings are never hurt. You’re processing that like it’s good information. Like you’re going to learn from this and take it to your next audition.”

  Of all the pieces I’ve done it’s one of the most commented upon, and that’s of course because of Farley. I can’t take any credit for that except casting him. He was also very nimble and a good dancer, which made it impossible to feel like it was just a freak show.

  Later in that show, Jack Handey had written a sketch about a mouse-trap -building class. It was one of those group scenes where everybody has a very small part to play. Farley had only one little bit to do, but he had so won the audience over with “Chippendales” that he got the biggest reaction in the piece. They had already adopted him as their own.

  CHRIS ROCK:

  “Chippendales” was a weird sketch. I always hated it. The joke of it is basically, “We can’t hire you because you’re fat.” I mean, he’s a fat guy, and you’re going to ask him to dance with no shirt on. Okay. That’s enough. You’re gonna get that laugh. But when he stops dancing you have to turn it in his favor. There’s no turn there. There’s no comic twist to it. It’s just fucking mean. A more mentally together Chris Farley wouldn’t have done it, but Chris wanted so much to be liked.

  I wanted to be liked, but I had no problem saying something was racist and I wasn’t doing it. Imagine if they’d had me in that sketch and then said at the end, “Oh, we can’t hire you. You’re a nigger.” Would I have done a sketch like that? If I had, ten years later I’d want to shoot myself.

  That was a weird moment in Chris’s life. As funny as that sketch was, and as many accolades as he got for it, it’s one of the things that killed him. It really is. Something happened right then.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  You had to prove yourself to get airtime and to get your sketches on. It was obvious after “Chippendales” that he was going to be one of the standouts. I can’t remember too many read-throughs where he didn’t have something to do.

  TOM DAVIS:

  During the early read-throughs, I was shocked when I heard him struggle to read scripts he was seeing for the first time. He struggled with reading in the way of someone who was not schooled well. But on the stage he was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. He was a star. I saw it the first day he walked in the office. There was some quality that shone brightly. Despite his shortcomings as someone who hadn’t honed his skills yet, it was clear that he had the raw talent to work on that show successfully, which he did.

  ALEC BALDWIN, host:

  In the cast of Saturday Night Live you have people who’ve come from improv troupes, and you have people who’ve done a lot of stand-up comedy. You can distinguish the real actors from the stand-ups, and Chris was a good actor, a very good actor. He could have had a career for the rest of his life. Fat, thin, old, young, he was a really talented guy.

  JIM DOWNEY:

  Farley was like an old-school cast member. The first cast was a repertory company. They weren’t comedians; they were funny actors, and they were called upon to do lots of different things. In the nineties, we got those with more of a stand-up background. And that’s not to knock the stand-ups. Nobody has ever made me laugh harder than David Spade. But the danger is that a stand-up can do an absolutely devastating ten-minute audition, but that might not help you two years later when you need a Senator Harkin in your congressional hearings piece. As a general rule, we’ve always done better with the old Dan Aykroyd types.

  LORNE MICHAELS:

  I used to say that he was the son that John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd never had. When Chris was a kid, he used to tape his eyebrow up to try and figure out how Belushi did it.

  TOM SCHILLER, writer/short-film director:

  It was very shortly after he arrived that he asked me about Belushi. I could tell by the gleam in his eye that he was very excited to find out as much as he could. I don’t recall exactly what I told him. I guess I told him a lot. But there was an immediate bond, and he wanted to be in one of my films to take part in that heritage.

  MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER, writer:

  Chris would come up to me and say, “You knew John. What was he like? How did he dress? Just tell me everything you knew about him.” He just had this reverence, and it was always about real minutiae.

  MIKE SHOEMAKER:

  He always idolized Belushi, but when I looked at him I saw more of Aykroyd and Murray.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  Chris would always throw in bits or accents inspired by the older guys, more Bill Murray than anyone. He stole his “Da Bears” character from Aykroyd. Todd O’Connor, that’s basically Aykroyd’s Irwin Mainway, that cheesy salesman who sold all the dangerous toys.

&n
bsp; ROBERT SMIGEL:

  I had moved to Chicago in 1982 to take improv classes with the Second City Players Workshop. Today it seems you can take them anywhere, but back then that was the only place to go.

  I was always a huge sports guy, and I wanted to see all the iconic Chicago sports landmarks, so not long after I moved there I went by myself to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. I just walked up to the box office about a half hour before game time and said, “Give me the best ticket you’ve got.” It was right behind the dugout, so I was pretty excited.

  But during the game I noticed that the fans in the crappiest seats— the bleachers—were the ones having all the fun. I got a better look at them outside the ballpark after the game. They had their Cubs T-shirts on over their collared, button-down shirts; it was like a uniform. They all seemed to wear aviator sunglasses, which had been out of style for a good five years. And they all had these big walrus mustaches, which I think to them were some sort of symbol of virility, probably passed on from Dick Butkus to Mike Ditka. They had a swagger to them, even though at the time all their teams pretty much sucked, which made the whole thing funnier.

  Years later, at Saturday Night Live, there was a writers’ strike that shut us down after February. Bob Odenkirk and I decided to go back to Chicago and do a stage show we’d talked about. The original sketch as we did it then was three of these guys sitting on a porch, talking about the Bears. It was more absurd, just guys talking about stuff and the conversation always going back to “and I’ll tell ya who else will be riding high come January. A certain team known as . . . da Bears.” It was a hit in Chicago, but we never thought about doing it on SNL. Too local, we figured.

  Then in 1991, Joe Mantegna hosted, and Bob suggested we do it. To make it more accessible, we set it in a sports bar and made it a parody of the Chicago sportswriters show, only with these ridiculous fans and their outrageous predictions given as sincere, cogent game analysis. Their idea of predicting an upset was to say that the Bears would only win by thirty points, instead of seven hundred.

  Jim Downey is from Joliet, Illinois, and he was really insistent that the Chicago accents be dead-on. He felt that was really important to the joke. The only person in the cast who could really do the accent was Chris. Mike Myers could do a pretty decent accent, because he’d lived there awhile. Downey actually thought my accent was the best, and he wanted me to play the third guy.

  So we did that original sketch with Mantegna. It did well, and that, I thought, was it. But it caught on in Chicago. A popular deejay named Jonathon Brandmeier played excerpts from it all the time. By spring the Bulls were headed for their first championship, and, coincidentally, George Wendt was hosting our season finale. It made sense to do another one. It was fine, but in Chicago it had a life of its own. “Da Bulls” was suddenly the rallying cry of the team. It’s funny, because I had never thought of it as a catchphrase. In the scripts, it was always spelled “the Bulls”; the “da” just came out in the delivery.

  That summer in Chicago, Michael Jordan was honored by Comic Relief. George, Chris, and I were invited to do the Super Fans onstage with Jordan at this benefit at the Chicago Theater. Jordan had a lot of fun doing it and got comfortable with the idea that he could do comedy. That led to him hosting the season opener in the fall, where we did another one. It just took off from there. I think we did eight or nine in total.

  It was fun to do on the show, but we had even more fun doing things at Chicago events. Chris and I started doing predictions every Thursday night for the local Chicago NBC affiliate. We’d tape them via satellite from 30 Rock in New York. Chris’s managers never liked the idea of his doing these Chicago appearances if he wasn’t getting paid, so he only did a few. I always thought that was ridiculous. Some of them were once-in-a -lifetime experiences.

  When the Bears made the playoffs, in December of ’91, Chris, George Wendt, and I actually stood at the fifty-yard line at Soldier Field and made a pregame speech. Half the fans went nuts and half were just weirded out, I think. Then they let us stay and watch the game on the field. I felt like a moron wearing my costume out there during the game, but I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to watch from the sidelines.

  At halftime they had a contest where they let kids try and make a field goal from a tee on the ten-yard line. Quite spontaneously, they asked us if we wanted to participate. We said sure, and suddenly on the PA it was, “Ladies and gentlemen, we direct your attention to our additional contestants.”

  We let Chris take the first kick. He lined up to make the field goal, took a running start and then slipped and nosedived right into the mud. The whole stadium went crazy. George and I didn’t know what to do. We’d let the funniest guy go first, and now we had no way to top it. I figured the only thing I could do was to try and actually make the kick. So, with beer in hand, I lined up and kicked the ball and somehow I made it. The crowd loved it.

  Then it was George’s turn, and by now he’d figured out a topper. He had Chris snap the ball to me. Then instead of placing the ball down, we ran a “fake” and I lateraled to George. I “blocked” Chris, and George ran it in for a touchdown, as the announcer called it on the PA. That was just so much fun. The stadium was packed, and everyone was cheering and going crazy for a fat guy running ten yards. It was one of those perfect moments in life, where all your hard work comes together in a way that’s better than anything you could have imagined.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  It was a great time during those first couple of years. We were young. We all had money, we lived in New York, and we were on Saturday Night Live. We would always have dinner after the read-throughs. Saturday nights after the show we would hang out. We all played golf. We’d go to movies. We got invited to a lot of stuff, basketball games, baseball games. We all immediately bonded with each other.

  CHRIS ROCK:

  We just had fun. There was a lot of McDonald’s, a lot of going out to eat, a lot of watching MTV. We’d watch the musical guests rehearse. “Let’s run down and see Pearl Jam.” We got to see a lot of the grunge stuff before it really took off; all those bands made their first appearance on SNL.

  KEVIN NEALON:

  More and more, the older cast members started to realize we had our own little west wing going on with Spade, Farley, and those other guys. You’d go over and there’d be Playboy magazines lying around and it’d be a bit of a mess. They’d all be talking about what models they’d gotten laid with, and then you went into Dana or Phil’s office and they’d be talking about their 401(k).

  DAVID SPADE:

  We would just hang out and get in trouble. We shared an office, me and Chris. You’d have to go through our office to get to another little office for Rock and Sandler. There was always Smigel around, or whoever else. We were all back there, screwing around and staying up late, trying to write and think of ideas and brainstorm and do whatever you gotta do to stay alive on that show.

  MARCI KLEIN:

  You just spend so many hours there, and so much time of your life. We were all sort of the same age. We were all always together. It’s just inevitable that this group forms. We go to the party, then hang out at somebody’s apartment, and the next thing I know, it’s six A.M. and Chris and Adam are crashing in my living room.

  TOM FARLEY:

  The guys at SNL, they were like Chris’s new rugby team. Not nearly as wild but a lot of fun, and they gave Chris that fraternity atmosphere that he always thrived in. And then, somewhere along that first year on the show, Chris started dating Lorne’s assistant, this girl named Erin Maroney. Erin was great, just a lot of fun. And I thought it was the start of a whole new thing for Chris, a really good direction. It was the first time I’d seen him in a real relationship, you know, ever.

  DAVID SPADE:

  We’d always be outside Lorne’s office waiting for whatever, so we had a lot of interaction with Erin. Chris would hide underneath her desk, and he’d pop out and surprise her when she got back. He flirted with her all the time, and
it paid off. They started dating. Erin was very cute, very sweet.

  She went back to Wisconsin with him once, and she’d tell hilarious stories about what it was like around that dinner table. She’s kind of a preppy East Coast girl and there she is with seven Farleys fighting over chicken and steak, and the mother’s passing around a “yuck bag” where they throw all their extra bones and corncobs. I don’t think I ever would have put those two together, but I think she saw through all the other stuff to see that he was a good guy and a fun guy, and as history shows sometimes that’s enough.

  TOM ARNOLD, friend:

  Chris was in love with Erin. He talked about her all the time. She was very smart. Actually, she had the best line ever. They were all flying back from Los Angeles to New York, and Chris kept coming up and talking to Lorne, sucking up. So, after the third or fourth time he came by sucking up to Lorne, she turned to him and said, “Pace yourself, Tubby. It’s a long flight.” I think that’s why he loved her. A funny woman who’s attractive and smart, now that’s what you want.