God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem

by Darrell Hammond

  There isn’t that much cracking up on air, but it’s a guaranteed laugh from the studio audience if you suddenly slip and giggle. I was pretty good at keeping it together, although it was a struggle whenever Amy Poehler’s Kelly Ripa climbed all over my Regis Philbin. But I out-and-out lost it on a few occasions when something unexpected happened.

  The first time was in my third season, when we were doing a sketch called “Riding My Donkey Political Talk Show.” It was me, Will Ferrell, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer, and Jim Breuer. It was exactly what the title said it was, a political talk show that took place while riding donkeys. I was playing Sam Donaldson.

  At one point in dress rehearsal, my donkey turned around and looked at me, then looked at my crotch as if thinking, “Excuse me, but are those balls by any chance? I’d really like to find out.” And went for it. The sketch fell apart, but—assuming we could get the donkeys under control—it showed a lot of potential.

  By the time we got on air, the donkeys had been sedated or something. I was wearing a catcher’s cup, just in case. When my donkey whirled his head to see if my crotch still existed and tried to make a go for it, his legs went out from under him. We all started laughing. All the donkeys were having trouble keeping their footing. I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen anywhere.

  The next time, in March 2002, was during one of my favorite sketches ever, with Horatio Sanz and Sir Ian McKellen. Horatio was genius playing a Turkish talk show host, Ferey Muhtar, and in a rare instance where I didn’t do an impression, I was his Turkish Ed McMahon, Tarik. Ian McKellen played a Turkish dance club owner who was a guest on the show. All three of us were wearing dark wigs and mustaches, and everybody was smoking cigarettes.

  It was funny enough when Horatio started the sketch blathering in faux Turkish slang, and then Sir Ian came on and kept touching his package, which cracked the house up. I didn’t realize that my mustache was coming off, and every time I spoke, it flopped around my face. As I’m speaking the line to Sir Ian, “Don’t give me that suck job, man,” he reached over and tried to reattach my mustache. I tried to stay in character, but the audience was howling, and I lost it. Horatio giggled every time he looked at me—the reattachment failed, so the mustache kept flapping. Finally Horatio ad-libbed, “We all know you got a drinking problem, man, c’mon! You got the fake ’stache! You can’t even grow a ’stache, man!” By the end of the sketch, the mustache was gone, Horatio—staying in character by the merest of threads—was saying “We’ve got a show to do, bro!” and I could barely speak my lines, I was laughing so hard.

  The third time happened during a cold open in 2004, a re-creation of the last episode of Friends, but with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld leaving the Bush White House instead of Rachel leaving Ross. I played Rumsfeld opposite Will Forte’s Bush (he’d taken over the recurring role after Will Ferrell left the show). I remember the script was still being written as we were approaching the stage, so I didn’t have a handle on all of it. A lot of it was shown to me on paper, but I hadn’t seen the cue cards yet. It didn’t really matter, because the house exploded into the loudest laugh I ever heard when Rumsfeld and Bush embraced in a big full-mouth make-out. As we unclasped, I turned to the camera to say “Live from New York,” and Will snuck in two extra kisses to the side of my face that weren’t part of the script. That was the only time I was fully facing the camera when I cracked.

  When I walked offstage, Jeff Zucker said, “Classic.” He seemed very pleased.

  The last notable time happened in 2007, when Molly Shannon came back to host the show. Molly is a genius at four-minute theater, and she always held something back during rehearsal that she’d spring on us on air. No one has ever consistently blown the roof off a place quite like she did.

  During this show, we did a sketch where I was Dan Rather moderating a presidential debate between fringe candidates that included Bill Hader as Tony Blair, Amy Poehler as Dennis Kucinich, Maya Rudolph as Fantasmagoria Purlene Robinson, Andy Samberg as Lord Simon Frothingham, and a bunch of others—you can imagine how bizarre it was.

  When it was over, I had three minutes to change from staid newscaster Rather to Jersey gangster Tony Soprano for a sketch in which Tony auditions a new dancer for the Bada Bing club. I was backstage in one of the change booths under the bleachers—where we went when there wasn’t even time to go to the quick-change booths down the hall—while someone from hair pulled Rather’s wig off me and then squeezed an almost-baldy wig on; someone from wardrobe helped me out of the suit and into a bowling shirt and slacks; someone from makeup took one nose off and put another on; and someone else from makeup dabbed me with foundation. If I’d had time, I would have gone over to the cue card department, under the bleachers on the other side of the studio, to have at least a quick look at the final dialogue, but there was no time. In the middle of this, a piece of scaffolding fell on my head.

  By the time the three minutes were up and we went on air, my eyelashes were semi-glued together, I had pancake in my mouth, and I was trying to get the sting out of my eyes. I looked up at the cue cards and I didn’t recognize the dialogue—at all. I was so thrown by everything that had just happened that my Tony voice came out like Brando with a New York accent, which, as it turned out, worked well enough to get the laughs, but it was not what I had planned.

  Then Molly came out. She was playing her recurring character Sally O’Malley, who always proudly declaimed, “I’m fifty years old!” With an unflattering red knit pantsuit and a white handbag slung over her arm, Molly attempted to dance provocatively around the stripper pole. I interrupted her “moves” to tell her she was too old, but nobody puts Sally O’Malley down: Molly hiked up her pants halfway to her chest to reveal the biggest camel toe ever seen on live television. Molly pointed to her “desert rose,” then put her foot on the top of my head, forcing me to look right at her crotch. The place was complete thunder, and I was gone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I Saw What You Did, and I Know Who You Are

  If I’ve learned anything on this earth, it is that people will pay money to laugh. Recession or no recession, war in the Middle East or tornadoes in the Midwest, the Comedy Cellar is packed every Friday night. Say you’re bored on a Friday afternoon, you want something to do, so you go see a comic do a sixty-minute show. On a good day, that’s five laughs a minute—a laugh every twelve seconds for an hour. That’s three hundred laughs. I think that’s worth a two-drink minimum.

  During the SNL season, from September to May, I went to the Cellar to work on new impressions Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays. I never went on Wednesdays, because that was read-through, and obviously I didn’t go on Friday or Saturday (except for that late show at Caroline’s after SNL). During the summer hiatus, I hit the national circuit.

  Once I was on the LIVE! with Regis & Kelly show, and I was getting ready to say good-bye when someone handed Regis a card to read. “Darrell Hammond will be at the Improv in Baltimore this week.” He looked over at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Improv in Baltimore?” That eyebrow said, What in the world are you doing that for?

  Truth is, I didn’t turn many jobs down. I knew that one day SNL would end, and the chances of having a second career in show business were slim to none, so I wanted to make every single cent that I could possibly make. I had a lot of energy. I drank a lot of Red Bull. I’m not blowing smoke up their ass because I want an endorsement deal (although I do). I discovered that magic elixir on weekends when I would fly to Arizona or some other place on the far side of the country, and I’d get wicked jet lag. I’d do an hour of stand-up already tired as fuck, and still have to face a second show. The audience would be rowdy and noisy and not paying attention, so I’d have to be at my über-best to score and control them. A couple of Red Bulls, and I’d be crystal clear. I’ll be honest, the best performances I’ve ever given were while riding that Red Bull wave. And I’m not saying that because I want a contract (which I do).

  I don’t know if it’s com
edy in particular, or fame in general, or maybe it’s just me, but I seem to attract strange women. Not my wife, and not some of my significant others, but out there in the world, my molecules seem to cry out to the oddballs, “Hey, wanna hang out?”

  I was sitting in the Cellar one night after a show when a girl came and sat down. She was in her mid-twenties, and had been watching SNL since she was a kid. She talked about the minimalist approach I took to Cheney, and the lyrical swoon of Clinton. I thought she was an English major. I was very impressed.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I’m a fetishist,” she said.

  “What is that?”

  “I jerk people off with my feet.”

  I should have won an Academy Award for keeping my composure.

  “Can you make a good living?” I asked, as though she’d told me she did something as ordinary as trading pork futures on the Commodities Exchange.

  “Oh, yeah. I go to their apartment or sometimes a hotel. We talk about Chaucer or Rembrandt for a while, drink some wine, then I jerk ’em off with my feet. I charge a lot of money for that.”

  Then she said, “I kind of have a crush on you. Would you be interested?”

  A little alarm bell went off. No matter how cheery and well put together she was, something told me to sit this one out.

  “You know what? Maybe another time.” I’ve regretted it since.

  Another night I went to a club on the Lower East Side with a runway model, and everything in the place was yellow. They had yellow plastic forks, yellow knives, and yellow plastic spoons, yellow napkins, yellow counters, yellow walls, and yellow cups.

  There was a guy speaking French to somebody playing chess. His fingernails were really long and dirty, his hair was matted and speckled with dandruff. He started talking to me about a sketch that I’d done on SNL.

  Meanwhile, this runway model, who was ostensibly my date, wandered off into the back room.

  “What’s back there?” I asked.

  “Some of the guys back there will trade coke for sex.”

  Oh. Of course.

  Sometimes the women were more than strange. Sometimes they were dangerous.

  My second stalker was an amateur. A Turkish woman who showed up downstairs at the security desk asking to see me. She claimed my nonexistent brother was the father of her baby and she wanted money. She should have done a little more research on my family tree before she got to work, don’t you think?

  The first stalker, however, was quite accomplished.

  I met this attractive, charming, well-spoken woman at the Cellar one night in the early years of the millennium. She was a fan, we hit it off, and I invited her back to my place.

  When we got to my apartment, she said, “I have to use the facilities,” and as she walked toward the bathroom, she turned and looked at me—it was as if someone else’s eyes had been transplanted into her head. She might as well have said to me, “I saw what you did, and I know who you are.” Air raid sirens.

  “I’m not feeling well all of a sudden,” I said. “I need to go see some friends of mine.” I’d seen those eyes before, hadn’t I?

  I escorted her downstairs to a cab.

  Later that night, she called me. I didn’t pick up. She called again. And again. In total, she called about fifty times in the space of an hour. In most of the messages, she was screaming.

  I took the messages to the local precinct. There was one detective nearing the end of a brilliant career who took care of it, but it took time, because, as he said, “This animal needs to come out of the bushes a little bit more. She’s not going to be happy with just yelling at you. She wants more, and she’s going to eventually have to come out to get it. So we wait.”

  He eventually called her and said, “You need to understand that this is not going to work out for you. It’s going to be bad if you take this any further. I’m obliged to tell you that. I think it would be really great if you would just stop.”

  But he understood this kind of person. He knew she wasn’t going to stop, and she didn’t.

  Her next move was to have a friend of hers call this veteran detective and say he was a lawyer, telling the police what they couldn’t do. The boys at the precinct house just laughed.

  Then she sent a horrible note threatening my family, and that was enough. The detective and I went to the district attorney, and the DA said, “If we want to take her to trial, will you testify?”

  Ninety-nine point-nine-nine-nine percent of the time, once the DA and the NYPD get involved at the level they were prepared to get involved at, the harassment stops. Her friend got a call from the DA’s office, which was sufficient to change his mind about the things he’d said to the cops. Then the police went to her apartment, which I was told was done up like a shrine to me, with photos of me and interviews I’d done plastered all over the walls. They arrested her and incarcerated her at either the Tombs downtown or Riker’s Island. As the cops suspected, the experience was sufficiently horrific, and it was no longer worth it to her to continue. She copped a plea, and I never heard from her again.

  And yet, although they stopped her, they couldn’t stop the fear I’d developed. It’s hard to do comedy when someone’s threatening to kill you and your family. When someone has a gun and can shoot from the shadows, they might as well be a hundred feet tall—either way, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. They’ve let you know that they want to do you harm, they let you know they know where you are, and due to the stalker laws, they have to make some kind of threat on tape or on paper before the authorities can get involved. But even then, how much can they do if a person really wants to kill you? Put them in jail for a few days?

  It reached the point that I was leaving 30 Rock via the garage in the subbasement so that no one ever saw me exit the building.

  I didn’t want to stop going to the Cellar because it was really helpful to me to work out new material there. Eventually I called Estee and said, “I need to do a set, but you can’t advertise that I’m gonna be there.” Sometimes my friend Eddie Galanek—a former NYPD detective who’d spent a couple of years undercover with the Gambinos before he started doing security for SNL, scanning the audience for troublemakers and looking after the celebrity hosts—would come with me, but you can’t get a top bodyguard to come with you every fucking night.

  Still, you’ve got to be security conscious. You never know when you’re going to encounter some freak who was hit on the head when he was three years old at vacation Bible school after his dad molested him and spent the next ten years chained to the radiator in his grandma’s basement. It’s true that 99.9 percent of stalkers are adoring fans, but 0.1 percent is the guy chained to the radiator in his grandma’s basement, and that guy wants to kill you.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Host of Hosts

  For the hosts, being on SNL is a mixture of pampering and really hard work. They get lots of encouragement, lots of support, and there’s always an assistant or two floating around to make sure they have everything they need. There were some extremely famous people who walked onto that stage before, during, and after my tenure, but live television is a very different—and more daunting—experience from what most Hollywood celebrities are accustomed to. There are no retakes. You screw up, and millions of people will know about it. (Just ask musical guest Ashlee Simpson, who got caught lip-synching to the wrong song and walked offstage humiliated in 2009. If that weren’t bad enough, 60 Minutes was on set that week, so the fiasco was replayed for a second time to a brand-new audience.) For the most part, people are on their best behavior as they walk through the hallowed halls of Saturday Night Live. No one wants to feel like they’re going out in front of sixteen million people alone.

  Strangely enough, it wasn’t the showbiz people who seemed to have the easiest time of it. The athletes just expect that they’re going to figure out a way to do this. All of these hall-of-fame superstars would walk in seeming to think, Yeah, this is how I do things—I
win. Tom Brady was fabulous. Peyton Manning was amazing. Jeter was great. According to the security guys—and they knew dirt on everybody—Jeter is one of the classiest guys going. He certainly behaved that way around SNL. Sometimes while raising my kid, I’d think, What would Jeter do? (When I did Trump, as I left the stage, I would say, “And Derek Jeter’s going to be there,” as a tip of the hat. Jeter’s Mr. New York City, as far as I’m concerned.)

  Donald Trump was the same way. Trump doesn’t quite understand defeat. Even when it occurs, it doesn’t register in his brain. He has been millions in debt and never developed a drug problem, like some people would have. He reminds me of the horse Native Dancer, one of the most famous thoroughbreds in racing history. Back in the 1950s, he was undefeated for three years running, and he became accustomed to going into the winner’s circle after every race. When he finally lost the Kentucky Derby, he trotted over to the winner’s circle anyway. Winning was all he knew.

  It reminds me of an old soft drink commercial where Larry Bird was supposed to miss a free throw. I’m not being guarded, the basket is only ten feet away, and you’re asking me to miss this shot? I don’t know how.

  When Trump hosted SNL, he dove in with tremendous enthusiasm. Here was one of the most famous men in the country asking more questions, spending more time with the cameraman, the lighting people, the costume people, than just about any other host I’d ever encountered.

  At one point, shortly before we went on the air, he said, “Let me ask you a question. If I deviate from the script for a second, will that make things seem more spontaneous?”

  Of course. Nothing could be more spontaneous.

  “And if it’s more spontaneous, it’s more real?”

  Yeah, and that makes it funny.