I will say one thing in Paris’s favor, though. We rehearsed a sketch in which we were to play Donald and Melania Trump that included a full liplock—and yes, Ma, I know where her mouth has been, too. It didn’t make the final cut, but we did do a sketch in which I kissed her on the cheek—she has absolutely the best skin of any human ever.
While no one else ever did anything that egregious, there were occasionally hosts who threw a wrench into the proceedings. In December 2000, Val Kilmer had the hosting duties. To me and my father, Val was the best Doc Holliday ever to be played on the big screen, which he did opposite Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp in the 1993 film Tombstone. During Val’s SNL monologue, we did a spoof of It’s a Wonderful Life in which I played Clarence the angel, who walks Val around the studio, showing him how things would have gone if he had decided not to host.
Seconds before air, I was told by a stage manager that Val looked at one of the cue cards and said, “I’m not doing that one. I don’t like it.”
I was told, “Handle this.”
By omitting the part he didn’t want to do, Val left a gap that I had to bridge coherently off the top of my head. By then I’d been on the show for five years, so I’d gotten the hang of it, and I was able to walk us through the sketch without anyone being the wiser.
I remember one episode for the sheer beauty of the guests. Sting was the musical guest, and he had the best male physique I’ve ever seen. When I saw him during rehearsal, I thought, That yoga shit must work.
Elle McPherson hosted that same show. She was the first supermodel I’d seen up close. She was taller than I’d expected. Exquisite from top to bottom—God had obviously spent a lot of time on her. During rehearsal, she fell off the stage, and her enormous splendid frame plopped on the ground with a violence that would have put someone else in the hospital, but she got up and dusted herself off the way an incredibly well-constructed physical creature would.
When former cast member Phil Hartman came back to host, I tried to lay a compliment on him as he was entering the theater. He didn’t respond. He just looked around and said, “Watch and learn, boys. Watch and learn.” I don’t know if he was serious, but it blew my shit away. I was in awe of him.
The host who spent the most time with me was Sylvester Stallone. We talked about the Everglades. No, really, he was a big fan of the Everglades. It was early in my run at SNL, the beginning of my third season, and he left an autographed picture of himself in my office. He inscribed it, “Dear Darrell, Thank you for letting me bask in your talent.” Nice guy.
In 2004, Robert De Niro hosted. As you might imagine, the proposed sketches were going to have at least something to do with the mob. Even my pal Eddie Galanek got in on the action. Drawing from a real conversation he’d overheard when he was working undercover with the Gambinos, Eddie wrote a sketch about two wiseguys having a conversation that went something like this:
“I gotta do what I gotta do.”
“Then I gotta do what I gotta do.”
“You’re telling me that you gotta do what you gotta do because I gotta do what I gotta do? Don’t tell me you gotta do what you gotta do because I gotta do what I gotta do, because I gotta do what I gotta do!”
Since it would have been odd for a script to be submitted with a member of the security staff’s name on it, a writer named Lauren Pomerantz, who writes for Ellen DeGeneres now, and I submitted it under our own names. Everybody laughed at read-through, but another writer had also written a wiseguy sketch, and Lorne didn’t want to do two, so Eddie’s got cut.
But among the true highlights for me was the opportunity to meet two of my heroes. They weren’t hosts, but if I hadn’t been on SNL I probably wouldn’t have met either one of them.
Eddie Murphy was the first impressionist I ever saw who was always funny. One day, he was doing The Rosie O’Donnell Show, which taped down the hall, and he strolled over to me and said, “I think your shit is freakish. Heh heh heh.” He did his laugh. I was like, Oh, my God. The distance between here and the closet in my childhood bedroom where I used to hide with a bottle of vodka cannot be measured. I stumbled all over myself, trying to have a conversation with someone who inspired me so much. My ability to perform is limited to the stage; in private moments, I have no social skills whatsoever.
I met Richard Pryor near the end of his life when he was very sick with multiple sclerosis. I thought, Fuck it, you’re my hero, and I have a chance to do this. I’m going to do it. I kissed him on the head.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Politics for Dummies
Washington, D.C.
2000s
One of the strangest things that came out of impersonating so many prominent politicians and news figures was that people thought I actually knew something about politics. Journalists were always asking my opinion about this, and my opinion about that, like I knew something. I’d tell them, “I’m a fucking clown.” I’m not kidding when I tell you I have a copy of Politics for Dummies on my bookshelf at home. I was disheartened when I realized that to make what I thought was an informed judgment or decision, I would practically have to go to back to college and study economics, theology, history, and military strategy. I mean what, really, is a caucus? I still don’t know.
I think they also wondered why I didn’t hate anybody, why I never took sides. How do you hate a guy you’re studying so closely? To do so would be to endorse the notion that there are people who come to Washington to not do their best, and I truly don’t believe that, no matter what side of the aisle they’re on.
There was a strange hybrid documentary about the 2000 presidential election that ran on PBS in the fall of 2002 that I was invited to participate in, but in character. So in between serious segments that addressed the procedures and the ultimate fairness of the election that put Bush 43 into the Oval Office, replete with policy wonks and analysts and whatnot, I’d pop up in the guise of Clinton or Gore or Cheney, and crack a joke. I’m not sure why producer Fred Silverman thought the combination of serious documentary and my humor was a good idea, but the end result baffled the reviewers.
In the fall of 2004, SNL put together a “Best of Darrell Hammond” episode, which made me the first cast member to have one of those while still on the show. (Let’s just say, the show isn’t available anywhere, and that’s because it sucks, which was partly my fault.) In advance of the show’s airing, Chris Matthews invited me on Hardball, which I agreed to do as long as he didn’t ask me about politics. I guess Chris didn’t get the message because when I got there, all he wanted to talk about was the midterm election and who I thought was going to win. He asked me about the Iraq War, for God’s sake. I had no idea.
One network called me to comment on one of President Bush’s State of the Union speeches. Are you serious?
I used to call in to Laura Ingraham’s radio show a lot. I called in once as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was a great bit that she and I put together. She’s talking to her sidekick, then all of a sudden the theme from The Exorcist begins to play. Laura is informed Timothy McVeigh, who had just lost his last appeal before his execution scheduled for a few days later, is on the line.
“So sorry, y’all, that music follows me wherever I go,” I said.
We shoot the shit for a few minutes, and then she says, “You’re going to go down as one of the worst murderers in history.”
And McVeigh says, “In what sense?”
When the bit was over, I was played off by one of my old favorites, “Build Me Up, Buttercup.”
Another time I went on her show with Chris and Kathleen Matthews. I played Chris, and he and Kathleen were, obviously, themselves. You can imagine the how crazy that got, with two Chris Matthewses screaming emphatically at the same time.
Laura and I hung out together a fair amount, and she was instrumental in the first time I did Rumsfeld. She was going with me to Rosie O’Donnell’s studio, and we came up with a bit in the car together.
In character as Donald Rumsfe
ld: “Al Quaeda says they’re a spiritual people who want to find God by dying in a war with the West. To hell with it, let’s help ’em out!”
I was totally impressed by Tim Russert, whom I met backstage at an event I did for NBC president Jeff Zucker at the St. Regis in New York, where there is a well-used ballroom on the twenty-third floor for banquets and such. Russert and I chatted, but I didn’t want the conversation to go too far because I worried that pretty soon he was going to ask me about the budget or, Who’s your financial planner?—shit I didn’t know anything about.
Eddie Galanek sometimes did security for Jim Cramer, the CNBC money guy, when he was on the road, so Eddie got this idea that Cramer and I should meet. With Cramer’s outlandish gesturing, Eddie thought he’d be a great character for me to do on the show. One afternoon, Eddie took me out to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to the CNBC studios. When we got to Cramer’s office, he was going on about this one company, explaining the product they made, where they were going with it, the profit they were going to make. Then he said, “I’ll be right back, I just gotta go grab something.” As he walked away, I turned to Eddie and said, “He doesn’t know I’m a moron about this kind of stuff?”
Maria Bartiromo showed me around the stock exchange one day and tried to explain how it all worked. Finally, I had to interrupt her. “I don’t understand any of this. There are numbers everywhere.”
But it was apparent that some of the media had really confused me for the people I played on television. Deborah Norville’s people called me feverishly for two weeks to get me on her show. When I showed up in the studio, she walked right by me. She had no idea who I was out of costume. In the same vein, I was invited to Larry King’s show—I’d met him and his wife at an event in D.C.—but on the air he called me Darrell Hayman.
Regardless of my patent ignorance, a lot of the power players I impersonated on television invited me to perform for them privately.
On the back of my Ted Koppel impression on SNL, I was invited to an event honoring the celebrated newsman at the Museum of Broadcasting. They had me come dressed as Koppel, with the big orange wig and the fake nose. I stood outside the room where the party was being held while Sam Donaldson stood at the podium, drink in hand, giving a slightly moist appreciation of Ted Koppel. I overheard him say something along the lines of, “Then we chartered a plane and we went to St. Louie. I said, ‘Ted, to St. Louie? You test the elasticity of my credulity.’ ”
Then it was my turn. Everyone turned to look at me as I walked into the room, and I was terrified to see the great man himself. I turned to him and, in his voice, I said, “Are you mad at me?”
He looked at me and said, “No, I’m not mad at you. Give me the microphone.”
I handed him the mic, and he turned to Roone Arledge, who was the president of ABC, and said, “Roone Arledge, you cheap bastard, if you paid me a living wage I could afford a decent rug like this guy’s got on.”
The audience laughed and applauded, and I was allowed to leave.
At a party at the Waldorf, I found myself on a panel near former president George H. W. Bush. I told a joke I told at many business conventions: “President Bush and President Clinton have become good friends, and President Bush has only served one term, so he could run again. Why not name Bill Clinton as his V.P.? I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.
“Clinton says, ‘Let me get this straight, you want me to be your vice presidential candidate? That would really piss off Hillary.’
[Pause for effect.]
“ ‘I’ll do it.’ ”
The Waldorf exploded. And I was delighted to see I’d made another president of the United States laugh at my jokes. I chatted with him for a few minutes beforehand at a cocktail reception, and he told me how much he loved Dana Carvey’s impression of him. But I was always afraid the president said to the Secret Service later: “That guy’s a dick.” What if you got called a dick by a president? You’d take it to heart, wouldn’t you?
One Washington insider told me, “You know, you’re going to have to take one side or the other if you’re going be a player in this town.” I was like, “I don’t want to be a player.”
Thanks to Bob Barnett, who was both Clinton and Cheney’s lawyer, I got to have the extraordinary experience of being alone in a room with President Clinton. I was doing The Tonight Show, and Clinton was giving a speech to the California Bar Association at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I was staying. When I found out he was going to be there, I called Bob and told him I’d love to shake the president’s hand, if that were at all possible. The next thing I know, I got a call in my room: “The president will see you.” So I went downstairs to a meeting room where he was cooling his heels until his speech. He greeted me like we were old friends. At first there were a couple of Secret Servicemen, then they excused themselves and it was just us. There was a little table with food and soft drinks (nothing says you’ve arrived at the inner sanctum of power like light refreshments). At the time, the former president was working in conjunction with the first President Bush on disaster relief efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina had destroyed the city.
I heard my voice say, “You like him, don’t you?” I couldn’t believe how cheeky that was of me. Like this was any of my business.
Then I heard his voice say, “I do. The only difference between us was domestic policy.”
Did anyone else hear that?
Then he went out and spoke for forty-seven minutes and got a standing ovation. Grammatically perfect, vivid, lucid, powerful prose. He mentioned me twice.
Thanks to my Cheney impression on SNL, starting with the 2000 election, I was invited to George W. Bush’s second inauguration in January 2005. I had access to the White House if I wanted to go hang out. During the main event, Cheney rose up out of the floor in the middle of Madison Square Garden, his hands in his pockets, surrounded by 35,000 revelers. It was the greatest theater I’d ever seen, Cheney with that lopsided grin on his face looking out at the world like a conquering hero. It was an unimaginable display of power.
Afterward, Cheney had me up to his box. He shook my hand warmly as he always did. He introduced me to a man whose eyes seem to suggest he knew all of the secrets to the universe. The man looked at me the way the workers at Sea World would look at the fish. Cheney said, “This is Darrell. He’s the guy who does all the damage on SNL. Heh heh heh.” And the guy just looked at me.
Cheney patted me on the shoulder as if to say, “He’s not so bad. He’s just doing his job.”
As part of the inaugural festivities, I was invited to perform for the troops at an event hosted by Kelsey Grammer at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C. Bush 43 gave me a tremendous bear hug and said, “You lost quite a bit of tonnage.” I have to say, it’s different getting a personal comment from the president of the United States than from, say, a bus driver. What are you suggesting, Mr. President? But I thought it was a funny line, and I laughed.
During my performance, I said, “Mr. President, not many people get a chance to talk to you. I’d like to make use of this opportunity, because I know I could either crack wise or try to make a difference. So I would like to ask you, Mr. President, is there anything you can do about Brad and Jen?”
He laughed hard. Once again, the thrill of hearing a president laugh at something I said. But it should be noted that joke was written by Beth Armogida, who writes for Steve Martin and the Oscar show, and who has saved my ass on more than one occasion by sending me last-second one-liners.
Cheney was the best laugher of all. He didn’t have Clinton’s famous charm, but I’d say shit and he’d crack up. He was always very nice to me. I ended up performing for him at his Christmas parties, at White House functions, and at various private events.
Once, the vice president summoned me to the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, about a five-hour drive from Washington, D.C.—one of the most fascinating, unsettling gigs I ever did.
Th
e Greenbrier was famous as a congressional hideaway, filled with subterranean bunkers built in the 1960s during the Cold War. The vice president’s people had sent a car to pick me up at the airport, and I was hustled through a maze of underground rooms (the vice president was still taking precautions in the wake of 9/11) until I found Cheney and about forty of his buddies—including Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert—eating and drinking and laughing.
Once again, it wasn’t so much Darrell Hammond who was invited but Bill Clinton, so I showed up in character, ready to poke some fun at the gathered Republican power brokers. I started out with a joke about Cheney’s pacemaker—that every time he sneezes, garage doors start to open all over the neighborhood.
At one point, I looked out across the room and thought, Man, it doesn’t get any weirder than this. In fact, it was weird squared. After I’d zinged the key players, I spent the rest of the evening hanging out with these guys. There didn’t seem to be any reason for the gathering; it was just a bunch of pals having a good time. Everybody wanted to pose for a photo with “Bill Clinton.” There was one great shot of me reaching out to shake Cheney’s hand, the vice president recoiling in mock horror.
When I attended an event at the vice president’s residence in 2006, where I would be simply myself, Lorne took the precaution of sending his fantastic assistant Lindsay Shookus, who is as good a conversationalist as has ever lived, to accompany me. When I was introduced to Chief Justice Roberts, it became immediately apparent that I didn’t know how to talk to a guy who was fourteen or fifteen times smarter than me. You don’t have to keep talking to me. You’re a very nice guy, Chief Justice Roberts, but you and I both know that pretty soon you’re gonna get bored with this. You’re going to want to talk about torts and meaningful shit, books you’ve read about the galaxy, and I won’t know anything. And that will be bad. I’ll be embarrassed. He was very nice, but I was relieved when Lindsay took over.
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 16
