Gasping for Airtime (7 page)

Herlihy, who had given up a career as a successful lawyer to become a writer, taught me the rules of sketch writing. On the show that Newhart hosted, near the end of my second year, Herlihy sat me down and structured a Ricki Lake sketch. It turned out that there was a whole vocabulary for writing sketches that I had never heard. You don’t want to tip the sketch, meaning give away the reason for the sketch in the first thirty seconds so there is no reason to keep watching. The shows in the seventies routinely tipped the sketches—the cast dressing up as bees and doing
The Honeymooners
; the moment you see the bee suit the joke is over. There was also an entire art to revealing the host. If it’s The Rock in drag, the question becomes, when do you see that? Him being in the
sketch
isn’t the reveal; him being in drag is. You also don’t want to make it too jokey, Herlihy explained, or hit it too on the head. You just want to knock out the beats—the jokes—and make it work.

Some of the cast were amazingly self-contained and didn’t need much help from anyone. Mike Myers was at the top of that list. I never saw him around the offices for more than twenty minutes after the pitch meeting, let alone watched him go from door to door asking for input. He was a strange bird because he was the model of efficiency. Rhythm, shmythm. The Mike Myers sketch was a science, and he perfected it.

Myers wrote his sketches alone. He knew exactly how they should sound and how long they should be. The sketches were always funny, they made the host funny, and they were often franchise sketches. At no time in my two years did any of his sketches ever need rewriting. He would hand in a “Coffee Talk” sketch and it would be flawless. The Harvard writers in particular really disliked seeing one of his sketches on the table. One night Dave Mandel was reading a “Coffee Talk” sketch full of Yiddish, and he threw up his hands. “I don’t even know what any of this means!” Mandel yelled. Duh, that was the whole point. I remember once asking why Myers’s sketches even needed to be rewritten. No one responded or even gestured. You can respond to an eye roll or a shrug of the shoulders, but not to a blank stare.

One of the few true collaborations I experienced was when Travolta hosted. The sketch was “
Welcome Back, Kotter
Directed by Quentin Tarantino.” The Sweathogs were Travolta as Barbarino; Tim Meadows as Washington; Mike Myers as Kotter; David Spade as Horshack; Sandler as Epstein; Janeane Garofalo as Julie; and I played Mr. Woodman, the principal. Dave Mandel, Al Franken, and I were hammering out the beats late one night in Franken’s office and things were clicking. We weren’t tipping the sketch or making it too jokey, and it felt great.

Mandel knew
Reservoir Dogs
the best, Franken knew the show, and I know both well enough to round out the beats. All the lines I suggested were good, and they were met with positive reinforcement. Franken would throw his head back, slap his knee, and bellow with laughter. There was a slight hesitancy on my part, thinking that he might just be fucking with me. I didn’t know how to react to someone actually liking my ideas. We hammered that sketch out in six hours. That was an evening of quality.

The sketch opened with Myers (as Kotter) asking, “Did I ever tell you about my uncle Sid?” Then it launched into a rendition of “Little Brown Bags,” the
Reservoir Dogs
theme song. This was followed by the Sweathogs walking in slow motion to “Little Brown Bags.” I enter the room as Mr. Woodman and complain about the noise, at which point they all tie me to a chair and pour gasoline over my head. Travolta then dances toward me with a razor. Just before Travolta cuts off my ear, the door flies open and special guest Steve Buscemi bursts into the room brandishing a gun. The Sweathogs all pull their guns. It’s a Mexican standoff. Finally, all the guns go off at once and everyone drops dead.

Every once in a while, that week’s host would come along and play basketball with us. George Clooney was a great player. David Duchovny could hit a jump shot from anywhere on the floor. I basked in these evenings well into the next day, when someone would inevitably ask me, “What did you do last night?” Basketball wasn’t really my thing, but it felt great just to be running up and down the court.

When Jason Patric hosted, he arrived in the early afternoon. He had heard that we played basketball and wanted to know if he could play, and if so, where the gym was located. I didn’t know which gym we would be playing at yet, so I gave him my phone number and told him to call me at my apartment, where I was going to change clothes after the pitch meeting. When I walked in, the message light on my answering machine was blinking. I hit play and listened to a message from Jason Patric telling me he wasn’t going to be able to make it because he was exhausted from flying to New York and needed some sleep. I saved the message and played it like I had never heard it before when my roommate got home.

Saturdays should have been my favorite night of the week. Unlike Monday nights, when the building was pretty much empty by the time you got to work, Saturday nights were packed.
Saturday Night Live
was and still is the greatest show in town, and the hallways would be crowded with people who knew they were lucky to be in the way. A lot of celebrities came to the show, too. It wasn’t uncommon to be rushing from your dressing room to the stage and pass Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Charlize Theron or Paul Simon.

And Saturdays
were
my favorite nights—if I had a sketch on the air. If you weren’t in anything, you spent all of Saturday night in your dressing room watching everyone else have a great time. But if you had a sketch on the air, everything was perfect. Even if your sketch bombed, you were still accounted for. You had contributed to the history of the show. You could stand onstage during Good-nights and wave and shake hands and not feel like a phony.

Too often, however, I was not accounted for.

Every time Rob received a sushi delivery he would scrabble through his desk and take out a loupe like a jeweler preparing to examine a diamond. He would hold each piece of sushi up to the light and inspect it through the loupe. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was checking for worms. He would put the loupe in his eye as if he were staring at the Hope diamond. It was raw fish. “Here’s one!” he’d shout. He would hand me the loupe and I would go through the same jeweler motions he did and take a peek. Sure enough, I could make out tiny dots in the center of the sushi. This happened once a week. He told me that you always have to check sushi for worms because they were very common in Manhattan. Personally, I would have stopped ordering sushi, but not Rob. He ordered and inspected it every week.

With the Harvard guys, it was never pizza. It was “We’re ordering Portuguese, what do you want?” I didn’t even know what Portuguese food was. I would study the menu and it would be chicken followed by a Portuguese word and rice. The next night, someone would announce they were ordering Serbian food. Again, I’d ask for the menu and their eyes would roll, as if they were saying, “Jesus, Jay, don’t you know anything?” The first time they ordered Indian food, I remember thinking the second that it hit the plate that it smelled identical to the inside of a taxicab. Being a New Yorker, I was reluctant to eat the smell of another man. I put on a stiff upper lip and ate the lamb vindaloo. When I finished, I looked at my plate and saw that it was stained orange. I went to the men’s room and tried to clean it with the grainy, sandy soap. No matter how hard I scrubbed, the plate remained orange. It was then that I concluded anything that stains a plate so drastically is also staining my esophagus and my stomach.

Soon, every time I saw pizza boxes in the writers’ room, I would help myself to four slices, eat one, and stash the others in my office drawer for the inevitable night of Serbian deli takeout. Even with the food, I was out of the loop.

S
URPRISINGLY, THERE
weren’t many fistfights while I was on the show. Tempers flared and people screamed at each other, but for the most part, there were no brawls. The one fight I remember was one between Norm Macdonald and Ian Maxtone-Graham.

Ian was a writer who had graduated from Brown University. Jim Downey used to kid him about it. There were so many Harvard guys around (Downey included) that when Ian suggested something during rewrites, Downey would say, “Is that how they would write it at Brown, Ian?” or “Would that be the Brown version?”

Ian was always nice to me. He looked like a character out of
The Great Gatsby.
He wore scholarly glasses and even sported an ascot from time to time. He was very tall and rail thin. Whenever he entered a room, he was usually eating yogurt with nuts in it. He didn’t drink or smoke, and he came off as a bit of a square. Ian’s pet peeve was smoking. He was extremely vocal about his displeasure with people who smoked in the building.

The entire building was a nonsmoking building, but that was pretty much ignored on the seventeenth floor. A lot of
SNL
people smoked, and they weren’t about to wait for a night elevator to go downstairs and outside to have a butt. Oddly, there were no ashtrays on the seventeenth floor. Because of all the smokers in the history of the show, you would think that someone would’ve thought to bring up an ashtray.

Since most of the trash cans were filled with paper, tossing your butt in the garbage was not an option. Dave Attell and Norm both weren’t bothered by the lack of places to put a cigarette. Whenever either would put a cigarette down, he would stand it up on the filter end and leave it on the desk or table. If he didn’t touch it again, the cigarette would burn down to the filter and go out by itself. Sometimes I would walk into my office in the morning and find Dave asleep on the couch. Across his desk would be a line of cigarettes. Some he had forgotten about and left there, because there would be a long line of ash on the desk next to them. It looked like a little graveyard.

One Thursday evening during rewrites, Norm was sitting on the couch by the door inside the writers’ room. He was smoking and ashing into a soda can. Ian Maxtone-Graham walked into the room holding a cup of water. He stopped, looked down at Norm, and poured the entire cup of water over Norm’s head. Shocked, Norm sat there soaking wet.

The room grew quiet and then Norm stood up and punched Ian in the face. He really blasted him. All six feet eight inches of Ian went down, and the writers quickly jumped up and separated the two. Ian went home right after the fight and didn’t come back to work for about a week. I don’t know if it was pride or principle, but my man was AWOL. I found out a few days later that Ian was planning to sue NBC for not enforcing the nonsmoking policy. He was also going to take Norm to court for assault and battery.

A few days passed and word filtered in from the outside that Ian was doing well, wasn’t going to sue anybody, and would soon be returning to work.

Rob enjoyed dressing the new guys down in front of everyone. He would always call me rookie in front of the other writers. I was always more confused than upset because half of the writers were rookies, too. I don’t mind a little hazing, but after a while it got real old. The cycle of asshole would start with Schneider chiding me as a rookie in front of everyone and then proceeding to treat me like garbage for two weeks straight. Then, for some bizarre reason, he would wander into my office and start massaging my shoulders and ask, “How have you been, man?” With Ellen you always knew where you stood—out of her way. With Rob, you never knew which guy was showing up.

Schneider and Spade almost fought once. I don’t know what the issue was, but for about a week Rob was walking around the offices saying: “Spade wants to kick my ass! What the fuck is his problem?” We all found it quite comical. The two smallest guys ever to be on the show were gearing up for a schoolyard fistfight. After a while, that died down, too.

Despite our differences, Rob was one of the few writers or cast members who really went out of their way to help me. Strange but true. (There’s no possible way that Christopher Walken doing “Psychic Friends Network” would have made it on the air on the show Jeff Goldblum hosted without Rob’s help.) Once Rob stopped acting like an asshole and encouraged me to put together a musket sketch based on a real-life shopping trip of mine. I had gone to an antiques store to buy a musket to hang over my fireplace. The musket salesman told me the gun still worked. When I explained that I didn’t have a license, the guy told me that I didn’t need one because the firearm was an antique. Then I started thinking, How would you feel if you got mugged by a guy with a musket? Imagine you are jogging on a trail in the woods and a guy jumps out of a bush with a musket and tells you not to move. Methodically he begins packing the powder into the gun—warning you, as he toils away, to remain still. The punch line of the sketch would be that once he shoots, you are too far away for him to hit you anyway.

Rob and I wrote up a three-page sketch about two Revolutionary War soldiers who couldn’t get their muskets loaded fast enough and ended up being blown to bits. The sketch never made it on the air, but I use the musket story in my stand-up to this day.

Another time Rob and I were in his office writing and I suggested we put Al Franken in the sketch. Rob cautioned me, “You don’t want to do that.” When I asked why not, he led me out of his office and down the hall. We passed photo after photo as Rob ran his finger along the wall so he wouldn’t miss the one he was looking for. Finally we came to a photo from 1976. It was a photo of the sketch where Garrett Morris is having a white sale. In the photograph you see Belushi, standing with his gut out. Bill Murray is off to the side, looking like the least desirable white guy you could buy. In the middle of the picture stood Al Franken. His chest was pushed out and he had a look on his face like he was taking a dump. Rob pointed to Al in the photo, said, “That’s why,” and walked away.

Rob Schneider, my antihero.

When I asked
SNL
bandleader G. E. Smith how much of the sketch was false, he told me none of it. He pulled me into his office, picked up a guitar, and started strumming. He told me to watch his left hand on the neck of the guitar. He swore he could play fifteen Aerosmith songs and never move a finger. I didn’t believe him until he launched into “Cryin’,” then “Crazy,” without changing the position of any of his fingers on the fret. He put together a quick medley of Aerosmith songs to prove his point. He was right. Through five different hits, his hand never budged.

In a way, I resented Sandler. Not Adam the person, but the audience’s familiarity with Adam. I felt that if I could just get on the air more often, people would become familiar with me and look forward to a sketch I was in. Having an audience know who you are as a performer is an amazing freedom. It’s true of stand-up comedy. When you reach the status of headliner, doing stand-up becomes easier. You don’t have to worry about winning everyone over. You are the reason everyone has assembled. Hundreds of people have gathered in a room because they already like your sense of humor. With this, your audience becomes much more patient. They are far more willing to climb out on a wire with you. On
Saturday Night Live,
I had the same audience rapport as an open-mike comic. They didn’t know who I was, so whenever I was onstage I felt a sense of urgency to prove to everyone that I was funny.

Even when I was doing a killer sketch, I always felt like the audience was wondering who was under the prosthetic. When I played Don Rickles, my entire face was covered. I was in the makeup chair for three hours. I had a bald cap on and they fitted me with big jowls and made me new lips. I was unrecognizable. While in the makeup, I walked around the hallways and no one knew who I was. Everyone thought I was an old man in a tuxedo walking around. I walked up behind my manager and told him to get out of my way as Rickles. When he turned around, he apologized and stepped aside. I should have gone out and robbed banks with that makeup on.

I played Don Rickles in a sketch about NFL football moving to Fox. The premise of the sketch was that Fox was using all of its different television stars doing commentary for the game. Rickles and Richard Lewis, played by Adam Sandler, were in a Fox sitcom at the time. Chris Farley played John Madden, who tossed to Rickles and Lewis via satellite. Sandler did a pretty good Richard Lewis, but I still think my Rickles was perfect. When I spoke in the sketch, no one even giggled. They didn’t know who I was. They really had no idea, and spent every moment of every line I had trying to place me. I again overheard people in the audience whispering things like “Is that Spade?” and “No! I bet it’s Mike Myers!” Sorry, folks, but it’s me, Jay, and if you would just give me your undivided attention for a few minutes I will blow your balls off with this impression I’m doing over here. The sketch went over well and got its share of laughs. Just not when I spoke.

During a commercial break, Sandler and I were standing under the bleachers in the studio waiting to go onstage. I had shaved my chest to look more like Joe Perry. I was wearing leather pants and a cool wig with long curly hair, and I had a guitar slung around my neck. Sandler was dressed just like Steven Tyler. His wig was perfect and his clothes were right on the money—except that he was wearing a pair of sunglasses that looked like Elton John’s. I told him before we walked under the bleachers that I thought the sunglasses were wrong, but he disagreed. With about thirty seconds left in the commercial break, I tried again, telling him that he should get a better pair of sunglasses. He glared at me.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up!” Adam yelled.

I was stunned. Looking back, I realize my timing was inappropriate. Since he had written the sketch for himself and was gracious enough to include me, what the hell did I care what kind of sunglasses he had on? But I did care. For some reason I cared a lot. I looked Sandler in the eye to see if he was serious. He was.

Then I looked up and noticed we were standing a few feet in front of the overhang of the bleachers. About twenty audience members were reaching over the railing, desperately trying to touch Sandler. I wanted to hit him or at least shout back, but I couldn’t help but feel forty eyes on me—twenty people who if they saw Adam Sandler and a guy in a curly wig in a fistfight would dive out of the bleachers and kick the shit out of me.

The worst part for me was that they all saw the entire exchange. I must have looked like a real asshole telling Adam Sandler to change his sunglasses. There wasn’t time to think of a response because we were soon whisked onto the stage for the sketch. We performed the sketch and it killed.

As we walked off the stage, Sandler came up to me. “We’re good,” he said. “Respect.”

He didn’t apologize and neither did I. We didn’t have to. Respect.

The first match happened in the graphics room, which was located halfway between Lorne’s office and the writers’ room. The graphics room was a great place to go if you didn’t want anyone to bother you. When you were tired of the phone calls and sick of people popping into your office, you could always find places such as the graphics room where no one would even think to look for you. Fred Wolf, David Spade, Chris Farley, and I were in there shooting the shit and kicking some ideas around for sketches. Mostly they came up with ideas and I stood there and watched. I had run out of ideas long ago, but I knew if I hung around I might wind up in something by accident.

Somehow the conversation turned to the subject of wrestling. I had wrestled in high school, and Fred and I had talked earlier in the year about possibly doing a high school wrestling sketch. We ran the idea by Jim Downey, but nothing ever came of it. Fred suggested to Chris that despite his size advantage I could probably beat him in a match. Chris bellowed, “Shut up, Fred!”

Now, Chris was well over 300 pounds, and I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of locking horns with him. Fred and Spade would talk out an idea and Fred would end by saying something like “And then Jay can come out and pin Chris.” Chris was turning red and my stomach was churning. Spade got into it, too, and began goading Chris. They both told Chris that if they had to bet, their money was on me to win the wrestling match. With that, it was on.