CHAPTER 3
DICK WENZELL:
As an actor, it took me a long time to learn how to let the character take me over, to lose myself in it. I think Chris figured that out very early in life, and he could hide himself by being anybody else that he wanted to be.
After Chris’s expulsion and subsequent stint at La Lumiere prep school, he was allowed to return to Edgewood for the whole of his senior year. He graduated in the spring of 1982 with little direction beyond a vague sense that he might one day work in the family business. But Chris’s father firmly believed that all of his children should receive a Catholic education, and so Chris found himself enrolled at Marquette, a Jesuit university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Though Chris’s grades did not make the cut for admission, they did qualify him for the university’s Freshman Frontiers Program, a preliminary summer school in which students could earn their way into the incoming class. Together with high school friend Dan Healy, Chris entered the program, passed, and began regular course work in the fall.
It has been said that college is less a place for academic achievement and more a rite of passage through which to discover oneself. By that standard, Chris’s years at Marquette were a ringing success. As always, he won friends easily, especially among the Marquette rugby team—the gung-ho, gonzo athletes who would become his ad hoc fraternity. Given the preferences of his father, and lacking any clear ones of his own, Chris started out in the business studies program. Bored and disinterested, he did not do well. However, as his understanding of his talents grew, he changed course and dedicated himself to a career in acting and comedy. Though his early attempts at performance were frequently clumsy, Chris kept at it with a dedication he had previously shown only in his football uniform.
As a Jesuit institution, Marquette teaches its students to pursue knowledge and personal growth not only for their own self-advancement but also for the glory of God and service to others. Chris’s four years in Milwaukee would give him the opportunity to do precisely that.
JIM MURPHY, friend:
When he first came to Marquette, he was a very preppy guy. Super preppy. He would always have his hair combed and always had polo shirts and khakis and Top-Siders. Then over time he would take those Ralph Lauren button-down oxfords and he’d rip the sleeves off. Then, in the next phase, the khakis became army fatigues and the oxfords turned into flannel shirts. It was the same thing everyone did in college. We all kind of came in as one thing and left as another.
FR. MATT FOLEY, friend:
The first time I saw Chris was on the rugby pitch. I was the president of the rugby team, and a sophomore. He was a freshman. He was wearing some kind of obnoxious chartreuse-colored polo shirt with argyle shorts and gym shoes. I was drawn to him right away because I thought, oh, this poor soul is going to get his ass kicked. The guys on the rugby team are a little rough, and here comes the preppy, portly kid. But he hustled and made many friends in no time because he was such a classic character.
One of the great things about Chris was that he was so very generous. Marquette would play Madison every year in rugby, so we went out there that fall. We’d been drinking all day, and Chris was like, “Let’s all go over to my place!”
We get there, and Mr. Farley and Mrs. Farley are just the most gracious hosts. All these drunk, dirty rugby guys are running around their house—this is around one in the morning—and Mrs. Farley is going, “Oh, you boys! Let me make some sandwiches.” And she just brought out all these beautiful sandwiches.
We rode back to Milwaukee in the back of a pickup, freezing our asses off. It had a camper top on it, but it wasn’t very warm. The bars in Madison closed at one, but the bars at Marquette didn’t close until three. You could close the bars in one town and still make it to close the bars in the other. That’s the rugby mentality at its finest.
KEVIN FARLEY:
When I got to Marquette, Chris had only been there two years, and he was already a legend, flat out the funniest guy on campus, and that really grew out of the rugby parties. The Avalanche was a typical Milwaukee bar. That’s where the rugby players would go party after their games. It had a great jukebox and a couple of pool tables. They had fifty-cent Red, White and Blue beers. When you finished your bottle, you threw it against the back wall of the bar.
Chris started doing this thing after the games: naked beer slides. Everyone in the bar would pour out their beer and he’d take off all his clothes and take a running start and slide across the bar like Pete Rose coming into home base. The Avalanche is long gone, but people still do it. It’s something of a Marquette tradition. People have built a legend around it.
JIM MURPHY:
It got to a point where every team coming in to play Marquette had heard about the beer slides and wanted to see them. Chris would start to take his clothes off, going, “Aw, man. Why do I always have to do this?” But he’d kind of set the tone early, and he always had to live up to himself.
PAT FINN, friend:
Any time during a game that there was a lull, or any opportunity for a laugh, you’d just look over at Chris. One game, we file in for this line out. Everyone is waiting for the inbound pass. Chris kind of looks over and then pulls up his pants into his ass like a thong. The whole other team just turns and stares, like, “What the hell’s with this guy?” Then, with the whole team distracted, Chris takes the pass and gets about twenty yards on the play. He was always hilarious.
DAN HEALY:
Freshman year of college, a group of us had done a road trip for some winter festival. It was freezing, snow everywhere, and we were goofing around, diving and playing in the snow. And while we were all screwing around, Chris just stopped cold. He stopped, and he turned to me and said, “I think I can make people laugh.”
He’d had an epiphany, literally. He was starting to realize that he had this ability, a calling in life.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
He saw his talent as a gift from God—there’s no doubt about that. I went away to seminary after his freshman year, but one thing I found fascinating about him in those two semesters was that he had a tremendous faith life, devoted and disciplined. He was not evangelical; he didn’t preach about it, but it was something in the fiber of his soul.
At Marquette, there’s the Joan of Arc Chapel, this beautiful chapel brought over stone by stone from Europe, and they have a daily mass. Inevitably, you would find Chris there, disheveled and partied out and just sort of scruffy. There’s not a doubt in my mind that he was in church more than any other student on that campus, at least three or four times a week.
PAT FINN:
After I met Chris, we signed up for a class called the Philosophy of Humor. We thought, could there be an easier A? I don’t know why we thought that, since we’d never gotten an A before. Truth be told, Chris got a D. But Father Nauss, who taught the class, gave us each a copy of “A Clown’s Prayer.” The last lines go, “Never let me forget that my total effort is to cheer people, make them happy, and forget momentarily all the unpleasantness in their lives. / And in my final moment, may I hear You whisper: ‘When you made My people smile, you made Me smile.’ ” It meant a lot to us, and we kept it in our wallets.
There were times, for instance, when Chris and I’d be on the highway, going through a tollbooth. He’d do a bit in front of the tollbooth taker, and it’d make the guy laugh. At first you were kind of like, oh, that was a little weird. But on the other hand it was like, you know, he just made that guy’s day. That guy’s gonna go home and tell his wife, “Yeah, this big guy came through in a car today and did this thing with the steering wheel . . .”
One of the cool things about Chris, and one of the noble things about Chris, is that if he made somebody’s day better, if he could ease the pain and sadness in the world just a bit, that was why he felt he was here.
MARK HERMACINSKI, friend:
The thing about Chris was that he always made all of us feel like we were the funny ones. He always listened and anything you’d throw out there, he’d bounce it back as a joke, so he made everyone feel like they were a part of what was going on. Even if you’re not a comedian, it’s fun to sit around and laugh together, and he could pull the humor out of you.
MICHAEL PRICE, dean, College of Communications:
I was going through the student registrations for the spring semester of his sophomore year, and I saw that Chris hadn’t preregistered. I called him in. He said he really didn’t want to be there anymore. He didn’t want to be in school, period. I said, “Chris, what do you want to do?”
“I want to be at Second City,” he said. “It’s a comedy company in Chicago.”
“Well, I can certainly see you doing that,” I said, “but why don’t we talk it over with your folks? See what they say.”
He seemed a little reluctant to even bring this subject up with them. His father wanted him to go into business. But Chris and his parents came down to my office. We talked about what Chris wanted. I said, “You guys talk it over, and I’ll be right outside.”
When I came back in, the decision was made. Chris would remain at Marquette. He could drop the business studies major, and he’d major in communications studies and minor in theater. Then, if he graduated, they would support his wishes to do what he wanted. Onward he went.
PAT FINN:
Chris and I took this professional speaking class together. The teacher would give you a topic, like a how-to speech or a “talk about a relative” speech. Then you would have to write a three- or eight-minute talk.
The first one was fine, but we both thought it was a little easy. We were sitting at lunch right before the next class, and one of us said, “Hey, why don’t we make up each other’s topics and go improvise it?”
So that’s what we did. Our speech was supposed to be on our summer job. Chris decided that I’d spent the summer repairing air conditioners. I told Chris that he’d been a carny in the circus.
Chris got up with nothing but a blank sheet of paper and said, “Hi, I’m Chris. This summer I spent three months as a carny with the circus.” And he just started telling stories. How he fell in love with the fat lady, made out with a midget. The class stared at him. It was amazing to watch, because you knew it was complete fiction.
After those speech classes, Chris and I were determined. We wanted to “do comedy,” but what that meant we didn’t actually know. If you want to be a lawyer you go talk to somebody’s uncle. But it wasn’t like we could call up Bob Newhart and ask him. We’d sit and listen to National Lampoon albums. We’d watch Saturday Night Live, David Letterman. We’d do everything we could to see anybody do anything funny.
JIM MURPHY:
Chris and I both had these things that we were pretty passionate about, art and comedy, but we were at a Catholic liberal arts school in Wisconsin, not the place most conducive to learning these things. Fortunately Marquette actually did have a healthy theater program. The big thing for Chris was when he got a part in the school play. It was Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class. It kind of got him going.
TOM FARLEY:
Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of choices: you played sports. But at Marquette a dean said to Chris, “Why don’t you try out for one of the plays?”
Chris was like, “Guys don’t do that.”
But he did it anyway and eventually found out that he wasn’t an athlete who happened to be kind of funny. He was an actor who happened to be very athletic.
MICHAEL PRICE:
Dance was a part of the theater requirement. If you’re going to be a theater minor or major, you gotta do that. So Chris took ballet. You know, he moved well. He was large, but he was not a slouch. He was great. Sheila Reilly, the ballet teacher, had a dress code and it was pretty stringent, and I think Chris got by without having to abide by that. He may be one of the first students she ever allowed to wear sweats instead of tights.
KEVIN FARLEY:
It was a very formative time for him. After he moved out of the dorms, he and a bunch of his rugby pals lived in this big piece-of-shit house up on Nineteenth Street. They called it the Red House. It was a hellhole.
JOHN FARLEY:
Whenever I’d walk into the Red House I’d say, “Well, well, well. Looks like somebody forgot there’s a rule against alcoholic beverages in fraternities on probation.” It was just disgusting. Dad refused to go in for basic sanitary reasons. Everything had a touch of something on it. Odd smell, too.
JIM MURPHY:
One of our roommates was the Budweiser rep on campus, so everything was Budweiser, signs and cups everywhere. Chris’s room was at the top of the stairs. Any time your parents would come, it was the first room they’d see. He was such a slob, food and clothes everywhere. There’d be all these fruit flies and it was, well, let’s just say it was college.
MARK HERMACINSKI:
We put Farley close to the bathroom, but that didn’t help much.
KEVIN FARLEY:
The bathroom was unspeakable. One of the things that made Chris a legend on that campus was his room, simply the fact that a human being could survive in there. People would come over just to look at it.
JIM MURPHY:
We were pretty poor, so we didn’t turn on the heat until after Thanksgiving to try and save money. It was so cold. We had a rugby awards banquet there. We kind of cleaned it all up and everyone brought dates. The girls all came in dresses, and they were freezing. We had a bucket for ice so we could make cocktails. We put it out on Friday night. By Sunday night, the ice hadn’t melted.
The other thing I remember about the Red House was every couple of months Chris’s mom and dad—this being Wisconsin—would send him a twenty-five-pound summer sausage and a twenty-five-pound wheel of cheese. Any time you’d look in the refrigerator there was never anything inside it except this gigantic sausage and this huge wheel of cheese.
MARK HERMACINSKI:
The kitchen was all infested with flies and maggots. After two months we just closed the door. But we had a lot of fun. Since we had the campus Budweiser rep, they’d pull up the truck with ten, fifteen kegs and we’d have a party with five hundred of our closest friends. Chris always drew a crowd. Wherever he was, in Madison, on a rugby road trip, he’d have a crowd around him in minutes.
TOM FARLEY:
The place where Chris really learned how to be this galvanizing figure was at Red Arrow camp. It was like a graduate school in male bonding. Every summer in college we all went back as counselors, and every summer all the kids and the other counselors, they’d rally around Chris.
FRED ALBRIGHT:
The kids loved him. How could you not? Every year, he was one of the most popular counselors. Chris had this very sensitive, sweet side to him, an empathetic side that helped him communicate with kids in this amazing way.
DICK WENZELL:
He could take any old boring activity and make it a fun, exciting experience. If you were eight years old, digging for earthworms with Chris was the most fun you ever had. He’d just hypnotize these kids. “We’re digging for monsters, boys! Oh! Hey! I found a big one!” And he’d lead them off on this grand adventure. And that’s the same thing he did with an audience.
RANDY HOPPER, counselor, Red Arrow Camp:
Chris came to life around those kids. He was the biggest kid there. We had this flag-football game called the Salad Bowl. When it was time for the big game, Chris would get up there in front of the boys and give them a pep talk that convinced them that this was the game of their lives. He’d get them all riled up. He’d be waving fistfuls of bacon, going, “Sooweee! Love them Hogs!” doing his big, high-school-coach motivational speech. In ten minutes, he’d have thirty kids so riveted and excited to be playing in this game that the Super Bowl would pale by comparison. His ability to connect with people was uncanny.
FRED ALBRIGHT:
He couldn’t talk to girls, though. Around girls, Chris’d hide behind his jokes. He’d start flexing and doing this jokey, deep-voice, macho-man thing to try and hit on them. One night we’re out at a bar near the camp and he goes up to these women and says, “Well, which one of you little ladies is gonna go home with me tonight?”
And one of the women looks at him and says, “Well, it can’t be me, because you’re my son’s counselor.”
Chris felt so small after that you just about could’ve balled him up and put him in a thimble.
He had one girl that he had met up north in Minocqua during the summer. She really adored Chris. They’d kid around, and it was like they were buddies, but Chris had this greater attraction to her. He would talk to me every day about how he’d had some moment with her. I see her now fairly often, and she didn’t even realize that he was so completely enthralled with her.
TIM HENRY:
Being a camp counselor was all about working the girls from the other camps. If you played your cards right you could go out several nights a week, but the girls were only allowed to go out one night a week. So you always had one little honey from each camp.
RANDY HOPPER:
We’d all go out in the woods, have a big bonfire, and it was all about trying to score. That was the game. Chris was not too adept at that, not usually. But he would entertain everyone.
TIM HENRY:
It would always piss Tom off, because Chris didn’t know when to stop. We’d be out in the woods, Tom would be working his magic on some girl, about to close the deal, and Chris would come barreling through the campsite fucking around. Then Tom would have to tell me to fuck off because I was laughing so hard.
TOM FARLEY:
One night, these two girls I knew from Georgetown had come all the way up from Chicago to visit. Chris was so out of control, and he wouldn’t turn it off. These were nice girls, and one of them I was really trying to get serious with. They were getting annoyed, really offended. He wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I lost it. He was acting up and running around, and I grabbed him and I beat the shit out of him, just whaled on him, punching him in the face. He was crying so hard he couldn’t even fight back. He was so scared. The next day he showed up at mass black and blue and bloodied all over.
TIM HENRY:
Chris so wanted to be with one of those girls, but he would always go back to what was safe. He would revert to the guy who’s had too many beers and got silly. Most nights the parties would go really late. As the hours wore on, everybody would start to drift away and pair off out in the woods, and there would be Chris, alone by the campfire.
DAN HEALY:
I only stayed at Marquette for a year. After that, I transferred to University of Wisconsin. That sophomore year was a crucial time for Chris. I started to hear stories about him drinking alone in his room, which was weird. We were always big social drinkers, but never the sit-alone-in-your-room kind of drinkers. The Marquette rugby team came into Madison one time. We all went out and drank, and then afterward I made a point of saying to Chris, “What’s going on? I hear you’re really going off the deep end.” He backed away immediately. He didn’t want anything to do with that conversation.
JIM MURPHY:
Then, during our junior year in the Red House, Chris read that book about John Belushi, Wired.
MARK HERMACINSKI:
Wired was the only book that Chris Farley read in college. The only one.
JIM MURPHY:
For our spring break that year, me, Chris, and this other guy went to L.A. We had a couch to crash on, and Chris was really developing an appetite for this career he wanted. We went around doing all the Hollywood tourist stuff, and the whole time Chris was like, “Jimmy, I really think I can do this.”
I’m a huge fan of Buster Keaton and all those early physical comedians. One time I was trying to turn Chris on to Fatty Arbuckle. So I made him sit down and watch one of Arbuckle’s films. At the end of it, the only thing Chris said to me was, “Wow, Jimmy, he did all of his own stunts.” He fixated on this one thing about Arbuckle, and that was all he really took away from it. And that’s sort of what happened with Belushi. When Chris read Wired, he just took completely the wrong thing away from it. You could tell that what he saw in Belushi and what you and I saw in Belushi were two different things. Chris wasn’t blindly imitating Belushi, but reading that book validated all the addictions and impulses that Chris already had inside him.
Chris didn’t smoke pot freshman or sophomore year, didn’t do any drugs at all, other than drinking. Then all of a sudden that year it clicked. I have this vivid memory of him in his room one day. While everybody else was going to class, he sat in this chair with a big red bong. He sat there doing bong hits and chugging Robitussin cough syrup. Back and forth. One after another.
At that point you could see where it was going. I’d try to explain to him, you know, that you can only get so high. It’s like pouring water into a glass. You can pour in all you want. After a while, it’s all just spilling over the sides. But it was the same thing no matter what he did. It was the same when he tried pot, or when he tried mushrooms, or when he tried comedy.
PAT FINN:
The first place Chris and I ever got up and performed together was during our senior year in a skinny bar in a bad neighborhood in downtown Milwaukee. It was called Wimpy’s Hunt Club, and it had an open-mike night at midnight. The stage was literally twelve milk crates turned over in the corner. There were about nine people in the audience, all factory workers on break from the brewery. Tough crowd.
Chris and I went up there, and it was like when you’re in middle school and you go on a date and you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. It was that awkward, and that bad. We bombed. We signed up to do it again the next week. Then we found out that a bunch of Marquette students were going to be there. We chickened out and didn’t go. Everyone got real mad at us.
Finally we signed up for the Follies, the school talent show. We got an actress, and we decided we’d do a parody of The Dating Game. Jim Murphy was the host, and another friend of ours, Seamus, was the third bachelor. We kept on meaning to get together and work, and we’d talk about it every once in a while, but we never had any idea what we were doing. Then about a week before the show the girl quit school and moved to Chicago, and we figured we’d just blow the thing off.
But the night of the Follies, I was over at Chris’s house and we were hanging out. About fifteen, twenty minutes into it, and we get a phone call from the stage manager. “Where the hell are you guys? You better get down here. People are pretty pissed. They want to see you—and they’re screaming for Farley.”
We hopped on our bikes and rode over. It was way bigger than we thought it was going to be. There were at least a couple thousand people there. The show had three more acts to go before it ended. “You’re goin’ after this singer,” the stage manager told us.
Chris just goes, “All right, Jim, you’re the emcee.” He looked over at Seamus, who had overalls on. “Seamus, you’re farmer guy.” Then he flicked my collar up on my shirt, unbuttoned a button, and said, “And Finner, you’re cool guy.”
“Okay. What about you?” I asked.
He pulled out these nerdy glasses and said, “I’ll be nerdy guy. Let’s go.”
Jim went out, made up some intro, brought out Seamus, and they did a funny little Q&A. Then I went out, doing this “cool guy” walk, hopped on my stool, and answered some questions. There was no girl, mind you, just the host and three male contestants, but that became part of the gag.
Then Jim said, “All right, let’s bring out the next guy.” The spotlight hit Chris coming out of the curtain. He ran as fast as he could and then tripped and slid across the entire length of the stage. The place went berserk. Then he went over to his stool, clumsily knocking it over. He finally clambered on and then fell right off. It was insane. The audience loved it.
As soon as it was over, Chris and I ran backstage, and I remember he just grabbed me by the shirt and he looked right in my eyes and said, “We’re gonna be doing this for the rest of our lives. That was the greatest high I’ve ever felt in my life.”
MICHAEL PRICE:
In the spring of Chris’s senior year, we got one of those rare days when you can open windows, be outside, and throw a ball around. There was this white house on Kilborn Avenue where all these girls lived. Chris had a cherry smoke bomb. He lit it and put it on the open windowsill, thinking the smoke would drive everyone out and it’d be a good prank. But he forgot that when you light those things they twirl around and spin out of control. Well, it spun off and landed on their couch. And it burned. I mean, it really burned. Pretty soon the house was on fire, and it was spreading to the second floor. Chris figured he’d better get the heck out of there. So he took off with a friend, and they went down to Illinois, just across the border.
The next morning I got to work about seven, my phone rang and it was the police department. They were wondering if Chris was around. I called the Red House, and they said Chris wasn’t there. I hung up, and then, about fifteen minutes later, two of the Red House guys showed up at my office. They said they couldn’t talk to me on the phone because their line had been tapped. I said, “Oh, come on. You guys are outta your mind.”
They told me where he was. I called him in Illinois. I talked to him and told him to come back. Then I called his folks in Madison. They asked me to give them the name of a lawyer in Milwaukee, so I did. Between the lawyer and his parents it was decided that Chris would come to my office, we would all meet there, and then he would go and turn himself in.
I called the police department, and I told them what the lawyer told me to say, that I knew where Chris was and he would come down there on his own the next day. Chris came back. The attorney took care of things. And after many weeks of delayed hearings and so on, Chris came away from it with a “dangerous use of firearms” charge, or something like that. He ended up with about thirty hours of community service, but he couldn’t get his diploma.
In Tommy Boy, Chris’s partying, rugby-playing alter ego graduated from Marquette in seven years. In the real world, Chris squeaked out in four and a half. As a result of the smoke-bomb incident, he was put on probation, and university policy did not allow students on probation to graduate. However, he was allowed to walk in the graduation ceremony with his classmates, complete his course work at the University of Wisconsin in the fall, and receive a Marquette diploma the following December.
Forced to return to Madison for school, Chris moved into an apartment downtown, close to many of his high school friends who had never left. Between finishing his classes and performing wherever and whenever he could, Chris took the only job offer he had. He went to work for his father.
MIKE CLEARY:
To understand Chris you have to understand something about Madison. Madisonians tend to be very educated, very literate, and upwardly mobile, but I would say that seventy-five percent of them have never seen the ocean. And I’m not kidding. Madison’s got everything you need—that’s the default mentality here. And Chris came back in large part because the family discouraged him from doing anything else.
TOM FARLEY:
Dad always wanted all of us home. It was almost like, “You can’t make it out east, and so you don’t need to try it.” Kevin bought into that at first, and Chris did for a while, too. Dad had tried it with me. After I left Georgetown, I said, “Hey, all my buddies are going up to New York. That’s where I want to go.”
Dad sat me down and said, “You’ll never make it.”
“Watch me,” I said. And I left.
Dad and I butted heads throughout our lives. If he said something was blue, I said it was red. Chris was the opposite. Everything he did was to please Dad. At that point, he had done the plays at Marquette, but he really had no idea of how to go about making that into a possible career. Dad just said flat out, “No one’s going to offer you a job. You’d better come work for me.” So Chris went to work for Dad, but it wasn’t a two-man job, so there wasn’t a whole lot for him to do. The job was really a joke.
KEVIN FARLEY:
When Chris finally left and I came in to take over the job, we opened up the drawers of his desk and there was nothing in it but Cracked and Mad magazines.
JOHN FARLEY:
What did Chris do for my dad? Hell, what did my dad do? No one really knew. He’d take people to dinner, entertain them, and they’d buy stuff from him. That was our notion of work. Dad didn’t really have to sell his product. He was selling roads. Everyone needs roads, and all roads are basically the same. Oil plus gravel equals road. The funniest, nicest, coolest guy was going to get the bid from the county, and there was no better guy to hang out with than my dad. Add Chris to the mix and they could sell anybody anything.
My grandfather was a salesman, and some days he had to go on four breakfasts, going town to town to town. Then he’d have to go to all these lunches, and then come home and have a dinner. It was the same for my dad. My dad knew every restaurant, every bar in Wisconsin. You’d drive by some place way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, and Dad would be like, “They can sauté a mushroom like nobody’s business. Good cheese-burgers. ”
My dad’s clients were these farmers, these down-home guys from rural towns who just happened to sit on the county highway commission handing out multimillion-dollar contracts to pave roads. The big thrill of their month was when Tom Farley would drive out from Madison and take them out for a schmooze and a steak dinner. You know those square pats of butter they keep on the table? Farmers in Wisconsin eat those like appetizers, like a predinner mint. Just open ’em up and eat ’em. Sweet Jesus that’s insane, but it’s a very Wisconsin thing.
Sit. Eat. Talk. Drink. That was the business. It was about putting on a show, buying the round of scotches, prime rib for everyone. That’s the key to who the Farleys are. We’d rather see a smile on someone’s face, even if it meant hurting ourselves. I don’t know why we did, but we did.
TOM FARLEY:
Chris was a great entertainer of clients, but for Dad to keep paying him twenty grand a year just to go to lunch was a bit much. So Chris started doing these open mikes at the student union. He bombed, failed miserably. He was getting up at the liberal, progressive University of Wisconsin and telling crude lesbian jokes. That went over like a fart in church. He’d get heckled and booed. Then he found improv at the Ark.
TODD GREEN:
Chris, Greg Meyer, and me all lived near each other downtown. And one night Chris said, “Guys, we gotta go to this thing, the Ark.”
All through our childhood we always knew that Chris was going to do something. We just didn’t know what. That night they were doing some skit and they needed audience participation. Chris started to get into it, and he completely stole the show from the performers. That was the start of the whole thing.
DENNIS KERN, director, Ark Improvisational Theater:
Chris always spoke fondly of his days at the Ark, and I was always very appreciative of that. We sort of took him in off the street—quite literally—and gave him a home. He showed up at the theater one night after a show and stumbled in through the door. He was so drunk he could barely even form coherent sentences. He was just going on, like, “Wanna do . . . comedy . . . improv, I wanna—gotta do this . . .”
I could barely understand him. To be honest, I thought he might be retarded. I didn’t think he’d remember anything that I told him, so I said, “Look, we’re having a rehearsal tomorrow. Why don’t you come by and join us then?” Then I showed him out the door, thinking that was the end of the whole episode.
The next day I got a call from my wife, who was at the theater. “Did you tell some big guy that he could come to our rehearsal today?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “but I didn’t think he’d actually show up.”
“Well, he’s here. And he brought a case of beer.”