CHAPTER 4
BRIAN STACK, cast member, Ark Improvisational Theater:
Keith Richards said that the first time he heard rock and roll it was like the whole world went from black-and-white to Technicolor. That’s how Chris always seemed to describe finding comedy.
As a city, Madison, Wisconsin, has something of a split personality. On the one hand, it’s a typical Midwestern town with no shortage of beer, football, and competitive bratwurst eating. On the other hand, thanks largely to the University of Wisconsin, Madison carries with it a long history of liberal, even radical, politics. Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator Robert LaFollette launched his left-wing Progressive Party in Madison. And in the late sixties and early seventies, the university itself saw some of the country’s most violent antiwar protests, culminating in the bombing of the school’s Army Mathematics Research Center at Sterling Hall.
In such a hothouse political environment, a small but vibrant arts community was bound to spring up as well. It would still be a few years before enterprising UW students hatched the Onion, the satirical newspaper that eventually found its way to Internet fame and glory. In Chris’s day, if you lived in Madison and had a notion to seek a career in comedy, you went to the Ark.
Dennis and Elaine Kern founded the Ark Improvisational Theater in Madison in 1982. Both professional actors and directors, they had left New York City determined to do theater on their own terms and, God forbid, actually make a living at it. For its first two years, the Ark staged weekly shows at a local bar, Club de Wash, and offered classes in improv and acting. It quickly became recognized as a stepping-stone for those on their way to greater opportunities in neighboring Chicago. Joan Cusack, who had joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1985, was among the Ark’s alumni.
As the theater grew more established, the Kerns purchased a defunct downtown building that had once housed a Brinks truck garage. They gutted it and installed a small one-hundred-seat theater. It was that converted garage that Chris Farley stumbled into late one night in August of 1986. For over twenty years, he had been a performer in search of a stage. He had finally found it.
JODI COHEN, director/cast member, Ark Improvisational Theater:
I was there the day that Chris came to audition. I forget what the scene was, but as part of it he fell out of his chair and—smack—landed on the ground. I thought he’d really had a heart attack. My first reaction was: Is the theater insured for this? What’s going to happen? That’s how convincing this fall was.
Elaine and I didn’t want him in the company. He seemed like a wild card, and he didn’t seem very focused. But Dennis said, “This guy is really talented. He should be in the group.” We formed a company called Animal Crackers, and Chris performed with them.
BRIAN STACK:
I had never met anyone like him before. He had such incredible enthusiasm in everything he did. One thing that gets lost a lot is that when it came to the work, he was always very serious about it. He was always on time for rehearsal. In fact, he was usually there before everybody else. I never, ever remember him being late for a show.
I don’t know if Chris had ADD, but people who have a lack of focus, when it comes to something they’re passionate about, they hyperfocus. Chris was certainly like that when it came to acting. Our group’s shows were mostly short-form, game-oriented improv with a lot of audience suggestions. But we also did some sketch-type stuff, and Chris was great with both of them. He was just a blast to work with from day one.
One thing that always amazed me was his ability to do things that if I had done them would have put me in the hospital, and then he’d get right up from them. He could slam into walls and slam down on the stage. He was such a natural athlete. He was almost like a ballet dancer. Even though Chris is known for being a great physical comedian, some of my favorite things were the subtle little characters he would do.
DENNIS KERN:
The Motivational Speaker appeared onstage for the first time at the Ark. It wasn’t the same as on Saturday Night Live, but it was there in its infant form.
PAT O’GARA:
The Motivational Speaker actually started back in high school and was based heavily on our coach, Joel Maturi, who would go off on these inspirational speeches. He’d be prepping us for the game, briefing us on the other team’s defense and all that, and Chris would be right there behind him, imitating him, making all these faces and forcing us all to laugh.
JOEL MATURI:
The Motivational Speaker is based in part on me; there is some truth to that. Mostly some of my mannerisms, the hiking up the pants, the spreading the legs and crouching down to get serious. I was pretty vocal with the pep talks and the Knute Rockne speeches. Those kinds of things. I think the more philosophical side of the character was actually based on his dad.
DENNIS KERN:
We taught Chris the basics of improv and scene work at the Ark, but the natural talent he had was already present. As a performer, he was just there in the moment, like Johnny Carson used to be on the Tonight Show. What Carson was so brilliant at was just reacting and responding naturally to the environment around him in a way that made you laugh. Chris had those same instincts. He just knew what to do.
BRIAN STACK:
He could do the same thing fifty times and somehow always make it funny. If a pretty woman walked by he would drop and start doing push-ups, starting out “. . . 198 . . . 199 . . . 200.” I’d seen him do that lots of times. It shouldn’t have been funny to me anymore, yet it always was. It’s hard to explain why it was; it just was. You could videotape it and analyze it with a computer, like you would a golf swing, but you still wouldn’t understand it, and you could never hope to replicate it.
One night after a show we went to this bar, and Chris was making this middle-aged couple in the bar laugh. He was dancing with the guy’s wife and doing these cat-eye things with his hands. The husband was laughing so hard that he was actually falling off his bar stool, and he eventually said to Chris, “What’s your name? I want to be sure and remember it. I’ve never laughed like this.” It was strange. Everyone sort of sensed that there was just something unique about him. Chris wasn’t famous, but it was the same reaction he would get years later after he left Madison and became a movie star.
DENNIS KERN:
Chris and Brian Stack had just started rehearsals on Cowboys No. 2, a Sam Shepard play that we were going to put on. And Chris, meanwhile, had been taking trips down to Chicago here and there with his father. Then it became clear what all those trips to Chicago were for.
BRIAN STACK:
When Chris decided to leave, it was pretty upsetting. He loved the Ark, but he was bursting at the seams to get out, and Chicago was the first step. I think Dennis was happy that Chris was leaving to pursue his dream, but he seemed kind of angry on his last night.
DENNIS KERN:
I was happy for him, but at the same time I thought it was too soon. I thought that he needed to be more in contact with the source of his creativity before he went to try at the professional level. I always knew he would make it, but I don’t know that he was grounded enough in the technique of acting to have something to hold on to. He was immensely talented, but that talent was sort of at the whim of whoever needed the next laugh.
TOM FARLEY:
The experience he had at the Ark told him he had to get out of Madison. Plus, he couldn’t take the job at Scotch Oil anymore. As much as he wanted to please Dad, after a year of selling asphalt even Chris was like, “I gotta get out of here.”
JOHN FARLEY:
Dad had made the ultimate sacrifice. He would have been a great lawyer, smartest man you ever met. Dreamed of going into politics. But he had given all that up to raise a family. And so he wanted everyone to stay in Madison, because that was what he’d sacrificed everything for. Years later, Chris had to cry for this scene when he filmed Black Sheep. So he turned to me and he said, “Johnny, make me cry.”
I said, “Well, Dad’s all alone in Wisconsin with two ladies. All his boys have gone and moved on with their lives.”
“Shut up.”
He really got angry that I had said it. Somehow it had triggered the wrong emotion.
MIKE CLEARY:
When Chris was working for his dad, he called me up one day and said, “I gotta talk to you about something.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, I have an opportunity to go to Chicago to study at Second City. What do you think?”
I really wasn’t sure about taking risks like that. I said, “Chris, you need to just work with your dad. Establish a solid career and maybe do this stuff on the side.” That was totally my mentality. Finally, I said, “Well, what does your dad say about it?”
And his exact words were, “My dad says I should definitely take the opportunity and go for it. He’s gonna back me one hundred percent.”
I said, “Well then there’s no conversation here. You have to go.”
TOM FARLEY:
We thought Chris would come running home in six months, and he never came back.
In June of 1987, Chris left for Chicago. He moved into a small apartment off Armitage Avenue, just north of Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. There he rejoined his Marquette rugby and acting friend Pat Finn.
The yellow porch light of Second City had led Chris to Chicago, but he quickly found that the doors of the renowned comedy institution did not immediately open for untrained unknowns fresh off the bus from Wisconsin. Forced to look elsewhere for a place to learn and perform, he found it at ImprovOlympic.
Today, ImprovOlympic has become an industry mainstay in its own right, producing a steady stream of bankable film and television stars, among them Mike Myers, Vince Vaughn, John Favreau, Andy Richter, Tina Fey, Steven Colbert, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and director Adam McKay, not to mention a healthy chunk of the writing staff at Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
But when Chris arrived, ImprovOlympic was still a fledgling outfit of vagabond comedians looking to make the funny anywhere they could. Teacher and director Charna Halpern had founded the group in 1981 with several goals in mind. Second City used improv as a means to create sketch comedy. Halpern wanted a curriculum in which improvised performance was the end in itself. At Second City, only a handful of seasoned performers trickled up to the main stage. Halpern gave ImprovOlympic a communitarian ethos, allowing even new and less-experienced students the chance to practice and learn in front of a paying audience.
In 1984, comedy guru Del Close joined Halpern’s cause. As a director in Second City’s early heyday, Close had trained and mentored a who’s who of comedy, from John Belushi to Harold Ramis to Bill Murray. He was instrumental in shaping the forms and conventions of the Chicago school of improvisation. Perhaps his most notable contribution was the Harold, a long-form, fully improvised performance in which a whole cast works together off of a single audience suggestion to create a cohesive, continuous series of scenes.
For Close, the goal of improv was not to get laughs but rather to find the real, emotional truth of the characters that created those laughs. He found the perfect instrument for that in Chris Farley. With Halpern’s instruction and Close’s inspiration, Chris began his comedy education in earnest. Some expressed doubts about his raw, unschooled talents, but those doubts quickly vanished. Chris, performing full throttle at night and bumbling through a comical parade of semiemployment by day, proved to everyone that he was destined for a life onstage.
PAT FINN:
After I graduated from Marquette, I went down to Chicago. Chris followed about a year behind me. We had no jobs, and we had no idea what we were doing. He moved into his place off Armitage, and we went from there down to Second City one day around two in the afternoon. We just kind of paced around in front of the theater, back and forth. In our minds, the scenario literally went something like this: Somebody up on the second floor would say, “What? We need two more people for the Second City main stage? Where are we going to find— Oh, wait! What about these two people out front? They look hilarious.”
That was about how far we’d thought things out. Then, after about ten minutes of pacing around, Joel Murray—Brian and Bill Murray’s brother—walks by. He was at Second City at the time, and he and I had gone to the same grammar school, so I knew him a little.
Chris said, “There’s Joel Murray. He’s Bill’s brother. You should talk to him.”
“I don’t know, Chris.”
“You got to! C’mon. That’s why we’re here.”
So Joel walked up, and I said, “Joel. Hi. I’m Pat Finn, from St. Joe’s.”
“Yeah. Little Finn,” he said. “What’s goin’ on?”
“Um, nothin’. This is my friend Chris. We wanna get into comedy.”
He just kind of looked at us. Chris’s eyes had this look like the next thing out of Joel’s mouth was going to be the keys to the kingdom. And, actually, it turns out it was.
JOEL MURRAY, cast member, Second City:
So one day here’s Pat Finn, who I haven’t seen since high school, standing there with this big guy. I could tell that the big guy was restraining all of his energy to just listen and be attentive to what I was saying. But I basically told them, “Go find Charna Halpern and Del Close at the ImprovOlympic and study with them, and then see if somebody’ll let you paint the bathroom at Second City.”
It was funny, knowing Chris later, just to watch him holding it in, trying not to be an idiot.
CHARNA HALPERN, director/teacher, ImprovOlympic:
ImprovOlympic didn’t even have an actual theater at the time. We performed at Orphans, this bar on Lincoln Avenue. We had to be out by ten o’clock so the band could come on. We got kicked out of Orphans, and we moved around to like fourteen different spaces. It was an insane time. But I kept attracting these really brilliant people—Farley and Pat Finn, Mike Myers, Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Andy Richter—and the shows kept getting better and better. But even though we were getting thrown out of these places, the audience was following us. It just kind of kept snowballing, getting bigger and bigger, and that was what it was like when Farley showed up.
BRIAN STACK:
I went down to Chicago to visit him at ImprovOlympic. He was taking classes, but Charna hadn’t let him go up onstage to perform yet. After the show, he was pacing outside, and I could just see he had all this pent-up, frustrated energy that had nowhere to go. You could see how he was bursting at the seams, how he needed to get up onstage.
CHARNA HALPERN:
One night after a couple of weeks, Chris came up to me with Pat Finn and said, “Let me go onstage! Let me play tonight!”
“You?” I said. “God, no. You’re definitely not ready.”
He started getting violent. He was banging his fists on the wall above me, like, “Let me go! Let me go onstage! I’ll be great! You’ll see!”
“I’ll tell you when you’re ready to be onstage,” I said.
He was just not hearing it. After a good seven minutes of his badgering, I finally got fed up myself. I said, “All right, I’ll tell you what. You can go onstage and play tonight, but if you’re bad you will never ever get on my stage again. Do you wanna take that chance?”
Before I even finished my sentence, he was bounding out into the room to tell the guys he was going on. Everyone was looking at me like, “Are you crazy?” But he got up there and was absolutely hilarious.
The good thing about it was that when he got back to class, he started to calm down. Once I’d let him go onstage, he’d lost that need to prove something. From then on he was really willing to learn and get better.
PAT FINN:
From that point on, he just committed a hundred and ten percent. We took classes with Charna. Then we got classes with Del. There were two improv teams that got assembled around that period. One was very cerebral—that wasn’t us. We were the physical group, called Fish Shtick. People wanted to watch them because they were so smart and heady, but then they’d want to watch us because we were just off the wall.
BRIAN STACK:
Chris once said that Del Close told him to attack the stage like a bull and try and kill the audience with laughter.
NOAH GREGOROPOULOS, cast member, ImprovOlympic:
He was so big and emotional, very physical. He gave one guy a permanent scar on his forehead when he dove from the bar onto the stage in this overblown ninja thing. He landed on him, smashing his glasses into his head. His commitment was just past the point of safety.
TIM MEADOWS, cast member, Second City:
I was already touring for Second City, and I used to go back and perform at ImprovOlympic every now and then. One night I went up there and did a Harold with Chris’s team. It’s difficult when you’re the new guy in a group, because they already have their dynamic and you don’t know how you’ll fit into it. But the very first time we performed together Chris was right there for me. I started a scene where I was hanging something up, and it was obvious to everyone in the audience that I was hanging up laundry on a clothesline. But Chris came out and said, “Doctor, what does the X-ray say?”
I just looked at him and said, “Well, it’s not good.”
And it got a big laugh because it was such a change from where people thought it was going.
PAT FINN:
When you get a suggestion in an improv set, usually one performer goes out and sets the stage based on the idea. And sometimes that person is out there for a while, just fumbling around. He doesn’t know where he’s going, and because he doesn’t know, it’s really difficult to step in and help him.
One night this girl walks out and puts a pretend briefcase down and goes, “I had such a great day today, honey. They made me partner at the law firm and they love me and somebody’s gonna be interviewing me for Newsweek . . .”
And on and on and on. It was this long exposition, just going nowhere. We’re all standing there at the back of the stage, thinking, how do we even enter this scene? She’s giving us nowhere to go.
This goes about a minute or so. She’s droning on and on, and finally Chris storms out of the back line and goes, “Sweet Lord, would you just shut up and bowl?!”
His instincts were near perfect. With one line he put the whole scene in a place and a context and established what the joke was. “My God, every time you bowl it’s something different. You’re a doctor. You’re a lawyer. ‘Look at me, I discovered something!’ Bowl the goddamned ball.”
JAMES GRACE, cast member, ImprovOlympic:
He was an amazing processor of information. He wasn’t great at getting things started, but if you gave him anything, he would take it, internalize it, have a perspective on it, be affected by it, and ride it out for the scene.
CHARNA HALPERN:
He was an amazing listener onstage, like a sponge. You could just see him reflecting your idea through his facial expression and taking on your mood. He totally got it.
And he was in incredible shape. That always surprised people. I remember one football sketch he was in where his teammates were making fun of him for being out of shape. They’d say, “All right, fatty, drop and give me twenty.” And Chris could do it, with no problem, clapping his hands in between each push-up, even. He was all muscle under there.
TIM HENRY:
We’re at a bar in Chicago one night. It’s ten degrees outside. Chris has got his English driving cap on, Timberland boots, and some cutoff sweat-pants, and he’s sporting these huge muttonchop sideburns. The after-work crowd is there. A bunch of little honeys are at the bar, and Chris starts chatting them up. “Hey, how are you? What do you guys do?” he says.
They work in advertising or insurance or whatever, and they ask him, “So what do you do?”
Chris is standing there, sweating in ten-degree weather, and he goes, “Me? What do I do? I’m an aerobics instructor.”
We’re all laughing, ’cause we know he’s winding up to have fun with them.
“Aerobics instructor?” they say. “Are you kidding me?”
And Chris, with one hand on the bar and one hand on the stool, defying all laws of physics, goes from standing stock still, leaps into a perfect backflip, and lands back right on his feet. Hat doesn’t even come off his head.
“Yeah,” he says. “You know, aerobics instructor.”
TED DONDANVILLE:
I got hooked on Chris’s shows very early. When I went back to Red Arrow Camp to be a counselor, Kevin and Johnny told me Chris was down in Chicago. I’d been thrown out of the University of Denver; I wasn’t having a traditional college experience. So I started hanging out with Chris a lot. When you’d go and see him in these bars, you’d have to sit through an hour and a half of bullshit watching these kids learn how to do comedy. But however good or bad the shows were, Chris always had that moment, that one moment where lightning would strike and he’d just kill the audience.
PAT FINN:
ImprovOlympic was very young, and I think that’s what made it, for lack of a better word, romantic. There were no agents coming to see you. There was nobody pitching a screenplay. It was just about the pure love of the game, going out every night and making people laugh.
JAMES GRACE:
It was like a wave of energy. We were doing five shows a week, one on Thursday and two on Fridays and Saturdays. We were just all constantly together all the time, performing, hanging out. Everybody who was there had come because they wanted to challenge themselves and push the boundaries of comedy. People were either rehearsing or performing every night of the week. You were consuming it all the time. And when you weren’t rehearsing or performing, you were hanging out with people whom you rehearsed and performed with. Once you were on a team, that was basically your fraternity.
It was very collegiate, especially when it came to the drinking. I would say that if you took a clinical definition of alcoholism, then everybody there had a huge problem. Farley always did everything bigger than everybody else, but we were all out of control. One time I saw Pat Finn fall down two flights of stairs solely to make me laugh. That’s what we did, outrageous things all across the board.
PAT FINN:
Chris must have had something like forty jobs during that time. One day he and I were walking down Armitage Avenue, and he was like, “Yeah, I worked there. I worked there.”
And I was like, “When?”
“Well, I worked at the butcher shop for like an hour, and they fired me. Then I got a job at the hardware store the day after the butcher shop, but I was really tired ’cause I’d had to get up so early for the butcher shop, you know? So I fell asleep on some boxes in the back.”
I said, “How could you fall asleep within hours of your first day on the job?”
“I don’t know, but they were really pissed.”
So he lost that job. Basically he’d lost every job up and down the street. Eventually, we’d go to church and he’d pull the little tags on the bulletin board that said “Need neighborhood workers” and stuff like that.
He got a job as a bouncer, but then one day he said to me, “Hey, I think I kinda got fired from that bouncer job at the bar.”
“Jeez, Chris”—this was on Sunday—“you started it on Friday. What happened?”
Apparently a fight had broken out, so he—Chris, the bouncer—had left, because he didn’t know what to do. And he’d caused the fight.
What had happened was Chris was checking IDs, and, goofing around, he goosed some girl in the butt. Her boyfriend thought it was somebody else, and he started shoving people and it broke out into a real melee, so Chris just kind of slipped out the front door.
All the other bouncers came out from inside and finally settled it. Then the owners came out and said, “My God, who’s on the front door?”
At that moment, Chris came back around from this alley down the side of the bar. He saw the owners, panicked, turned down this alley, and yelled “And stay out!”
“Where the hell were you?” they asked.
“Where was I? Where the hell were you? There were like nine guys in the alley on top of me.”
“What?”
“It’s okay. I took care of it. But, man . . .”
“Oh Chris, we’re so sorry.”
So on Saturday he went back to bounce again. I asked him how that went.
“Well,” he said, “normally you get your shift drink around eleven. But the girl behind the bar really liked me, so I got my shift drink at seven. Then I had another one. She was making those greyhounds that I like. Man, I had a lot of ’em.”
“Were you okay?”
“Well, that’s my question. I’m not sure. I passed out on the people in line while I was checking IDs, and all the bouncers had to take me across the street and put me into bed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So do I just go over there to get a paycheck, or do I ask ’em to mail it? How does that work?”
“I don’t know, Chris. You probably drank more than your paycheck. ”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. I guess I just won’t go over there for a while.”
He didn’t seem particularly fazed by it. It just kind of reinforced to him that he needed to find a way to make a living in comedy.
CHARNA HALPERN:
We got a pilot, an improv game show, similar to Whose Line Is It Anyway? I picked out a bunch of our best performers, of which Chris was one, and they flew us all out to L.A. We were doing some really smart work, and the producer just wanted us to dumb it down. “It’s too smart,” he kept saying, “too smart.” And he started firing some of the best people. He wanted to bring in all these dick-joke stand-up comics.
So, one by one, my cast was getting fired. It was just a nightmare, which Del had warned me was going to happen. Chris could see what was going on. At one point in the rehearsal he said, “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t wanna get fired.”
“Do what you gotta do,” I said.
And so he hiked up his shorts into the crack of his ass and started jumping around doing the monkey dog boy dance, which is when you hold your crotch with one hand and put your fingers up your nose and just start jumping around being silly. And, oh, they were on the floor laughing, because that’s the kind of dumb stuff they wanted. And he saved his job.
But Chris wasn’t always a caricature of the fat guy. He did beautiful scenes. When he did serious scenes, oh my God, he could make you cry.
NOAH GREGOROPOULOS:
Chris’s vision of himself was that everyone just wanted to see fatty fall down, so that was what he was going to give them. But there were plenty of other guys who could fall off a chair and eat in Roman proportions. What Del Close liked about Chris wasn’t necessarily what everybody else liked about him. Del felt that Chris was in touch with genuine emotions in a way not all improvisers allow themselves. That’s what Del was really attracted to in Chris. He wanted to show Chris that he could be more than just a one-note performer.
CHARNA HALPERN:
After Chris was done working with me, I couldn’t wait for him to get to Del, because that was the next level. I said to Del, “I can’t wait for you to see this guy. I want to see what you think.”
Del watched him, and after the show he turned to me, and the first thing he said was, “Oh, that’s the next John Belushi.”