CHAPTER 5
JUDITH SCOTT, cast member:
If you think of the rest of the Second City cast as flat land, Chris was something that fell out of the sky and gave us shape. He might blow out a huge crater, like a meteor, or just collide with the ground, becoming this huge mountain. And by creating this landscape, he gave the rest of us the terrain on which to play.
Chris Farley spent a little over eighteen months studying and performing at ImprovOlympic. The young theater was rapidly becoming one of Chicago comedy’s best-known training grounds, but at the time it remained just that: a place to learn. For actors seeking out professional opportunities and a professional paycheck, Second City was still the place to be. Since its founding in 1959, Second City had established itself as the nation’s graduate school of comedy. In the early days, Robert Klein, Joan Rivers, and Alan Arkin all came across its stage. Over subsequent years, dozens of Hollywood stars matriculated there as well.
Chris auditioned for Second City’s touring company in January 1989 and was offered a position. Most performers would have spent months or even years on the road before joining the main-stage ensemble; Chris made the move in a matter of weeks. Del Close had been offered the opportunity to direct Second City’s spring revue, and he was given great latitude to mold the show and its cast to his own liking. The performer he liked most was Chris. Second City producer Joyce Sloane expressed reservations about the young performer’s readiness and his outsized partying habits, but Charna Halpern insisted that working with Close was exactly the kind of discipline Chris needed. Sloane ultimately agreed.
And everyone agreed that Chris’s potential was virtually without limit. During his eighteen months at Second City, Chris performed in three revues: The Gods Must Be Lazy, It Was Thirty Years Ago Today, which marked the theater’s thirtieth anniversary, and Flag Smoking Permitted in Lobby Only. Also making the leap from the touring company at that time was Chris’s friend Tim Meadows. Second City veterans David Pasquesi, Holly Wortell, Joe Liss, Judith Scott, and Joel Murray, as well as understudy Tim O’Malley, rounded out the cast. With each show, Chris’s reputation grew. He created a number of characters and scenes that would go down as some of the best in the theater’s history.
TIM O’MALLEY, cast member:
I was sitting in the main lobby at Second City. Chris came through the front door, all big and boisterous like he always did. He went upstairs and auditioned. What he did for his audition was he pretended he was late for whatever the scene was, took a running leap from stage left, and landed flat in the middle of the stage. They hired him right away, just on his energy and his commitment. Everyone was like, “You should have seen this guy’s audition. He was fucking nuts.”
TIM MEADOWS:
Me and Farley were the two new guys, both coming straight out of the touring company. We bonded over the fact that we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing.
HOLLY WORTELL, cast member:
When we started rehearsals, Chris’s inexperience showed. You had to come up with your own scene ideas, and he was not very good at that. One day we were throwing out these social, political, and cultural ideas, and Del said, “Chris, do you have anything?”
Chris went, “Um . . . yeah. I was thinking, um, that there’s rich people . . . and, uh, there’s poor people . . . you know . . . something about that.”
And I was like, “What was that?”
TOM GIANAS, director:
Chris was a great writer, actually. He just worked on his feet. You gave him a premise, and he’d spin it into gold.
JOEL MURRAY:
The first time I had to improvise with him onstage, the suggestion we got from the audience was “the drunk tank.” It was like, okay, there’s a natural. I said to Chris, “Let’s do a two-person scene where I’m your dad and I’m picking you up at the drunk tank, but in actuality I’m a drunk, too.”
“Yeah,” Chris said. “Let’s go with that.”
I didn’t know anything about Chris and his father at that point; I just figured he was Irish so he’d know what I was talking about.
It was a great scene, and the emotions in it were so close to home in some ways, this drunk Irish father in his pajamas picking up his son. He’s coming down on the boy, but everything he says—like “That time your mother left me after I mowed down the hedges . . .”—reveals that he’s a drunk, too.
So father and son have this meaningful talk about their drinking, and Chris is defending himself, like, “But I’m really good at it.” Like his dad should be proud of him. Of course it winds up with Chris’s character offering to drive home. And the dad, who’s been drinking, says, “Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a good idea.”
And that became Chris’s big sketch in the first show. What do you do with a drunken sailor? You have him play a drunken sailor. Del Close was in the audience, and he came backstage and said, “Yeah, well, that one’s ready. Script that.”
NATE HERMAN, director:
At Second City, a lot of the performers tend to be very verbal. But every once in a while a physical comedian comes along, and when an actor has that rough physicality in such a small setting it really tends to explode.
PAT FINN:
When Chris’s first revue opened, he was an instant hit. There was a scene where he played a waiter. The people eating dinner were the heart of the scene, but Chris came out and got a huge laugh with “Can I get you something to eat?” That was it. He went over to the other side of the stage to make the drinks and sandwiches in the background, and every single head in the audience slowly turned to watch Chris. It was the oddest thing. Even if he was doing nothing, you wanted to watch him do nothing.
JOE LISS, cast member:
His mere presence would induce laughter. Anything he’d do on top of that was gravy.
DAVID PASQUESI, cast member:
Crowds loved him. I don’t think you can find anyone who’ll refute that. That’s not an opinion.
HOLLY WORTELL:
On Friday and Saturday nights, we had a break between shows. Chris and I would always dash out and get something to eat, and we’d always run into about half the audience from the first show. We’d both been onstage for the past two hours, but everyone would come right up to Chris and say, “You were so great!”
Chris would go to great pains to say, “Hey, she was in the show, too. Wasn’t she good?” And that was very sweet of him, but it seemed logical to me that people would notice him more.
JOEL MURRAY:
During that first show the cast, minus Holly, went away to Joyce Sloane’s place on Lake Michigan. It was the dead of winter, and we’d brought a whole bunch of “Murray Brothers’ Tea,” this big thing of psilocybin mushroom tea. We wrote half the show that night, just from stuff we came up with screwing around. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.
JOE LISS:
We were fucking around inside the house. I started doing this crazy English character. Tim was going on about how he couldn’t feel his legs. The sun was coming up, and we couldn’t find Chris. “Where’s Chris?” “Let’s find him!” We struck out of the house on an “expedition” to track him down. We ran out, and there he was, lying out on the ice of Lake Michigan. “Look,” we said, “it’s a whale!” “No! It’s a boy!” “It’s a Whale Boy!”
JOEL MURRAY:
The whole lake was frozen ice, these huge glacier formations, crazy stuff. And at one point, Farley was out there, shirt open, T-shirt over his head, diving like a seal onto the ice, doing these crazy belly flops, his stomach bright red. We riffed on this Whale Boy thing for hours, high on mushroom tea, laughing our asses off out there on the frozen ice of Lake Michigan.
JUDITH SCOTT:
We came back to the cabin, and as the drugs wore off we realized that we’d written a scene.
TIM MEADOWS:
We had trouble putting it on paper. When we got back we tried to improvise with this Whale Boy character, and there was just too much information. Plus, we all remembered it differently because we’d been tripping. So Nate Herman, our new director, sat down and said, “Each of you tell me your version of the story.”
We did that, and then a few days later he came in with the whole thing. The story was that we had raised this Whale Boy as a real boy and hidden his true origin from him. The scene was his coming-out party into society. But the tension underneath was that his mother couldn’t stand the fact that this was not her own son. Ultimately, we have to tell Chris the truth: that he’s not our son, but in fact the product of a whale impregnated by radioactive human sperm and medical waste. Once he discovers that, Chris launches into this grand song and soliloquy about reclaiming his true identity.
HOLLY WORTELL:
We wanted him to be able to spout from his head like a whale, and so our stage manager took a football helmet, drilled a hole in it, and connected this water hose so Chris could squirt water out of it.
JOEL MURRAY:
He looked like a Hummel figurine. When he would come out like a choir-boy and sing the Whale Boy song, the crowd would go nuts.
The last preview before opening night, he does the song and goes to exit through a door, and he pulls the doorknob off. There’s nothing he can do, so he jumps into the crowd, and he breaks his foot. We’re all like, “Suck it up, Farley. C’mon.” But it turns out he really did break his foot, and he had a walking cast for opening night.
TIM O’MALLEY:
Ian Gomez took over, and Chris was out for a good eight weeks. But nobody could stop him from coming in and doing the improv sets. He’d come in and do those on a cast.
JOE LISS:
Chris was always “boy.” He was Whale Boy. We did another sketch where he was Caramel Boy. Then of course there was Tommy Boy.
NATE HERMAN:
Paul Sills, one of the founders of Chicago improv, used to say, “Out there doesn’t matter. This is the only place that matters. The stage is the only place you exist.” So if the stage is the only place you feel real, it makes sense to make the whole world your stage.
ROBERT BARRY, friend, Edgewood High School:
Whatever Chris Farley did in the movies or on TV, that was just Chris Farley. He was never acting. Or, perhaps, Chris was always acting. That might be a better way of putting it.
CHARNA HALPERN:
He was always more himself onstage than off. He was more intelligent onstage. He’d step out there, and it was like a light would go on behind his eyes.
HOLLY WORTELL:
I remember we’d be in his apartment and he would be really calm. He’d talk about his feelings, things that he would never say around the guys. Then we would walk down the stairs and open that door out onto Wells Street and, literally, the second that door opened he turned into “Farley.” It was like a jacket that he put on when he was leaving the house.
Chris would tell me a story about his day, like maybe a story about ordering a sandwich from the guy at the deli, and he’d do his voice and the guy’s voice, acting out this little scene. But instead of just saying, “I told the guy, ‘I want a tomato,’ ” Chris was really acting it up, like, “I told the guy, ‘I want a tomato!’ ”
And so I asked him, “Chris, how come when you speak, you’re imitating yourself ?”
“What?”
I said, “When you tell that story about yourself, you’re doing your own dialogue in a different voice. You’re doing a character voice for you.”
And that kind of blew his mind.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Most of the people at Second City, after the show they’d all go out for drinks, and they’d just hang out with you like a normal person. But Chris and Joe Liss, they couldn’t stop. The red nose and floppy shoes stayed on.
NATE HERMAN:
His greatest frustration was trying to beat that character that he was becoming. He really seemed like he was uncomfortable being the great, swaggering drunk; it didn’t suit him. I always thought that inside there was this nice kid from Wisconsin going, “I’m really not comfortable doing this, but this is who I’m supposed to be.”
TIM MEADOWS:
Chris used to say that he only had one character, and that was the fat, loud guy. But of course that wasn’t true at all. In our last revue, we did a scene where the premise was basically that Chris and I were good friends, we’re hanging out, and then his sister, played by Jill Talley, comes in. She and I really hit it off and I’m digging on her and Chris is really not okay with it.
JILL TALLEY, cast member:
The more Tim and I would milk our flirtation, the more Chris would amp up his reactions. Tim was giving me a foot rub, I was laughing at all of his jokes, and Chris was just fuming, bubbling under the surface, which he did so brilliantly.
Then Chris comes right out and tells Tim, “You can’t date my sister.”
“Why, because we’re friends?”
“No, because you’re black.”
TIM MEADOWS:
The thing that I loved about Chris was that he was willing to be the racist in that scene. He starts off as my best friend, and then when I exit the stage for a moment he does this really subtle change where he confronts her and tells her he doesn’t like it. Then I walk back onstage right as he says “nigger.” Every night you could hear a pin drop as soon as he said it. People didn’t expect that from Second City, and they certainly didn’t expect it from Chris.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
When he was at Second City, he would call me late at night and I could tell he was using, that he was not doing well. He was really struggling; he was so damn lonely. He’d lost some of his anchors, and he was ashamed of his drug use.
TIM MEADOWS:
When we were in Chicago, we all drank, and we all did our share of other things. But one night after we did the first show we were getting notes from Del in the back. Farley went into the kitchen, got a bottle of wine, and just started guzzling it straight down. I remember watching him drink that bottle and thinking, holy shit.
Then, when we would go out drinking after the show, it would never end. His personality changed. He was a messy drunk. He would just get loud and in your face. I would go to one bar with him, and then he’d ask me if I was going to Burton Place, this bar that was open until five in the morning. I’d say, “No, I don’t like that place.” There was just a bad vibe in there, a lot of people who were involved in heavier drugs. I used to call it Satan’s Den, and he would always tease me about that. “You wanna go over to Satan’s Den with me?”
TIM O’MALLEY:
When you drank or got high with Chris, it was like corralling a tiger. I was doing coke on a regular basis, and I knew I was an addict. I don’t know if I recognized Chris as being worse off than me, though. Guzzle and pour, guzzle and pour, slobber and puke. That was about it for us. We’d sleep all day. If we had rehearsal, we’d haul out of bed and make it there by eleven. We’d always try and get home by sunrise and get some sleep, but some days we were partying right up through to rehearsal, then try and get a nap and some food in before the show. Then, sometimes, we were just high for days.
TED DONDANVILLE:
The first hour of drinking with Chris was fun. The second hour was the best hour of your life. The rest of the night was pure hell.
DAVID PASQUESI:
He was taking it as far as someone could while still making it to work, and he was being rewarded all along the way. So there was no reason to stop.
TOM GIANAS:
Chris came in to rehearsal one day, and he was really out of it, kind of falling asleep. I took him aside and told him he had to go home. But Chris could always turn on the charm. He talked me into letting him stay. I always regretted that one moment. It was just a minor incident, but it was one instance where I had an opportunity to exert some discipline over him, and I didn’t do it.
JOE LISS:
Second City sees itself as a family, and we were a pretty codependent family, too. There could have been a big intervention from the cast, but it didn’t happen. We were all doing drugs.
The one thing we did crack down on was drinking during the show. That wasn’t okay. One time I caught Chris in between sets. There’s the greenroom backstage, and then there’s another dressing room on the other side with a pass-through between them. I’m backstage, and I look down the pass-through and see Farley at his locker. He looks around, reaches into his locker, takes out a big tumbler, takes a big sip, and then hides it back in his locker.
I’m like, “You motherfucker.”
So I wait for Chris to leave and go and get a big box of salt from the kitchen. I take the drink, fill it with salt, stir it up and let it dissolve, put it back, and head back to the other room and wait.
Chris comes back for the next show, reaches into his locker, gets the drink, takes another big sip of it and just does this beautiful spit take, spewing the drink all over. There was no more drinking during that show.
CHARNA HALPERN:
We had a couple of meetings with Chris where Del Close told him about the clinic where he went through aversion therapy and stopped drinking. It’s a horrible process, like something out of The Twilight Zone. They shoot you up with this chemical and then they make you drink this watered-down alcohol until you vomit. Then they throw you back in your bed, and a couple of hours later they shoot you up and make you go through it again. They keep doing this until even the smell of alcohol makes you throw up. It sounds futuristic, but it works.
So Del told Chris about this therapy. “You need this,” he said. “Try it. It works.”
And Chris was like, “Nah, that’s too permanent.”
PAT FINN:
We were at a bar in Chicago once, Chris and me and his dad. Chris’s dad goes, “Finner, you want a beer?”
“Oh yeah that’d be great, Mr. Farley.”
“Christopher?”
“Uh, yeah. Thanks, Dad,” Chris says.
“All right,” he tells the bartender. “Two Old Styles for Finner, and a coupla Old Styles for Christopher. And I’ll have a scotch. Tall glass. Rocks. Leave the bottle.”
The guy just kind of stares at him. Mr. Farley stares back. Then he finally turns around to get the drinks.
I go, “Wow, Mr. Farley, really? What are we, in the Old West?”
“Look, Finner,” he says. “I like scotch, and when I want a drink, and this bartender’s talkin’ to his gal pal down at the end of the bar, I’m not gonna wait for him. So I get a bottle, and I can have scotch whenever I want it. On top of that it’s kind of fun to see what they charge me, because they never know how many shots are left in the bottle.”
TOM GIANAS:
When his dad would come to the shows, they’d go to That Steak Joint, which was this steak restaurant right next door to the theater. They had this thing called the Trencherman’s Cut, which was this ungodly cut of meat, just an unholy-size piece of Chicago beef. You would buy it for the table and eat it family style. When Chris and his dad would go, they’d each order one.
TIM MEADOWS:
His father used to tease him if he couldn’t finish his. It was funny to see Chris when his parents came to town, because it was the only time you’d see him dressed up. The pressed shirt, the sport coat, the slacks. He’d have a haircut and a shave. He wanted everything to go right.
TIM O’MALLEY:
He was still a kid. His parents paid his rent for him. We told him to save some money and pay his own rent so he’d feel more responsible for himself. “But my dad wants to pay for everything,” he’d say.
JOE LISS:
It was like they were still treating him like a kid at college, and he was embarrassed of it, or tired of it. He would get these care packages from his mother, and he would get visibly angered by them. She would send him food and slippers, new clothes from Brooks Brothers, and he’d be like, “Aw, dammit.” But if you looked at his private life, you were like, “Chris, you need new clothes. You need a cleaning lady.”
HOLLY WORTELL:
One time I tried to get Chris to open a bank account. He didn’t have one. He would just cash his checks and have cash on hand. He was very generous, would buy everybody drinks, but he wouldn’t save anything. I said to him, “Look, just walk with me up the street and open up an account.”
“No.”
“Chris, you can’t just spend all your money. You’re spending all your money on food, drugs, and alcohol. You have to put some away for rent and bills and savings.”
And he wouldn’t do it. He would not set foot in the bank with me.
JILL TALLEY:
We all took turns bringing him home. I remember being shocked that he didn’t really have anything, nothing that you would associate with a home. It was really sparse, just a bare mattress and a big trash bag full of clothes. That was it.
JOEL MURRAY:
I had an apartment above Los Piñatas, this Mexican place by Second City. I always believed that Joyce Sloane had something to do with Farley all of a sudden having the apartment next to me. She knew that I would watch out for him.
He was like Pigpen from Peanuts. We had mice, too. The mice would come through my apartment and stop and give me this look, like “We’re just on our way over to Farley’s place.”
JOYCE SLOANE, producer:
He always talked about how he wanted a girlfriend, and I said to him, “Do you think you could bring a girl up there? To that apartment? You gotta clean it up.”
I tried to tell him that Bluto was just a character John Belushi played in Animal House; that wasn’t what he was really like. When John’s widow Judy was in town, I introduced him to her, and I said, “Do you think a lady like this would’ve been married to him if he was really that character that you saw?”
I thought that was a good thing to do, to let him know what John was really like. It didn’t sink in, obviously. So I hired a cleaning woman for him to try and fix his place up. She came every week.
TIM O’MALLEY:
For all the trouble, everyone wanted to take Chris under his wing. The alumni that came in, like Bill Murray, would just adopt him immediately. It just oozed out of him: “Love me. Please love me.” He got so much love. He got a ton of it. I don’t know how he was even able to process it.
DAVID PASQUESI:
It was pretty obvious that there were problems for Chris from the word go. I don’t think we realized that it was as detrimental as it was, but we could all see it. Then there was some odd behavior that was a bit obsessive-compulsive. We just thought it was weird, and we were right. That was some weird shit.
JOE LISS:
Before he put his pants on, he’d lick the tip of the belt, then the buckle, then he’d put on his pants. Before he went onstage, he’d touch the floor twice, touch the wing of the stage twice, and then go on. Every time.
BOB ODENKIRK, cast member:
I cannot express to you how much he licked everything. He’d open his wallet and lick everything inside it, the pictures, the money. He had to lick his shoelaces to tie them. He’d lick his finger and touch the stair, lick the finger, touch the stair, and do it all the way up the staircase. It was totally nuts.
HOLLY WORTELL:
One night I was onstage, and I said a cue line for Chris to enter. He should have been standing right at the door, but I could see him off in the greenroom, and that meant he had to go all the way down the corridor backstage and enter from the other side. I remember thinking, he’s got to cover all that distance, touching every door twice, touching every stair twice, touching all the coats twice. It’s going to be an hour before he gets there.
One day we were walking down the street, and he kept bending down and touching the sidewalk twice, touching the parking meters twice. I said to him, “Chris, why do you do that?”
And he said, “I’m just trying to even everything up.”
JOE LISS:
He was superstitious, too. There was this Ouija board backstage. “Get that thing out of here!” he’d say. He was afraid of it. So, of course, someone took the Ouija board and put it on his pile of props in the back. “Who did this?!” he yelled. Then he took a towel—he wouldn’t touch it with his hands—and he picked it up and threw it aside.
TIM MEADOWS:
I was surprised by Chris’s faith. He’d go to mass all the time. I always admired that about him. I grew up in a Christian household, but once I got to Chicago I didn’t go to church anymore. I just prayed whenever I wanted something.
HOLLY WORTELL:
We would do charity gigs sometimes where they would pay us a hundred dollars, which was huge for us; the most we ever made was $435 a week. But whenever we would do those charity shows, Chris was the only person in the cast who turned down the money. He would always say, “Please keep this and make sure it gets to the people you’re helping.”
JUDITH SCOTT:
He had a moral code, a sense of right and wrong. There was something in him that was correct and proper and Midwestern. If we were in a meeting and somebody’s idea got shot down, Chris would immediately take up for that person and defend them.
HOLLY WORTELL:
In a show, you do the scenes, the director gives you notes on those scenes, and then you build on that the next night. I was so excited that I was going to get to work with Del Close, but what I came to learn was that Del hated women, didn’t think they were funny, didn’t want them in the show. At a certain point I was like, “What is this guy doing? He’s not coming up with any ideas. He’s not pushing us. He’s not doing anything.” He would say to us, “No notes after the show tonight.”
Then, after several weeks, Chris came to me and said, “Holly, I know I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’ve just got to tell you something.”
“What?”
“When Del says we aren’t having notes after the show, we are. We’re all going over to Joel’s apartment, and he’s giving us notes. Del says that you and Judith are evil witches and you’re trying to ruin our show.”
And what was happening was that Judith Scott, Joe Liss, and myself, who hadn’t worked with Del over at the ImprovOlympic, would go home every night, not knowing what was going on, and Chris, Tim Meadows, Joel Murray, and David Pasquesi were all going over and working on the show with Del. For Chris to go behind Del’s back and betray him was huge. Chris would never go against any authority figure, but he did it because he felt what Del was doing to Judith and me was wrong.
JILL TALLEY:
Once in a blue moon I’d make it to church, and I would always see Chris there. I always got the biggest kick out of watching him come back from taking communion, because it was like he knew everyone there, all the parishioners. He’d nod and smile at them, and they all really liked him. The priests really liked him, too. He was very much a part of that community. It was just a pious, quiet side of him that you’d never know unless you saw him there. Then, fourteen hours later, I’d be carrying him home from a bar and putting him to bed.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
Chris and I would sit and talk all night. He would ask me about God, about faith. His biggest questions always related to his struggles with evil, with his addictions. Drugs were Satan, to Chris. Fighting that took a lot out of him.
HOLLY WORTELL:
When he was drunk, he might do or say something he shouldn’t have done. But one day he told me, “I went to church and I confessed, and now it’s over so I can do it again.”
And I said, “Chris, I’m Jewish. But I’m pretty sure that’s not how your religion works. That doesn’t even make sense.”
One night, Matt Foley came to see the show, and the three of us went out after. I said to Matt, “I have to ask you this. Chris says if you sin and go to church and confess and say your Hail Marys, then you can just do it again.”
And Matt said, “No, of course you can’t do it again. You have to try not to do it again.”
I punched Chris in the arm and said, “See?”
FR. MATT FOLEY:
There are two ways to look at confession. One is to say, “I’m in a state of grace. God has blessed me, but in the midst of that greatness I have treated my brother or sister poorly and need to make atonement.”
The flip side is to say, “I’m a sinner. I’m not worthy. I have to find Christ to find my way out of my natural state, which is sin.”
I’m not sure which side Chris worked from, but I suspect it was the latter. “I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” That’s what Chris believed. And that’s not wrong, but it needs to be balanced with an understanding of the good side.
Chris was grateful for each day of the life God had given him. He never saw himself as an equal of God, and many times we do. A lot of our humanism is very arrogant. It says, “I’m God. I’m equal to God.” Chris was never like that. He stood in awe of God.
BOB ODENKIRK:
He saw things in a very simple way, good and evil, right and wrong. I was raised Catholic, too. I can remember being scared of the devil, of hell. It’s real in your head.
One time at Second City, Chris was violently drunk at a party. He was picking up these chairs and throwing them across the room. Me and my girlfriend brought him back to his place, and he started throwing the furniture there, too, chucking it across the room. Then he just stopped, looked over at me, and said, “Odie, do you think Belushi’s in heaven?”
It was sad, and chilling, and I didn’t know how to answer him. It made me think that those myths that you live with as a kid, they don’t always help you when you’re an adult. They don’t help you deal with grown-up things.
Even as Chris’s personal troubles began to mount, his professional fortunes only grew. Every night the audience favored him more and more. His reputation began to draw interest from the talent scouts at Saturday Night Live as well as representatives at Brillstein-Grey, the power-house management firm in Beverly Hills. In the spring of 1990, Chris was signed by Brillstein’s Marc Gurvitz, who would manage him for his entire career.
On March 24, 1990, Saturday Night Live flew Chris to New York to attend a taping of the show and to have an informal meeting with executive producer Lorne Michaels. It was the first solid indication of their interest in him and of things to come. At the same time, work had begun on Chris’s third Second City revue, Flag Smoking Permitted in Lobby Only. For this show, producer Joyce Sloane brought in Tom Gianas, a young director from outside the Second City universe. Gianas in turn hired actress Jill Talley and SNL writer Bob Odenkirk to join the cast. It was a fortuitous meeting for all. At Gianas’s request, Odenkirk helped Chris create the signature character that would take him to Saturday Night Live and beyond.
TOM GIANAS:
When you’re lined up to direct a show at Second City, you just go in and watch the performers. You make notes, jot down inspirations. Night after night, I would go there to work and make notes, and every time I saw him onstage, he transformed me from a director into an audience member; I forgot to take notes. I would just sit back and laugh and laugh and laugh. That’s never happened to me before or since.
I’ve worked with a lot of great people over the years, from Jack Black to Steve Carell, and this is something I can only say about Chris: From the moment he stepped onstage, the audience was completely invested in him. There was just a sense of “He’s gonna cause trouble, and I want to be here when it happens.”
When I arrived, he was doing the Motivational Speaker guy, but it wasn’t as a motivational speaker yet, because that idea didn’t exist. It was just that guy, in a million different contexts, usually a coach, or maybe an angry dad. It would destroy the audience every night. I said to Odenkirk, “We cannot open the show without that character.”
And that’s when Bob came back with a sketch about a family with pot-smoking kids who hire this Motivational Speaker, a guy who lives in a van down by the river, is thrice divorced, and uses the complete disaster of his life as an example of what not to become.
BOB ODENKIRK:
I sat down to write it, and the sketch came out pretty much whole the way it was done. I handed it to Chris, and watching where he took it was insane.
TIM O’MALLEY:
Chris could never remember his lines during rehearsal. He’d get so amped up with the energy of that character, doing the hips and the arm-pumping thing. He screwed it up every night for eight weeks. Odenkirk and Pasquesi sat down with him and went over and over his lines. He was like, “This is hard. This is like learning the Our Father.”
Then, on opening night, we were all worried he was going to screw it up—and he nailed it. When he came offstage, I said, “Why the hell did you finally get it tonight?”
“Big game,” he said. “Coach is here.” Del was in the audience.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
I was in the audience that night. When he said, “My name is Matt Foley, and I am a motivational speaker!” I was probably as red as a beet. I smiled and slid down a little further in my chair.
After the show we went and hung out in a bar for a time. Chris told me that he was never going to change the name, that it was always going to be Matt Foley. I’m honored by it still.
TOM GIANAS:
To this day, it’s got to be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. It never stopped making me laugh, and that’s rare.
NATE HERMAN:
Chris was never captured in either movies or TV as good as he was onstage. He was too explosive. He just seems flat in all those movies. It’s like watching a large wild animal in a cage.
BOB ODENKIRK:
The Matt Foley sketch was basically the same every night, but he was always on the edge of that character, forgetting his lines, making up new ones, changing the blocking. He was never content to mimic last night’s performance, which a lot of actors do. Sometimes, you try to make the performance fun and surprising again for the people onstage, who might be a little tired of it. Chris was doing a great show for the audience, but he was doing a completely different show for the rest of the cast. I can picture it in my head right now like it was yesterday. Night after night I’d stand there, four feet away from him, and just watch in complete awe.
HOLLY WORTELL:
I used to have to hold my cheeks with my hands because my face hurt from trying so hard not to laugh.
TIM MEADOWS:
Just watching him adjust his tie, or hitch up his pants, was enough to make you lose it. He’d get closer and closer to your face every night when he was saying his lines. I played the son. He started picking me up and tossing me up in the air, flipping me around. Then out of nowhere he’d kiss me. He just had a ball doing it.
JILL TALLEY:
He was so into the character that he’d be swinging his head around and his glasses would go flying off. Then he’d proceed to act like he couldn’t see for five minutes, stumbling around looking for his glasses, and that would become the scene. Funny things would just happen organically. Even if he did the script word for word, it felt new every night.
BOB ODENKIRK:
I just remember thinking, no one else in the world will ever be able to do this character.
TIM MEADOWS:
After Farley left for SNL, Ian Gomez filled in for him. Every night he tried to do a different character to make that scene work, and he could never do it. Finally we said, “We gotta cut it.”
TOM GIANAS:
The night that SNL came to scout him, he was nervous but confident. I remember saying to the cast, “The set’s yours. You can put up whatever you want tonight.” I wanted Chris’s strongest pieces to go up so he’d have a good shot at it.
TIM MEADOWS:
We had a great show that night. And it was great for me. Chris and I worked so well together. That helped me get noticed, and I got hired at SNL about six months later.
JILL TALLEY:
He was nervous about SNL. He went back and forth with everyone. “What should I do?” He called his parents, his priest, the entire cast. We were all like, “What do you mean, ‘What should I do?’ You take it.”
But he went round and round on it. Chris had his apartment, his bars, his church, and Second City right in this little four-block radius. That was his world, and I don’t know that he ever really left it. He was scared to leave that behind, to leave his family, to leave everything he’d ever known.
KEVIN FARLEY:
I was at the airport when Chris left. Chris was crying, and Dad was crying. It was sad to watch. When you’re from the Midwest, you don’t really ask for the spotlight. You just have your Sunday Packers game and that’s about as exciting as it gets. But I think Dad knew, we all knew, that after this nothing would ever be the same.
PAT FINN:
I got married the Saturday of Chris’s first night on the show, and he was all bummed out that he wasn’t going to get to be in the wedding. He called me early in the week and was just apologizing profusely because he had to miss it. “Maybe I can make it,” he said. “Get them to put me on next week.”
“No! You’re doin’ the show!” I said.
“I know. I sorta got to. I mean, I shouldn’t ask if I could skip it, right?”
“Chris. C’mon. It’s Saturday Night Live!”
“No, but it’s your wedding.”
And that’s the great thing about Chris: SNL was his dream, but if he could have skipped that first show to make my wedding, he would have.
The night of the ceremony, we were all at the Hilton. At ten-thirty, with everyone out on the dance floor and the wedding in full swing, about ten of us, including me in my tux and my wife in her wedding dress, snuck out and went over to the bar in the hotel and watched Chris make his debut on Saturday Night Live. It was so strange, so surreal. We’d all grown up with this show, and Chris was the first one we’d ever known to join those ranks. Just a few weeks before, he’d been hanging out in our apartments, and now he’d made it.