ACT II
CHAPTER 8
TOM SCHILLER:
He was a kind of secret, angelic being who tore too quickly through life, leaving a wake of laughter behind him. As corny as that sounds, it’s the truth.
For the next three years, Chris Farley stayed clean and sober. At Lorne Michaels’s behest, he had spent the entire Christmas break at a hard-core, locked-down rehab facility in Alabama. Unlike the celebrity resort and spa recovery units of Southern California, this joint was one step above prison, and it was staffed by, in the words of Tom Arnold, “a bunch of big black guys who didn’t take any of Chris’s shit.” And it worked.
Chris’s puppy-dog personality and endearing sense of humor had allowed him to weasel his way out of just about any difficult situation he’d faced in the past. But the people in Alabama weren’t having any of it. And, finally, Chris wasn’t having any of it, either. He realized he could no longer bullshit everyone, and he knew it was his last chance to stop bullshitting himself. He took the program seriously, took its message to heart, and took a new direction in life when he returned to New York. He moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side in the same building as Dana Carvey. A year later he would move back downtown to a new apartment on Seventeenth Street, a place chosen specifically for its proximity to his old halfway house and its steady availability of meetings and support groups. As the hoary cliché goes, Chris was a changed man. He was calmer, more thoughtful, and more focused.
He was also funnier. Chris missed the first show of 1993, but he was soon back in full swing, and over the following year he would establish himself as the show’s new breakout star. That February, the writers resurrected “The Chris Farley Show,” this time with one of Chris’s childhood idols, former Beatle Paul McCartney. The very next week Chris got to share the stage with returning SNL legend Bill Murray. The coming months brought some of Chris’s most memorable characters, including the blustery Weekend Update commentator Bennett Brauer, the outlandish man-child Andrew Giuliani, a ravenous Gap Girl, and the titular heroine of Adam Sandler’s “Lunchlady Land.”
And on the second-to-last show of his third season, with Bob Odenkirk’s blessing, Chris dusted off an old script lying around from his Second City days and brought it in to the weekly read-through. It was a hit, both at the table and on the air. That Saturday night, with one unforgettable performance, the phrase “van down by the river” assumed its permanent place in the national lexicon.
STEVEN KOREN:
Chris had been doing the Motivational Speaker character at Second City, but I didn’t know what it was. Since Bob Odenkirk had already written it, they just needed a writer to babysit it through production, check the cue cards and all that. It was never anyone’s favorite job to get. Little did I know.
So I was sitting there watching the rehearsal, making sure the camera angles were right, and I said to Chris, “You know, you’re gonna hurt your voice talking like that. Are you sure you want to do the voice that way?”
He was like, “Don’t worry, Steve. I got this one down.”
That was a good lesson for a young writer: just trust the actors. When he did it live the place exploded.
DAVID SPADE:
In rehearsal, he’d done the thing with his glasses where he’s like, “Is that Bill Shakespeare? I can’t see too good.” But he’d never done the twisting his belt and hitching up his pants thing. He saved that for the live performance, and so none of us had ever seen it. He knew that would break me. He started hitching up his pants, and I couldn’t take it. And whenever the camera was behind him focusing on me, he’d cross his eyes. I was losing it.
Once we started laughing, Chris just turned it on more. And we’re not supposed to do that. Lorne doesn’t like it at all, but Chris loved to bust us up. Sometimes after the show he’d say, “All I’m trying to do is make you laugh. I don’t care about anything else.”
NORM MacDONALD, writer/Weekend Update anchor:
Lorne didn’t like us cracking up on air. He didn’t want it to be like The Carol Burnett Show. He hated that. When people crack up on Saturday Night Live, it’s normally fake, because we’ve already done the sketches and rehearsed them so much. But it was always Chris’s goal when it was live on air to make you laugh, to take you out of your character, and he always succeeded. You could never not laugh.
He would do little asides, especially to Sandler, even if Sandler wasn’t in the sketch. One time Chris was in a Japanese game show sketch, and when he went to write down his answer for the game, he just took a big whiff of the Magic Marker and did a look to Sandler off camera. Sandler wasn’t even in the sketch, but if you watch the tape you can hear him laughing offscreen.
MICHAEL McKEAN:
It was nice to share the stage with that kind of manic energy. For one thing, you knew the focus was elsewhere. No one was watching me. I could have sat down and eaten a sandwich during some of the sketches we did together.
CHRIS ROCK:
You never really shared the stage with him. It was always his stage, and deservedly so. The weird thing is that nobody got mad about that. There’s a lot of competition on that show, but no one was competing with Farley. We’d all get upset if someone else had a sketch on and we didn’t, but I can’t think of one person who was ever upset about Chris getting a sketch on. No one ever complained.
ALEC BALDWIN:
Whenever I was watching Chris perform I would think, “How do I get where he’s at? How do I get to be as funny and as honest and as warm?” There are comics that I’ve worked with who are the most self-involved bastards you’ve ever met in your life, and they can’t fake the kind of decency Chris had. Chris was someone who was very vulnerable; it was a card he played. It was a tool in his actor’s repertoire, and yet it was something totally genuine. Even when he plays Matt Foley, and he’s hectoring people in this totally overbearing way, there’s a tinge of the character’s own neediness. Even underneath that, there’s Chris.
KEVIN NEALON:
He was so fallible. People just felt for him. Women felt protective of him, because they could tell he wasn’t watching out for himself. And men related to all his anxieties and imperfections.
LORNE MICHAELS:
One time we were in the studio, and Chevy Chase came by. Chris was practicing one of his pratfalls. He showed it to Chevy, and Chevy said, “What are you breaking your fall on?”
Chevy always had something to break his fall; you plan these things out. But Chris had watched Chevy and bought the illusion of it. How do you fall? You just fall on the ground and you don’t mind the pain, because that’s the price of doing it. So there was an honesty and a straightforwardness in him that people responded to.
NORM MacDONALD:
What I would do with Chris, when it came to writing a sketch, was just listen to him and observe him. There was this one thing he did. He’d tell a story—and I’m not doing this justice—but he’d tell a story like, “Anyways, Norm. Did I tell ya I seen my friend Bill the other day, and I says to him, I says, I look him right in the eye and I says to him, I says, I says to Bill, I says to him, get this, what I says to him is I says, get this, what I says, you won’t believe what I says to him, I says . . .”
And of course the joke was that he’d never get to what he’d actually said to the guy. And Chris could keep this going for twenty, twenty-five minutes straight. He’d do it two hundred different ways. It would just get funnier and funnier and funnier. When you can reduce something to four words and be funny for twenty-five minutes without an actual joke or a punch line, that’s genius. It’s not even really comedy anymore. It’s almost like music, like jazz variations.
I always liked comedians who just keep repeating things until nobody’s laughing anymore, but then they take it so far that eventually it’s funnier than it was in the beginning. There are only a couple of performers on the planet who can do that. Andy Kaufman could do it, and Chris Farley could do it.
So I had him do it on Weekend Update. Lorne had decided that the “I says to the guy” segment would last for thirty seconds, which I knew would never work. At dress, I told Chris to do it for four minutes. So he did, and it was just like I thought. People weren’t laughing for a while, but then right as he hit the four-minute mark it was really starting to kill. That’s when I realized he should have done it for eight minutes.
But he never got to do it on air, because Lorne went ballistic on me that I’d let Chris go so far over time. I tried to explain to Lorne that it wasn’t funny for thirty seconds, but Chris understood it completely.
ALEC BALDWIN:
There are people who are smart in a way that has no applicability to performance, but Chris’s brains and his quickness inside of performance were amazing. He knew exactly how to scan a line, exactly what inflection to have, how to time it, what expression to make. A great performer is someone who puts together a half a dozen things in an instant, and Chris was one of the most skilled performers I’ve ever seen in that respect. And he knew that his opportunity would come. He wasn’t sitting there, calculating how he was going to trump you or dominate the scene. He just patiently waited for his moment and then arrived fully in that moment.
STEVE LOOKNER, writer:
When it came to performing in your sketches, Chris was never some egotistical guy who was going to take your material and do it however he wanted to. He wanted to make sure he was getting the sketch the way you wanted it.
FRED WOLF, writer:
The highlight of my career, still, was the first sketch I got on at Saturday Night Live, this thing called “The Mr. Belvedere Fan Club.” Chris had a big turn in that sketch where he played a crazy person obsessed with Mr. Belvedere . He brought down the house. Afterward he came up to me, saying,
“That was funny. Thanks for the good stuff.” I couldn’t believe that about him. To me, it was the other way around. I should have been thanking him.
DAVID MANDEL, writer:
He always went out of his way to make sure people knew what material was yours, that they were your jokes, and he was just the guy who said the lines.
IAN MAXTONE-GRAHAM, writer:
I worked on some of the Motivational Speaker sketches, because Bob Odenkirk was gone by then. Matt Foley was very much Chris’s character, but Chris was also very loyal. We always had to call Bob up and read it to him over the phone and get his blessing.
SIOBHAN FALLON, cast member:
There was always an air of competition at Saturday Night Live. At read-through, people would purposefully not laugh at something even though it was funny, because they wanted something else to make it on the show. But Chris would laugh no matter what. If it was funny, he gave it a big, big laugh. He didn’t discriminate. He was honest.
NORM MacDONALD:
I don’t think Chris knew how to hate. I’d feel bad sometimes, because I’d be complaining and I’d go, “You know who sucks?” And I’d go off about so-and-so, some guy on the show. And Chris would immediately go, “I think he’s funny, Norm. Why don’t you like him?” So then I’d just feel like a jerk.
DAVID MANDEL:
The show was in a very weird spot at that time. During the election year, everything was Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey doing Clinton and Bush and Perot. Chris was a full cast member, and incredibly popular, but in those sketches he’d just do small, memorable turns as Joe Midwestern Guy. Al Franken and I wrote the sketch where Bill Clinton goes jogging and stops in at McDonald’s. In that one Chris played Hank Holdgren from Holdgren Hardware in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. In a lot of those small supporting roles I think you saw the road not taken for Chris. If he hadn’t found comedy, you could totally see him being the friendly hardware-store guy.
TODD GREEN:
When Chris interacted with celebrities, the guest hosts, he would always introduce me by saying, “This is my friend Todd. We met in second grade and grew up together.” He was proud that he was my friend, and he wanted to share that. I remember him regaling Glenn Close with stories of Madison, and you could see that she saw the genuineness in him. She just looked at him and said, “You really are an amazing guy.”
I’m a huge, huge Beatles fan, and so when Paul McCartney was on the show, that was a really big deal. Ten years earlier, Chris and I had been listening to Beatles albums in our basements. He called me during the week at like two in the afternoon and said, “What’re you doing?”
“What am I doing?” I said. “I’m working, like most people.”
“You know what I’m doing?”
“What?”
And then he took the phone and held it up, and I could hear Paul McCartney singing “Yesterday.”
“I’m just here, hanging with Paul McCartney,” he said. Then he giggled and hung up the phone.
The night of the show, he said, “Listen, I want you guys to hang out in my dressing room tonight. I have a surprise for you.”
So, Kevin and I wait and watch on the monitor in the dressing room. McCartney comes out and does the first song, and we watch him, wondering, “What’s the surprise? Why didn’t he come and get us?” Whatever. Didn’t matter. It was one of his new songs. Then the second song comes and goes, another new one, and still no Chris. Just before the end of the show, when we’re pretty sure Chris has forgotten about us, he barrels into the dressing room and says, “Okay, Greenie, you’re on! Follow me!”
We go running down the hallway to the studio. Paul and Linda McCartney come out. Chris introduces me to them. I’m in a state of shock, and the four of us walk out to the stage together. Chris and I stop just short of the cameras, and Paul and Linda go out and he sings “Hey Jude.”
And at that moment, Chris wasn’t a member of the show anymore. It was just two buddies from Wisconsin who grew up on the Beatles, listening to Paul McCartney. Chris literally forgot that he had to go back onstage for the good-nights.
I think, deep down, all of the guys from Edgewood figured that one day we’d end up back in Madison and it would be just the way it was. I think even Chris believed that. Even ranked against all the fame and money and stardom, he felt the days back at Edgewood were the best days of our lives.
KEVIN FARLEY:
When you come to the conclusion that you’re an alcoholic, and you go to these stupid meetings, they’re filled with down-and-out people right off the street. I’d go to Madison, and I’d see Chris, who was on Saturday Night Live, had money, had fame. He’d go and drink coffee and talk with these regular folk, and he could talk to them more easily than he could talk to Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney. He felt more at ease with the average Joes.
What he loved was the honesty. Nobody is as honest as they are in one of those meetings, when they’re admitting their faults, admitting that they’re broken human beings. Contrast that with the Saturday Night Live after party, where everyone wants you to think they’re hot stuff. They’re putting on airs, and it’s all bullshit because we’re all just broken people anyway. To witness people being honest about themselves and with themselves is a life-changing thing, because it’s something you so rarely see. That’s what’s truly amazing about recovery, and amazing about how it changed Chris.
TOM FARLEY:
He was a lot more fun to be around. He was much, much funnier. You could have thoughtful, engaging discussions with him, and he wouldn’t get mad or defensive. That was a huge difference from when he was drinking.
For Chris, being in recovery was a little like being at camp. That’s how he treated it. Make your bed every morning for inspection, that sort of thing. And that carried over once he got out of rehab, too. As disgusting a slob as he was before, he was that clean and organized once he got sober. He turned into a neat freak.
BOB ODENKIRK:
After all the years of being in and out of rehab, I never thought that Chris could take it seriously. But one time I was at this party out in L.A., and I saw him turn down a beer. He was saying no, and he meant it. I thought, oh my God, he figured it out. He knows how dire this is, and he’s really taking charge. It wasn’t about pleasing everyone else. It was about him and his choice. I was really impressed, and I thought, wow, nothing is going to stop this guy.
TOM FARLEY:
Toward the end of Chris’s Saturday Night Live run, my son was born, and he had to stay in intensive care for a week. One day I asked Chris to watch the two older girls while my wife and I went to the hospital. We went down to his apartment, and we were ringing the buzzer, waiting for someone to let us in. There was no answer. I was starting to wonder where the new, reliable Chris was. Then, around the corner here he comes with these huge bags of Cheetos and ice cream and these enormous Barney dolls, walking down the street. It was just a great sight. Chris was so happy that we’d asked him to look after the girls, that we trusted him with that responsibility. He was so proud that he could be a better part of their lives.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris paved the way for the rest of us. When he went down to Alabama, I started to look at myself. I was doing the same stuff he was—coke, pot, drinking all the time. I saw where I was headed. I never went into rehab. I just walked into a meeting one day. That’s when I realized we all are alcoholics, the whole family. My mother stopped drinking then, too, at the same time I did. We would go to meetings a lot together. We realized Dad was an alcoholic, and we saw the patterns very clearly once we’d changed our own. But Tommy, Johnny, and Dad were still drinking. Barb was the exception. She was never a drinker at all.
TOM FARLEY:
When I look back, or when people ask me what regrets I have, what I realize is that I always felt that Chris’s problems were his own. I was still drinking, and I didn’t take an active role in his recovery. It was his deal, and that was that. Then one day he asked me to come to his second-anniversary meeting, which he was going to lead. I said, “Great, where do you meet?” He gives me the address of this place down on Eleventh Avenue and Forty-something, the real fringe of Hell’s Kitchen. You go down there and you think, Jesus, what am I walking into?
But that’s where Chris liked to go. He had his choice between meetings on Park Avenue and in Hell’s Kitchen, and he wanted to be with the desperate, hard-luck cases to remind himself that his celebrity didn’t put him above them in any way. He stood up there in front of them and said, “Look, I woke up the same way you guys did this morning, wondering if I was going to stay sober today. My disease is no different than yours.” And it wasn’t bullshit. He just seemed so wise and intelligent and in control. I just sat there thinking, this is my brother? I looked at him in a whole different light from then on.
NORM MacDONALD:
What’s hard for a comedian is that they make a living on their anxieties and their self-doubts, but in real life they try and separate themselves from that. Chris didn’t do that. He was absolutely honest in what he was.
CONAN O’BRIEN:
You got the sense with Chris that he wasn’t punching a clock. And, obviously, that isn’t always a fun way to live. But it was fun for everybody else.
DAVID MANDEL:
Emilio Estevez hosted the show in support of Mighty Ducks 2, which we were given a screening of. We saw it in a private screening room. No one really cared about Mighty Ducks 2, so only a couple of us were there.
Now, in Mighty Ducks 2—which, if you need your memory refreshed—they’re training for the Junior Olympics, and they let some street kids from L.A. join the team. So now they have some black kids on the squad, and they do a giant musical montage where they take the rap song “Whoomp! There It Is” and change it to “Quack! There It Is.” And of course it was the actual musicians who’d sung “Whoomp! There It Is.” They’d sold out to Disney and done “Quack! There It Is.”
It was so ridiculous that those of us in the room started clapping along and jumping up and down and dancing with the music in the middle of the screening room. The next thing you know, Farley’s pants are down around his ankles, and he’s standing up on a chair, smacking his ass in time to “Quack! There It Is.” I have never seen anything funnier in my life. And yet when you look back sometimes you think, you know, maybe that was a cry for help.
SARAH SILVERMAN, cast member:
The cast was on a retreat, sitting around a campfire, and Chris sidled up to Jim Downey. I overheard him say in this little-boy voice, “Hey, Jim? Do you think it would help the show if I got even fatter?”
Jim said, in his parental voice, “No, Chris. I think you’re fine.”
Chris said, “Are you sure? ’Cause I will. For the show.”
Chris was fucking around for sure, and seeing the back-and-forth of the conversation was hilarious, but there was an element of truth in it: He would do anything to be funny.
NORM MacDONALD:
I never thought about it as needing attention, because Chris laughed at everybody else, too. He loved Sandler and Spade and me, guys who were much less funny than he was. And he was always more generous in giving you a laugh than in taking one for himself.
His greatest love was just the act of laughter itself. As much as he made other people laugh, to watch Chris do it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever see. Nobody could laugh with as much unbridled glee. He’d just go into these paroxysms of mirth. If Chris laughed at one of your jokes, you felt like the king of the world.
STEVEN KOREN:
Chris was really smart. He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s the same with Jim Carrey. He knows the exact degrees to which he’s being big or small or clever. When they’re that good, they know the difference between being laughed at and laughed with. There’s a definite awareness. I guess Chris was a victim of his own desire to make people laugh, but also I think his heart was so big that if he was the butt of the joke it was okay. He wanted to give people laughter so much that it was okay if it hurt him a little bit. It was a conscious decision, I think.
JAY MOHR, cast member:
No one was laughing at Chris. Everyone was laughing with him. Show me someone who was laughing at Chris Farley, and I’ll show you a real cocksucker.
DAVID SPADE:
I would have to write sketches all week to try and stay alive on the show, and Chris would be written for, so he didn’t write a lot, or read. So while I was busting my hump, he’d be bored behind me trying to amuse himself. One night he goes, “Davy, turn around.”
“I’m busy,” I say.
“Turn around.”
“Dude, if this is Fat Guy in a Little Coat again, it’s not funny anymore.”
“It’s not.”
“Really?”
“I promise.”
So I turn around and he’s got my Levi’s jacket on, and he goes, “Fat Guy in a Little Coat . . . give it a chance.”
And the coat rips, and that’s how we wound up putting it in Tommy Boy.
TIM HERLIHY, writer:
When comedians get together . . . I wouldn’t call it one-upsmanship, but it is like a game. Who can be the funniest? When I knew Chris, he was surrounded by the elite of comedy. Sandler’s a huge, funny star, but you always knew Farley was going to top him. He was the funniest among a group of very funny, talented people. All of us who worked with him are richer for it. We’re better writers, better performers.
FRED WOLF:
Comics are a pretty strange breed. Put all of us in a room and we can fight among ourselves and disagree with all our bitterness and neuroses. But when it came to Farley, it was unanimous: He was the best.
NORM MacDONALD:
What astonished me about Chris was that he could make everyone laugh. He could make a child laugh. He could make an old person laugh. A dumb person, a smart person. A guy who loved him, a guy who hated him.
IAN MAXTONE-GRAHAM:
He was a very funny, jovial presence in the office. He’d be very, very outgoing, and then he’d have this very cute, shy thing he’d do where he’d sort of retreat into himself. Hugely outgoing and hugely shy. That was the rhythm of his behavior. You can see that in some of his sketches.
BOB ODENKIRK:
Most of my memories are just of hanging out with Chris and him making me laugh so hard. But then, if Chris wasn’t being silly, if he was just listening to you quietly, that was as funny as when he was worked up. “The Chris Farley Show” on SNL, that was Chris behaving himself.
JOHN GOODMAN, host:
“The Chris Farley Show,” that was Chris.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
That was Chris.
STEVEN KOREN:
That was him.
JACK HANDEY, writer:
He was basically playing himself.
TIM MEADOWS:
That’s how he acted whenever he was around someone he admired. Until he got to know you, he really was that guy—shy and asking a lot of dumb questions but not wanting to be too intrusive. It was a very endearing quality.
TOM DAVIS:
I thought of that sketch originally. I thought, what the fuck are we going to do with this guy? He’s just over the fucking top all the time. I buttonholed Downey and said, “Let’s do ‘The Chris Farley Show’ and just have him talk as he really is so he doesn’t go over the top.”
JIM DOWNEY:
Farley was such a comedy nerd. He knew all the old shows, better than I did. He’d come up and say, “Do you remember that superheroes sketch on the show where they were having that party?” Then he’d proceed to do the entire sketch for me, his version probably longer than the original. He’d finish that and be like, “You remember that?”
“Yes, Chris,” I’d say, thinking this was all leading up to something significant. “What about it?”
“That was awesome.”
So we decided to put that in a talk-show format, with some poor sap being trapped on a talk show with Farley asking him retarded questions. We submitted it, actually, as a joke at read-through. I thought it was too inside, and so would never make it on the air. But Lorne liked it immediately, and seemed to have big hopes for it.
At dress, Steve Koren was watching it, grinning ear to ear and laughing. And of course the audience loved it. I don’t think it was just Farley being adorable. I guess there was just something universal about it, and I didn’t appreciate the resonance it had.
The first one was with Jeff Daniels. Then we did Martin Scorsese. By the time Paul McCartney came around, I actually didn’t want to bring it back at all. I just thought, what can you do that’s different? If you just do the same thing over again just because people liked it, they might stop liking it. But Lorne insisted on doing it.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Actually, I think Chris was the one who was adamant about doing it with McCartney.
ALEC BALDWIN:
We were just dying. We couldn’t believe how perfect it was. How hard is it to make Beatlemania funny again? How hard is it to make gooing over McCartney funny? We didn’t know if that would work. But Chris came on, and we were sobbing with laughter it was so funny. It was going along, and then Chris says, “You remember that time you got arrested in Japan for pot?”
And McCartney just suddenly changed his tone. “Oh, those are the things I’d like to forget, Chris.”
They played it perfectly.
JOHN GOODMAN:
The funniest bit that I ever saw him do was that McCartney interview. When I first met him he was like this kid who kept staring at me, just like that character did. I don’t know why, but he seemed genuinely thrilled to meet me. It wasn’t a celebrity type of thing, either; it was just that he couldn’t get enough of other people, of their stories. He was endlessly curious.
BOB ODENKIRK:
I said once—and it was misquoted in that fucking Live from New York book—that Chris was like a child. How it reads in that book was that I meant Chris was like a little baby, which wasn’t what I said at all. The whole quote—which they didn’t include, because they’re dicks—was, “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but Chris was like a child. He was like a child in his reverence and awe of the world around him.” And he was. He was so respectful of everyone, like he always had something to learn from you.
JAY MOHR:
I learned from Chris how to have more fun. Nothing is that serious. Acting is really a ridiculous way to make a living. You’re playing make-believe, and Chris never got away from that fact. Kids never come home and say, “I was over at Michael’s house and we played make-believe. It was awful. We were in a spaceship and I had a helmet on and there were Martians and then we chased them through the woods—and it just wasn’t my thing.” No kid has ever said that. It’s make-believe. You paint as you go. I have a three-year-old son now. I open up his coloring book and say, “What color are these footprints going to be?”
“Green.”
Great fucking idea. Green footprints, that was Chris.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
I would write songs and musical numbers for SNL, and when Kelsey Grammar was host I wrote a sketch called “Iron John: The Musical.” Chris sang in that one, and he came up to me after the performance and said, “I love those musical things. I just love them. I really want to do more of them.”
Musical numbers are very emotional things, and it’s a very childlike desire to want to have that kind of honest, sincere outlet. He wanted to share as much of himself with the audience as he could. He was not a great singer, as I recall. During the rehearsals, beads of sweat would literally drip down his forehead as he was trying comically hard to hit all his cues and hit all his notes. He so much wanted to succeed. And when you see a young guy working like that, with sweat running down his forehead, that’s kind of a wonderful thing. When the old cast would get laughs, we were practically counting them. We were very calculating. Chris wasn’t a calculated performer. He was out there for the love.
IAN MAXTONE-GRAHAM:
They have a meeting with the host every Monday night, and there were always two jokes that we used to do every single week. Let’s say Kevin Bacon was the host, and Tom Arnold was set to host the next week. Lorne would announce, “Everyone, this week’s host is Kevin Bacon.” And everyone would applaud.
Then Al Franken would say, “ And next week: Tom Arnold.” And everyone would applaud much louder. That was the little icebreaker they’d do to set the host at ease and poke fun at him a bit.
The other thing that would always happen was that at the very end of the meeting, Farley would jump in—kind of like that determined kid on the football team that’s never won a game—he’d jump in and say, "C’mon, let’s do it this time!” It was always very funny and sort of combined his childish eagerness with great comic timing and a great sense of the moment.
ALEC BALDWIN:
When you were on the set with Chris, he’d be giggling and pinching you and saying, “Where you want to go after the show, man?” It was like being in homeroom in high school. There’s a quotient of people at Saturday Night Live for whom the show is like operating an elevator. We go up. We go down. What’s the big deal? Then there were the people like Chris who made it their mission every week to make it the best show possible, and enjoy it.
ROBERT SMIGEL:
Just seeing Chris at the door of my office would put a smile on my face. He radiated this earnestness, and he really believed in the work that he did. Chris was also unique among comedians in being so open about his faith and spirituality. Most people in this industry are so caught up in being sarcastic or casually ironic that they’re loath to admit that they actually care about anything. Admitting that you believe in God is the same as admitting that you like Bob Seger. Okay, even I’m not crazy about Seger. But I like Springsteen, and even Bruce is just too earnest for lots of comedy writers to give it up for.
CONAN O’BRIEN:
There are a lot of us in comedy who are a lot more Catholic than anybody knows. Our Catholicism is sort of under our skin. People were surprised at the depth of Chris’s faith; to me it made perfect sense. A lot of people think that they’re mutually exclusive. How can you be dancing in a Chippendales thong and going to mass at the same time? But if you’re Catholic you think, of course that’s how it works.
TOM FARLEY:
Pretty early on, Chris told me he’d found this church, St. Malachy’s. “They call it the Actors’ Chapel,” he said. He totally ate that up. In his mind it was this place where all these old Broadway stars and vaudevillians had come to mass and prayed and found guidance. The first time I went with him, these old ladies who were sort of scattered about the pews would break out with the most beautiful voices during the hymns. They’d really belt it out, and you could picture them singing in their old musicals and operas. It was really special for Chris in that way.
MSGR. MICHAEL CRIMMINS, priest, St. Malachy’s:
He used to come on Tuesdays and Thursdays to the noon mass. He went to confession regularly. He’d bring his mother and his family to mass whenever they were in town.
Sister Theresa O’Connell was really his mentor and spiritual adviser. She knew him well. Unfortunately, she’s passed on, and they kept their relationship very private. But she suggested to him that he volunteer through our Encore Friendly Visitors Program, and he did.
SIOBHAN FALLON:
Chris lived close to me, and we went to the same church, Holy Trinity on the Upper West Side. He’d go to St. Malachy’s from work and Holy Trinity on the weekends. As he did everything big and great, he’d be in the back of church, praying intensely, bowed down in this dramatic position, practically kicking himself over whatever he’d done the night before. I’d say, “Hi, Chris.”
And he’d say, “Well, God’s gonna be mad at me this time!”
I have no doubt that Chris is sitting pretty up in heaven, entertaining everybody. He was a good guy. He’s taken care of. You can say that addiction is a selfish disease, but Chris wasn’t selfish. He always looked outside of himself. At that stage of someone’s career, in your twenties and early thirties, you’re so selfish and so self-consumed—especially actors. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone at that age who was thinking about anything other than getting themselves ahead. And so for Chris to be doing the work he was doing was amazing.
TIM MEADOWS:
A kid from the Make-A-Wish Foundation came to SNL once to meet Farley. I got to see that, but I had no idea that he was a part of this program at St. Malachy’s. He never talked about it. I was one of his best friends, and I didn’t know about it until after he’d passed away.
NORM MacDONALD:
It was amazing at the funeral to hear people talking. It was like, “My God, this is a person I never knew.”
SR. PEGGY McGIRL, executive assistant, Encore Community Services:
Whenever he came here he was very regular and without any airs. He had a quiet way about him; he didn’t like to have any attention focused on him at all. His main concern was just to be there to help the seniors. We have parties twice a year for people who are homebound, seniors and people with disabilities. One is in the spring and the other is around Halloween. If Chris was in town, he was always there.
KEITH HOCTER, volunteer, Encore Community Services:
I met Chris through the parties at St. Malachy’s. We worked the door together. He was just extremely friendly, not at all hung up about who he was, and he was pretty famous by that point. He just showed up and did what the rest of us did, which was whatever the sisters told us to do.
For a lot of the seniors, this was their big social event of the year. The party would have about a hundred and fifty people. A lot of them were in wheelchairs and walkers, and back then the church didn’t have an elevator. The party was in the basement, and the only way down was this old, narrow set of stairs. It had one of those side-rail lifts, but the thing never worked.
Chris and I and the other volunteers, we’d each grab a corner of the wheelchair, tip them back, and then just talk to them and keep them calm while we took them down. We never dropped anybody; I guess that’s the first measure of success. And we never had anyone freak out on us, either. Half of our job was to get them down safely. The other was to make them feel good while we were carrying them down. Then, at the end of the evening, we would stay and, one by one, help carry them all back up to the street again.
JOHN FARLEY:
One time we were in Chicago, coming back from filming this HBO special where Chris had this quick little cameo. As we get out of the limo at Chris’s apartment, there’s an old woman standing on the corner, begging for a quarter to get on the bus. Two minutes later, she finds herself in the back of a limousine with a hundred dollars in her hand. And Chris tells the limo driver, “Take her anywhere she wants to go.”
The next day the same driver comes back to pick Chris up, and he says, “Do you have any idea where that woman wanted me to take her? Please, let’s not do that again.”
ALFRANKEN:
Tony Hall is a former congressman from Dayton, Ohio. His son Matt had leukemia, and a mutual friend asked me to go and visit him at Sloan-Kettering. The second time I went there I said, “Who’s your favorite cast member on SNL?” It was Chris. So I asked Chris if he’d come and visit him, and he did.
Matt just loved it. His parents are very Christian, especially his mom, and Chris and I were just swearing up a storm. Matt laughed. His mom didn’t know whether to be happy or shocked or what.
After we’d spent a while with Matt and said good-bye, Chris went around and visited every single kid in the cancer ward. He stayed there and entertained every last one of them. Then at the end of the day, as we were walking out of the hospital, Chris just broke down and started sobbing. I think it was all sort of wrapped up with his own issues that he was dealing with at the time. I said to him, “Don’t you see how much joy you bring to these people? Don’t you see what you just did, how valuable that is?”
Chris went back and visited Matt again. When they had Matt’s funeral, I went, and they had made a bulletin board of “Matt’s Favorite Stuff.” In the middle of it was a photo of him and Chris from that day.
FR. JOE KELLY, S.J., priest, St. Malachy’s:
He believed that comedy was a ministry of its own. Anything that made people laugh was worthwhile. But at the same time, he wanted a little more than that. He was a bit of a disturbed guy. I’m talking personally, now. A bit of a disturbed guy.
He used to come up to my room here, just to sit and chat and talk about different things, especially about how important the Friendly Visitors Program was to him. He felt that without the program, without the work he did here, his life wouldn’t have much meaning. Doing what he did here gave him a purpose outside of some of the trivial work he was doing in entertainment.
Anybody who’s constantly making a fool of himself and getting laughs out of those crazy facial gestures and so on, very often they’re hiding something they don’t want to face themselves. I think that was the case with Chris. He was a much deeper person than he let on. One gift he had was the ability to make people laugh. The other gift he had was himself. Just being the person he was was a gift for others. And I don’t think he realized that for quite some time.
SR. PEGGY McGIRL:
We have a residence, a converted hotel, that is now a home for the homeless and the mentally ill, and Chris used to visit a man named Willie. He also spent time with another resident, a woman named Lola, but it was mostly Willie.
Willie was about seventy years old, and he had been homeless before coming to our residence. Chris took Willie out to dinner every week, and to famous restaurants. Chris treated him as an equal, always. He would take him to Broadway shows, take him out to ball games. If Chris was walking down the street on the way to his office, he’d stop in to see how Willie was doing. Whenever he had to go away for work, he’d send Willie postcards, and whenever he came back he always brought Willie a souvenir. They were friends for over five years.
TODD GREEN:
On the one-year anniversary of Chris’s death, St. Malachy’s was having a memorial mass for him, and I went with Tommy and Kevin Cleary. There was an elderly black guy there with a Chicago Bulls hat on. He was not quite homeless, but clearly one step away from it. He stood up to speak. He said his name was Willie, and he talked about Chris and about all the things he had done for him, all the time Chris had spent with him. Kevin, Tommy, and I, we just looked at each other—we had no idea.
The man spoke for a little while longer. Then he started to break down crying. He said, “This hat, this is the last thing Chris ever gave me, and I really miss him.”
SR. PEGGY McGIRL:
After Chris passed, Willie became very quiet. Eventually, some time later, he moved back down south to be with his family, to let his family take care of him. Whatever problems had put him on the street and made him homeless, he overcame them and went back home.
When you receive love, it releases you from the things that trouble you. Just knowing that someone cares about you can give you strength and courage. And I always believed that it was Chris’s love for Willie, and the things he did for Willie, that finally set him free.