Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [13]
I noticed a semicircle forming around Lorne’s desk and guessed that the pitches would start on one side of the desk and then work their way around the room. To act on my own prediction, I had to quickly decide which side of the desk to stand on. I wanted to be dead last to pitch so I could listen to everyone else’s ideas and hope for the light fantastic to strike. It was my only hope.
I picked the right side of Lorne’s desk, on the far side of the office. After some aggressive maneuvering, I managed to wedge myself into a position where I would be either second or second to last. Dave Mandel, a writer from Harvard, was on my left, and across the room, leaning against the wall, was David Spade. If Lorne said David, I was safe; if it was Dave, I was probably going to be axed before I saw any airtime. The office door swung closed and Lorne looked up from his desk. One glance generated instant quiet from the rowdy crowd. After a few seconds of silence, Lorne said, “David…”
Whew! With the exception of Dave Mandel, everyone would pitch before me. Think, damn it! I prodded my brain. Concentrating was particularly hard because as I was trying to come up with an idea, people like Al Franken and Adam Sandler were telling the host what they had in mind. That’s some pretty difficult stuff to tune out. Even more difficult to ignore was a pitch from Tom Davis, a writer from the highly regarded comedy team of Franken and Davis.
Tom excitedly pitched Charles Barkley doing a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial. Before he had gone far, Charles interrupted with a frosty “What?” But Tom pressed on about how Charles could tap-dance for spicy chicken, slowing only to refer to his notes. Soon Sandler began laughing, followed closely by Farley. The rest of us were staring at Tom, horrified that he was standing by his idea of Sir Charles peddling chicken. I thought I was off the hook. Even if my idea—the one I had not yet conceived—sucked, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as Charles Barkley tap-dancing for chicken.
I overheard someone on the floor talking about Barney the Dinosaur’s new kids’ album. I thought of Barney the Dinosaur. I thought about Charles Barkley. I pictured Barney the Dinosaur and Charles Barkley. The ideas were creeping through the semicircle and looping toward me. Sooner than was comfortable, I was next. Life all comes down to a few moments, and this was one of them. If I didn’t pitch something decent, I was a dead man. Then it hit me. Charles Barkley had a Nike commercial out at the time where he played one-on-one basketball with Godzilla. What if Charles Barkley played one-on-one basketball with Barney the Dinosaur!
“Jay?” Lorne said.
I steeled myself and pitched “Barkley vs. Barney,” a one-on-one pickup basketball game to the death. Everyone in the room smiled. Sometimes it’s just a roll of the dice. All those clubs I worked in all of those cities in all those cornfields, and my entire career seemed to have been determined by which side of the room I was on. No matter now, I had delivered big-time. “Barkley vs. Barney” was chosen as the opening monologue of the show that week—the first show of the nineteenth year of Saturday Night Live.
Talk about strange. Two days later, at 6:45 A.M., I walked into the gymnasium at Hunter College and saw Barney standing under the boards next to Al Franken. The show must have gotten a great rate on the gym, because for some reason we all had to be there by seven in the morning. I knew why the guy in the purple dinosaur suit was there, but I wasn’t exactly sure why Al was. He wasn’t in the sketch.
It turned out that the producers had assigned Al Franken to “oversee” the sketch. No one told me this, I gleaned it from his body language. I had naïvely assumed that if I wrote a sketch, my role during filming would be to explain how everything should go creatively. After all, they told