Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [16]
The moment arrived. Don Pardo, the NBC announcer, ran down the Saturday Night Live cast: “Ellen Cleghorne, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Melanie Hutsell, Tim Meadows, Mike Myers, Kevin Nealon, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, David Spade, Julia Sweeney…and featuring Al Franken, Norm Macdonald, Jay Mohr, Sarah Silverman. Musical guest, Nirvana. And your host, Charles Barkley.” He lowered his voice to hit the perfect basso cantinato tone. “Ladies and gentlemen…Charles Barkley.”
The rest of my life began. I constantly repositioned myself to stay out of the way. I must have moved five times in the first three minutes. When “Barkley vs. Barney” ended, the crowd went bananas and gave the sketch a rousing ovation. Charles waited for the applause to die down. “Stick around, Nirvana is here!” he said.
I was in. A real team player. Everyone had seen what I could do, and I was now on my way to becoming the most famous cast member ever. Undeniably, I thought I was going to be the next Eddie Murphy. There was going to be an applause break the following year when my name appeared in the opening montage. I wasn’t being cocky. That’s always been my personality as a performer. If people leave my stand-up show and say it was pretty good, this wrecks me. Why would this be any different? After all, out of everyone in the country who auditioned, they hired three new people—and I was one of them.
Four
Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday
THE SCHEDULE for putting together Saturday Night Live was made back in the seventies when everyone was on coke. For the two years I was on the show, the schedule was the same as it had always been. Problem was, no one did coke and we were expected to keep the same hours.
The fact that a show pieced together in two days has stayed consistently funny for more than twenty-five years is truly amazing, but I never understood why the format had to be so unnecessarily difficult. On top of the strain of working the most bizarre hours I had ever known, there was a vagueness to the entire process that was crippling. Everyone seemed to always be on their way to somewhere else. Every question I ever asked anybody was answered as they walked away from me, and no suggestions were ever offered. I assumed that they simply hated me. That would have been fine, but I think that having been on the show awhile, they were just afraid to stop moving. Also, why slow down your day helping the new guy when you’re trying to keep from drowning yourself?
When I started working at SNL, I was told to be there on Mondays at 1:00 P.M. A few other guys would be there by then, but as with my first Monday, the majority of people showed up much later. When I was hired, I didn’t know how to turn on a computer. While other writers were typing sketches and modeming them to wherever sketches went to be printed, I wrote mine with pencil and paper on a yellow legal pad with horizontal blue stripes and red vertical stripes and then sat around the office with the finished product wondering where to turn in my pages. My Harvard officemates couldn’t help me because they handed in their sketches with the push of a button. It took me about three days of roaming the hallways asking everyone I saw, “Where do I hand in my sketch?” before I knew what a production assistant looked like. All of them tried to be helpful, but they were inevitably on the fly, so they’d point in a general direction and mumble something with their backs to me.
Early on, it became clear that my body was not reacting well to my new surroundings. My stomach was always knotted. I never knew what time it was. I stopped looking. The clocks on the wall mocked me. Shapes shifted and sounds came and went. I stopped eating out after Norm Macdonald put the fear of a bad avocado in me. I