Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [24]
In the sketch I wrote, Newhart played a doctor who was a former pediatrician who diagnosed everything in preschool language. If a patient had a urinary tract infection, he’d say, “It seems like your pee-pee has a boo-boo.” After about half a dozen pee-pees and doodees, Newhart deadpanned, “I hope you all, you all realize that you are witnessing the actual…the actual…end of my career.” Everyone laughed. I wasn’t angry or disappointed at all. Because it came out of the mouth of Bob Newhart, it was like being knighted.
But there was nothing like being prepared to meet the host, like Dave Attell and I were when Kelsey Grammer was there. In the pitch meeting, Kelsey made it clear to us that he would love to do a James Bond sketch. That week, there were about eleven James Bond sketches at read-through. Apparently, Dave and I were the only two people who had read Kelsey’s bio, because in about nine of the eleven Bond sketches, the sketch ended with Kelsey getting eaten by a shark. As if that wasn’t horrible enough, in some of the sketches he had to scream things at the shark as it was mauling him. Kelsey, ever the trouper, read through all of them, sometimes yelling things like “Back, you demon of the sea! Stop eating me!”
Dave and I sat next to each other with our faces in our hands, tears running down our cheeks, laughing uncontrollably like idiots at the odds of a guy who lost two family members to shark attacks hosting Saturday Night Live and reading aloud sketches in which he gets eaten by a shark.
As everyone left Lorne’s office after pitching the host, some of us would mill around and wait to talk to Jim Downey. Getting five minutes of Downey’s time was like getting time with the Dalai Lama. The line to Downey’s office started early and lasted long. I’m talking hours and hours.
Once you were in Downey’s office, you never had his full attention. His office is like a garage in which you can’t fit the car. There’s a grill, a couple of tennis rackets, and a stuffed marlin hanging over the door. His desk looked as if it had been hit by an avalanche of sketches, letters, and newspapers. Downey would switch from sorting the papers on his desk to lying down on his couch. He was always moving, never looking you squarely in the eyes.
Downey was like a conglomeration of five different people. From week 1, he would always say to whoever was in the room, “I really want to put Jay in a sketch and make him a teen idol,” meaning a Joey Lawrence type with an album who takes himself too seriously. For two years, he would tell me how young and good-looking I was and would repeat: “Jay as a teen idol. That just cracks me up.”
He could also be sadistic. Once when I arrived with a sketch that I wanted him to read, he put out his hand and said, “All right, let’s have it.” Instead of grasping the ten or so pages, he let them lie flat in his hand, and he weighed the pile. Then he handed the sketch back to me and said, “It feels a little long.” He asked Rob Schneider for his sketch and he performed the same weighing technique. “That feels just about right,” he said. He asked for my sketch again, placed it on his palm, and rendered the final verdict: “Yeah, Jay, that’s definitely too long.”
Most of the cast would leave the pitch meeting and begin lobbying for support from the writers. This, I learned over time, was invaluable. These were writers. Any help I could get from someone who knew anything about turning an idea into a sketch, I welcomed. A problem I faced was, Who really wants to stay up all night helping the new guy? They all had their own weight to pull, and now you’re asking them to help pull yours. So from office to office I would go, literally until the sun came up, searching for help.
Several of the guys synced up naturally. Rob Schneider took Lew Morton under his wing. (Maybe we shouldn’t have run Morton out of our office after all.) There just was no one for me to latch on to. It would have been so foreign to say to Dave Attell, “Okay, you be my writer.” Dave