Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [25]
Writers generally had a knack for certain cast members’ voices. Tim Herlihy, for example, would write two sketches a week with Sandler. Like clockwork, at least one of those two would get on. It was maddening and frustrating to watch Sandler because you could stay up all night writing a sketch that you thought was great, and then the producers would tell Sandler at read-through to write a song for Weekend Update. Adam would return ten minutes later with “Left thumb, you’re the one, I like you better than my right one,” and the crowd would go nuts. He was the guy who, if we were down five runs in the bottom of the ninth, you could tell to grab a bat and put us back in the game. The crowd would applaud no matter what he did.
Equally as funny were the sketches that Fred Wolf would write for Spade and Farley. Fred was born to write for Spade and Farley as a team. (He later wrote the movie Tommy Boy for them.) He was also a great writer, period. Fred wrote one of my favorite sketches, which was entitled “How Much Ya Bench?” The sketch centered on a public access show with a bunch of steroid freaks bragging about how much they benched. Emilio Estevez was the host that week, and nearly all the male cast members were in the sketch. We dressed in giant steroid-freak body suits and had prosthetics on our faces to make us look like apes. Our legs were hidden as we knelt in chairs, and there were twiglike mechanical legs rigged under our torsos that contrasted with our steroid-ridden upper bodies. As we spoke to one another, our little legs mechanically kicked back and forth. Fred’s added twist was that Spade didn’t have mechanical legs because his were already so skinny.
Fred and Herlihy always looked out for me. They would always at least throw me a bone and give me a line or two in their sketches, though they never considered me a principal lead. Other writers had a really hard time just writing my name down on a piece of paper. Fred, who walked around with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, always took care of me. Most of the sketches I had two or three lines in were because Fred had written me into them. I never knew why he didn’t use some of the other male cast members for his bit parts, but I wasn’t going to try to change his mind.
Herlihy, who had given up a career as a successful lawyer to become a writer, taught me the rules of sketch writing. On the show that Newhart hosted, near the end of my second year, Herlihy sat me down and structured a Ricki Lake sketch. It turned out that there was a whole vocabulary for writing sketches that I had never heard. You don’t want to tip the sketch, meaning give away the reason for the sketch in the first thirty seconds so there is no reason to keep watching. The shows in the seventies routinely tipped the sketches—the cast dressing up as bees and doing The Honeymooners; the moment you see the bee suit the joke is over. There was also an entire art to revealing the host. If it’s The Rock in drag, the question becomes, when do you see that? Him being in the sketch isn’t the reveal; him being in drag is. You also don’t want to make it too jokey, Herlihy explained, or hit it too on the head. You just want to knock out the beats—the jokes—and make it work.
Some of the cast were amazingly self-contained and didn’t need much help from anyone. Mike Myers was at the top of that list. I never saw him around the offices for more than twenty minutes after the pitch meeting, let alone watched him go from door to door asking for input. He was a strange bird because he was the model of efficiency. Rhythm, shmythm. The Mike Myers sketch was a science, and he perfected it.
Myers wrote his sketches alone. He knew exactly how they should sound and how long they should be. The sketches were always funny,