Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [28]
Ian was a writer who had graduated from Brown University. Jim Downey used to kid him about it. There were so many Harvard guys around (Downey included) that when Ian suggested something during rewrites, Downey would say, “Is that how they would write it at Brown, Ian?” or “Would that be the Brown version?”
Ian was always nice to me. He looked like a character out of The Great Gatsby. He wore scholarly glasses and even sported an ascot from time to time. He was very tall and rail thin. Whenever he entered a room, he was usually eating yogurt with nuts in it. He didn’t drink or smoke, and he came off as a bit of a square. Ian’s pet peeve was smoking. He was extremely vocal about his displeasure with people who smoked in the building.
The entire building was a nonsmoking building, but that was pretty much ignored on the seventeenth floor. A lot of SNL people smoked, and they weren’t about to wait for a night elevator to go downstairs and outside to have a butt. Oddly, there were no ashtrays on the seventeenth floor. Because of all the smokers in the history of the show, you would think that someone would’ve thought to bring up an ashtray.
Since most of the trash cans were filled with paper, tossing your butt in the garbage was not an option. Dave Attell and Norm both weren’t bothered by the lack of places to put a cigarette. Whenever either would put a cigarette down, he would stand it up on the filter end and leave it on the desk or table. If he didn’t touch it again, the cigarette would burn down to the filter and go out by itself. Sometimes I would walk into my office in the morning and find Dave asleep on the couch. Across his desk would be a line of cigarettes. Some he had forgotten about and left there, because there would be a long line of ash on the desk next to them. It looked like a little graveyard.
One Thursday evening during rewrites, Norm was sitting on the couch by the door inside the writers’ room. He was smoking and ashing into a soda can. Ian Maxtone-Graham walked into the room holding a cup of water. He stopped, looked down at Norm, and poured the entire cup of water over Norm’s head. Shocked, Norm sat there soaking wet.
The room grew quiet and then Norm stood up and punched Ian in the face. He really blasted him. All six feet eight inches of Ian went down, and the writers quickly jumped up and separated the two. Ian went home right after the fight and didn’t come back to work for about a week. I don’t know if it was pride or principle, but my man was AWOL. I found out a few days later that Ian was planning to sue NBC for not enforcing the nonsmoking policy. He was also going to take Norm to court for assault and battery.
A few days passed and word filtered in from the outside that Ian was doing well, wasn’t going to sue anybody, and would soon be returning to work.
Rob Schneider was a sketch machine while I was there. He could also be an asshole, and for a long time I really wanted to beat the shit out of him. Only he and Ellen Cleghorne were assholes to me on a constant basis. Ellen was easier to deal with because you didn’t really have to deal with her. She was angry at you all the time. If you passed Ellen in the hallway, you didn’t even bother to say hi. She hated you and you both knew it. She was a single mom (with a beautiful young daughter) and you were a speck on the radar. No problem. The consistency of her behavior was comforting, almost like a black guy being comfortable with a KKK member because he knows exactly where he stands, as opposed to the Orange County guy who calls him pal in his living room and then firebombs his car. Rob, however, was a much more complex asshole.
Rob enjoyed dressing the new guys down in front of everyone. He would always call me rookie in front of the other writers. I was always more confused than upset because half of the writers were rookies, too. I don’t mind a little hazing, but after a while it got real old. The cycle of asshole would start with Schneider chiding me as a rookie in front of everyone and then proceeding to treat me like garbage for