Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [29]
Schneider and Spade almost fought once. I don’t know what the issue was, but for about a week Rob was walking around the offices saying: “Spade wants to kick my ass! What the fuck is his problem?” We all found it quite comical. The two smallest guys ever to be on the show were gearing up for a schoolyard fistfight. After a while, that died down, too.
Despite our differences, Rob was one of the few writers or cast members who really went out of their way to help me. Strange but true. (There’s no possible way that Christopher Walken doing “Psychic Friends Network” would have made it on the air on the show Jeff Goldblum hosted without Rob’s help.) Once Rob stopped acting like an asshole and encouraged me to put together a musket sketch based on a real-life shopping trip of mine. I had gone to an antiques store to buy a musket to hang over my fireplace. The musket salesman told me the gun still worked. When I explained that I didn’t have a license, the guy told me that I didn’t need one because the firearm was an antique. Then I started thinking, How would you feel if you got mugged by a guy with a musket? Imagine you are jogging on a trail in the woods and a guy jumps out of a bush with a musket and tells you not to move. Methodically he begins packing the powder into the gun—warning you, as he toils away, to remain still. The punch line of the sketch would be that once he shoots, you are too far away for him to hit you anyway.
Rob and I wrote up a three-page sketch about two Revolutionary War soldiers who couldn’t get their muskets loaded fast enough and ended up being blown to bits. The sketch never made it on the air, but I use the musket story in my stand-up to this day.
Another time Rob and I were in his office writing and I suggested we put Al Franken in the sketch. Rob cautioned me, “You don’t want to do that.” When I asked why not, he led me out of his office and down the hall. We passed photo after photo as Rob ran his finger along the wall so he wouldn’t miss the one he was looking for. Finally we came to a photo from 1976. It was a photo of the sketch where Garrett Morris is having a white sale. In the photograph you see Belushi, standing with his gut out. Bill Murray is off to the side, looking like the least desirable white guy you could buy. In the middle of the picture stood Al Franken. His chest was pushed out and he had a look on his face like he was taking a dump. Rob pointed to Al in the photo, said, “That’s why,” and walked away.
Rob Schneider, my antihero.
Adam Sandler and I almost came to blows once. He had written a sketch where he played Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and I was guitarist Joe Perry. The sketch had just the two of us, and I was excited that he had invited me to be in it. In my early days, I had asked Adam if he’d take me under his wing. “Nah, you don’t want to be under there,” he told me. “It’s stinky.” I guess it was smelling better now because I was his first choice for his parody of Aerosmith’s greatest hits. The joke was that all the songs sounded the same. As Adam sang each song, it became clear that the guitar sound never changed. The sad part was that it was true.
When I asked SNL bandleader G. E. Smith how much of the sketch was false, he told me none of it. He pulled me into his office, picked up a guitar, and started strumming. He told me to watch his left hand on the neck of the guitar. He swore he could play fifteen Aerosmith songs and never move a finger. I didn’t believe him until he launched into “Cryin’,” then “Crazy,” without changing the position of any of his fingers on the fret. He put together a quick medley of Aerosmith songs to prove his point. He was right. Through five different hits, his hand never budged.
In a way, I resented Sandler. Not Adam the person, but the audience’s familiarity with Adam.