Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [39]
My penchant for putting my foot in my mouth began at the wrap party after my first show. I spotted Nirvana’s Dave Grohl in the hallway and headed toward him. I asked him if he wanted to go smoke a joint. He looked at me like I had three heads and said to me, “I’m kind of doing the family thing right now.” As he spoke, I noticed he had his arms around what looked like his mother and his grandmother.
But I really stepped in a pile of doggie doo-doo when Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger cohosted. I was feeling trapped in another Thursday of rewrites, listening to sketch after sketch grind to a halt in front of twenty or so writers who apparently had nothing else to do with their lives.
That night, rewrites got off to an early start—meaning that the sun was still up. Someone had written a sketch about the game show Family Feud. In the sketch, the Baldwins were one family, and Kevin Nealon, Julia Sweeney, Sarah Silverman, and I were the other. (Alec’s brothers Stephen and Billy had both agreed to be in the sketch.) That left one open spot at the end of the dais to be occupied by Tim Meadows, who would play the author James Baldwin.
As the “Family Feud” sketch was executed line by line, I noticed that every time Kim Basinger spoke in the sketch, she had only one syllable at a time. Alec, Billy, James (Tim), and Stephen spoke in complete sentences, but when it was Kim’s turn to speak, she was relegated to saying things like yes and no. The longest line she had in the sketch was “I don’t know,” which she was scripted to say twice. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. Sarah Silverman broke up the infighting by asking, “How come all of Kim’s lines are only one word?”
Before anyone could answer I blurted out, “Because she’s dumb!”
I had gotten used to no one reacting to anything I said anymore. But this time they all reacted. A hush fell over the room as everyone stopped talking. I lifted my head and looked around the table. No one would make eye contact with me. Everyone was reacting as if she was in the room when I said it—and she was. During the rewrite, Alec and Kim had made their way into the room, and they were sitting on the same couch I was on when Farley fake-puked in my lap on my first day at work. The couch was directly across from me, and Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were staring straight at me.
Alec Baldwin is a bear of a man, and I wondered how long it would take him to walk over to the table and cave in my skull with his fists. I realized it was time to do some quick thinking. I looked at the rest of the writers and practically cried out: “You guys have made her look dumb! We can do better than this! We have to do better than this. She’s our guest, for Christ’s sake!”
Alec didn’t cave in my skull with his fists and Ms. Basinger was given several more lines in the sketch. Yikes. Not realizing that my attempts to save the sketch were merely to keep Alec from kicking my ass, Kim and Alec gravitated toward me that week. Considering my solitary state, I may have mistaken the fact that they sporadically spoke to me as some sort of bond I hadn’t experienced with any other hosts or my coworkers. I would be walking back from the restroom and pass Alec in the hallway and he would throw a fake punch at me and say something like “How’s it going?”
This was the friendliest anyone had been to me in weeks, and it was coming from a guy whose wife I had insulted. Man, I soaked it up.
Eight
The Motivational Speaker
CHRIS FARLEY was the most beautiful person I have ever met. You wanted him around all the time. You craved his presence. You wanted to hear his stories. You wanted him to answer the phone when it rang in your office. The man was just one giant beating heart, and that heart was full of kindness. He was a genuine, loving creature, one battling horrible demons.
Chris compared his problem to four cylinders: drugs, alcohol, food, and depression. He