Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [4]
Three?! It’s one-thirty, for Christ’s sake! I was told that if I liked, I could wait for them on the couch. So I waited.
At around two-thirty, people started trickling in. I recognized a few. Adam Sandler came over and said hi and then went somewhere. Marci Klein never came in that day. Michael Shoemaker came in around four.
Shoemaker introduced himself to me. An Ivy League–looking guy in his forties, he was very pleasant, but as he spoke, I couldn’t help but notice that he had a nervous tic. It was really distracting. This guy is giving me the rundown, and I’m staring at his face like an idiot.
As I was talking to Mike Shoemaker, Jim Downey, the show’s head writer, walked out of his office. Downey, who had a cherubic Irish look about him, was wearing khakis and a polo shirt, and his toothbrush was in his mouth. Shoemaker attempted to introduce me, but Downey stopped him in midsentence by holding up his index finger and pointing to the toothbrush. He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. When Downey returned, he said nothing and proceeded to walk back into his office and close the door.
Shoemaker then led me into the writers’ room. All the lights were out and there were six cafeteria tables pushed together in a haphazard rectangle to form one big table. Every newspaper in print was lying on this table. That was something I always loved about working at SNL. On any given morning I could walk in and pick up the Dallas Morning News or the Washington Post. I sat on one of the couches at the far end of the writers’ room for about twenty minutes, alone with the newspapers.
I would soon learn that my new job would require lots of waiting. As I sat waiting for Jim Downey, the room began to fill up with people. At one point, Shoemaker walked in with a kid who looked a little like Björk and said: “Jay, this is Lew Morton. He’s a new writer. You guys are sharing an office.” Uh…hi. The veteran writers came and went while the new ones sat around on couches and tabletops waiting for instructions.
Dave Attell and Sarah Silverman, two comics I knew from the clubs who were also new to the show, had arrived and taken a seat next to me on the couch. Sarah is from New Hampshire, and she is so “one of the guys” that you forget sometimes how beautiful she is. But when you first meet her, wow, you notice! Sarah and I were both hired as featured performers and writers, but Attell was hired as a writer only. Attell not being hired as a cast member, let alone a featured performer, was a crime.
I had always looked up to Dave as a stand-up, so I was glad that we would being sharing an office. But I also felt a little uncomfortable. I thought Attell was fifty times the comic I was and that he deserved to be on camera, too. He might be the funniest living stand-up comic, and he will perform anytime in front of any mike. Sometimes he’ll perform at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village in front of nine people at two-thirty in the morning (his preferred time slot, by the way). Whenever he’s onstage, you’ll also see other comics, me included, huddled in the back of the room to watch Dave spinning out zingers like “I have this blow-up doll that I fuck all the time, but I fill her up only halfway and I make believe she’s a model.” Attell was also a chain smoker. He smoked anytime, anyplace. Since I was an utter slob, our office looked like it was under construction in about a week.
We shared the small office meant for one person with Lew Morton and Steve Lookner, two Harvard guys. Whatever the rhythm was on the seventeenth floor, Lookner and Morton picked up on it pretty quickly. They always seemed to know what time to come in, what time to go home, where to hand in sketches, and most important, who to ask for help. All that separated the nonsmoking side from the smoking side was a couch in the middle of the room. Within a couple of weeks, we had smoked them out. I have no idea where they went. One day they were there, the next they were gone. I can’t say that I blamed them, but Dave and I were happy for the additional space.