Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [43]
Then Farley happened.
I didn’t actually hear Martin introduce Matt Foley (Chris) into the sketch, but he must have, because the door to the cell opened and Chris exploded onto the set. He was wearing prison blues and eyeglasses, just as in dress rehearsal, but as he entered, something about his appearance was drastically different. Prior to his entrance, Chris had taken the time to make gigantic sweat stains stretching from his armpits all the way down to his waist on both sides of his body. Gigantic pit stains! That was it. We all immediately burst out laughing. The audience started laughing because we were laughing, which only made us laugh harder.
As Chris fiddled with his belt and waited for the applause to die down, the stage lights glistened off his pit stains. I wondered at what point he decided he would add the pit stains to the sketch. It didn’t matter; once again, he had us all by the balls. We were helpless. Martin’s character had explained to us the bartering of young punks for cigarettes, and when the applause died down, he made a grand gesture of handing the cigarette he was holding to Chris, signifying that we were now the property of Matt Foley. He had no idea how right he was.
As Chris spoke to each of us individually, he timed when the camera was off him and on us. When the camera was on me, he said all of his lines cross-eyed. When the camera was back on him, he straightened his eyes and went back to being normal, which, for him, was being the funniest man alive. As he made his way down the line of young punks, he repeatedly crossed and uncrossed his eyes. We were all laughing out loud and nothing could stop us. It was sheer comedic brilliance. Despite the fact that the cameras were over his shoulder and twenty feet away, Chris knew the exact moment that the camera switched shots. I had never laughed like that before in my life—and I had no idea I was about to laugh even harder. Farley filled the stage, leaving no room for panic. The sun was out and the shadows were gone.
Whenever Chris or Martin said a line, they would make a grand gesture of passing the cigarette back and forth, the way the boys in Lord of the Flies used the conch. Farley finished his first paragraph of dialogue and handed the cigarette back to Martin. Chris’s line (I know this because it was written on the cue card) was supposed to be: “Sold! Five bitches to the homie in the cornrows.” But what came out of his mouth instead was: “Sold! Five bitches to the cornie in the homie rows!” He then paused, looked directly into camera, and said “Oops!”
I was never so grateful or appreciative of my coworkers as I was at that moment, because thankfully, they were all laughing as hard as me. I would have stood out if I wasn’t laughing. Even Phil Hartman was smirking, and I had never seen him come close to breaking character on the air.
As the sketch was nearing the end, Chris began dancing around and making his way toward the wall that he was going to fall through. He tripped over his own feet and obliterated the breakaway wall, falling onto his back on top of the gymnastics mat. The rest of us started running for the hole in the wall—and it wasn’t lost on me that we were now literally escaping the madness of Farley and the powerlessness he incited in us.
But instead of going through the wall one by one as scripted, we all raced to be the first one out of the sketch and on top of Chris. Five of us threw our bodies through the hole, and as we landed on Chris’s chest, we began screaming and squealing like children. We finally had him where we wanted him. There was now close to a thousand pounds of laughing idiots on top of Chris Farley on the gym mat.
No more than one second passed before Chris realized what we were doing. Chris didn’t panic,