Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [45]
The corollary to the Farley wig trick was that if people in the sketch weren’t wearing wigs but Chris was, he would shake his head violently to make his own wig fall off—though not in dress rehearsal. He played it straight in dress rehearsal so he could surprise you on live television.
Farley couldn’t cure writer’s block, but he sure could break up the monotony. When you were stuck, he was the guy who could push you over the edge.
Late one wintry night, I was going crazy. Dave Attell and I were on a downward spiral, and we had given up. Uncle! We couldn’t put anything on paper. Our writing collaboration was like waiting for a bus with a guy you know but don’t talk to. We very rarely bounced ideas off each other. It was just one guy on one side of the room smoking and doodling and the other guy on the other side checking his messages and leafing through car magazines. The only spark of hope that night was this Otis Redding boxed CD set that Lorne had given all the writers for Christmas. The cover art for the CD was an early head shot of Otis, my man. Dave had poked a hole where Otis’s mouth was and put a cigarette in it. On that dull, unproductive night it was the funniest thing either one of us had ever seen. We were keeled over holding our sides laughing. We needed help, so we called Chris into the office to hang out.
I’m not sure which one of us heard Chris Farley first, but it didn’t matter. The moment he walked through the doorway we began laughing like little kids. You couldn’t help it. He was a wrecking ball of joy.
One of us told Chris we would pay him a hundred bucks to take a dump out of our window. Farley was no dummy; he wanted our money on the table first. We were laughing so hard it took us a while to dig through our pockets and cobble together the hundred. When we did, we pooled the cash on my desk, which was next to the window. Chris stuffed the money into his pocket and opened the wide window with a wave of his arm.
Methodically, he prepared to execute. He unbuckled his pants and climbed onto my desk and then out onto the windowsill. The heels of his boots were on the outside of the window frame and his ass was dangling in the cold December air. Still fiddling with his belt buckle, Chris rested the back of his neck on the bottom of the window and balanced the rest of his enormous self outside the building to ensure that the shit fell out and not in. Seventeen floors above the dullest night in the history of man, Chris’s face turned beet red as he tried desperately to squeeze a shit out the window.
Dave and I were delirious. We laughed until we saw stars, knowing that one false move and Chris would fall to his death. A snot bubble came out of Chris’s nose as he pushed. Soon a tiny marble of crap dropped onto the windowsill. Chris looked up at us proudly, cracking a smile, the snot bubble still clinging to his right nostril. He craned his neck, searching around the office for something to wipe his ass with. There was a porno magazine on Attell’s desk, but it was too far away to be practical. So Chris wiped his ass with his hand. I had never seen anyone do that before.
Then Chris jumped off the window ledge and began chasing Dave and me across the office, his shit-stained paw outstretched.
We tore out of the office screaming and raced down the hallway as if we were being chased by a monster. In a way we were. We didn’t stand a chance of escaping. We had laughed so hard for so long that we could hardly breathe, let alone run. I was hunched over, choking, gagging, laughing, and running for my life.
In our path was a bookshelf that jutted out from the wall, creating a single-file lane. Dave and I were shoulder to shoulder and neither of us had any plans of slowing down to be smeared with Farley’s shit. Unfortunately, I was running on the bookshelf side of the hall, so if I wanted to be the first one past it, I was going to have to make a move, and soon. I concentrated on not laughing and tried to accelerate past Dave and past the bookshelf. I wasn’t going to make