Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [52]
In that photo, every smile was genuine. Even mine.
Ten
Fake Pitches
SINCE I had become medicated, I had more time to actually be at work—not literally but spiritually. I began to notice the smallest details of my work environment. The walls were white and they didn’t close in on me anymore. I began to take notes of the things around me to maybe someday write a book about my experience. I realized that the people I worked with were not sinister after all. They were all good people in an impossible situation. I was a functional person in a dysfunctional place. I wasn’t sick, the show was. It was a restaurant in a great location that served food that sometimes was awful and other times glorious.
I began to notice more and more tricks that the others applied to help them get through it all. The “I’m gonna help so-and-so with his idea” was just the beginning. Day by day, night by night, I studied everyone around me. In subsequent pitch meetings I became braver and more confident. I would scan the room and pick someone I didn’t get along with and then tell Lorne I was working with him on his idea. No one ever called me out. All the others probably just wondered what took me so long to catch on.
The strangest phenomenon I noticed in pitch meetings was the fake pitch. The fake pitch was an art form. If you had no ideas, you had to think of a sliver of an idea and say it out loud and the room would move on. The fake pitch took as much energy as an actual pitch, but you were relieved of the duty of having to write it up. You could also use the fake pitch if you wanted your sketch to be a surprise at read-through. Whenever someone would execute a fake pitch, everyone in the room knew it except the host. The host probably wondered what happened to that sketch at read-through, since we all giggled throughout the entire pitch, but it was never to be seen again.
Looking back, I never understood why some guys had to pitch in the first place. If a guy as brilliant as Phil Hartman didn’t have any ideas, did it really matter? Of course not. The writers would put him in their sketches anyway. Sandler nicknamed Hartman “Glue,” and he was. Phil Hartman could do anything, and he did so on a weekly basis. He was money in the bank. He held everything together. As long as Phil Hartman was on the show, every sketch had at least one person in it who would never let you down. Whether he was playing Sinatra or Charlton Heston or a schoolteacher or a Bond villain or Frankenstein, he executed flawlessly. I never met anyone with Hartman’s versatility.
So when it was Phil’s turn to pitch an idea to the host, he would always be pleasant, smile and shrug his shoulders, and comment on the pitches that had already been heard. It was understood that out of all of us, Phil Hartman was the last guy you had to worry about ideas coming out of. If he never thought of a single idea, he was still invaluable. He could do anything and we all knew it. If we were a baseball team, Phil was certainly our MVP.
Oddly, Kevin Nealon’s fake pitches were as funny as everyone else’s real ones. I would have given my right arm to have actual ideas like those that he was secretly presenting as fake ones. I can still remember Kevin Nealon telling one host: “You know those runaway truck ramps on the highway? Well, you live in a house at the top of one of those runaway truck ramps, and every night at dinner a semi comes crashing through your living room.”
Several weeks later, I was sitting around the table with several of the writers. I had thought the runaway truck ramp pitch was funny, but it hadn’t been submitted for read-through. Acting like the rookie I was, I asked what had happened to the pitch. I was met with blank stares from everyone. Aha.
Nealon was the anchor of Weekend Update, and sketch writing wasn’t expected of him. The Weekend Update anchor had such enormous responsibilities—gathering the