Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [62]
The brilliant part was that Mike was so high that he had an actual language in his head, and he was repeating words that meant the same thing to him as the first time he said them an hour ago, causing the reporters to nod and say, “Oh, the laka, laka thing again.” The whole thing was a parody of a guy who was blotto—but he really was blotto.
I still can’t eat corn chowder because of McKean. My second season a big bunch of us did a sketch about cops who can’t stop vomiting at a crime scene. It started with Mike and me (dressed as cops) arriving on the scene of a murder. Upon viewing the body, we begin projectile-vomiting all over each other. The crew had rigged tubes that ran up our backs and out the ends of our sleeves. The tubes came out the backs of our coats, across the floor, and into the source of the vomit, which was several giant barrels of corn chowder. The vomit tubes were something of an inexact science. Ideally, whenever we put the tubes up to our mouths, corn chowder would spray out of our sleeves on cue. The problem was that some of the tubes worked and some didn’t.
Cast members would be in the middle of saying their lines and corn chowder would come rocketing out of their sleeves, which were still at their sides. Thinking fast, we would immediately lift our sleeves alongside our mouths—only to have the “vomit” stop. It was priceless live television. Though the tubes worked on cue a couple of times, for most of the sketch we were at their mercy. By the end of the sketch, there were about ten people onstage stopping in mid-sentence to quickly put their sleeves up to their faces, and the motion of moving our arms from our sides to our faces was inadvertently spraying vomit all over the person next to us.
During the sketch, the smell of corn chowder became so strong that I started to gag. I wasn’t alone. I looked at the others, whose eyes were watering and throats were quivering. The audience could plainly see that the tubes were operating erratically and at the wrong time. The sketch became a backdrop to the fact that we were all laughing in the middle of our lines as corn chowder shot all over the stage and all over us.
When it was over, we were all covered in what had become the most disgusting substance on earth. Cue cards and protocol went out the window during that sketch. It was such madness that if I had actually vomited, I don’t think anyone would have noticed. That night was an example of how wonderful Saturday Night Live could be, and it was absolutely some of the most fun I had on the show. The audience was being treated to a sketch within a sketch, and the cast was all in the corn chowder together.
Twelve
Dressing Down
IT WAS the first Thursday of the new season and I was on my way to studio 8-H to rehearse a sketch. Since I had some extra time, I figured I would first stop by my dressing room and feng shui the place. But when I reached my previous year’s dressing room, the door said CHRIS ELLIOTT on it.
I was confused at first, then relieved. Maybe I had been moved to one of the larger dressing rooms. Most everyone else had the same dressing rooms as the year before, but some of the dressing rooms were reassigned to accommodate the new cast members. I was obviously one of the people that had to move to a new dressing room—though no one actually ever told me my dressing room would be moved. Just as in my rookie days, I found out by mistake. But because of the way the network had handled my option, I was happy just being back working on the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock—let alone being on camera,