Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [64]
By the time I returned to the studio, rehearsals had reached the midway point. They had started without me (as they should have). When asked where I had been, I replied that I was in the bathroom. I wasn’t going to start the first show of my second season complaining about not being represented on the walls. The only people who ever saw those photos were the host, the cast, and the writers. I decided to let it go and concentrate on putting my face where it meant a lot more to me—on television.
Dress rehearsals are a pretty boring affair. The cast assembles on the set and runs through each sketch from beginning to end to allow director Dave Wilson to choreograph the camera movements. There’s nothing artistic about it, because every few steps Dave’s voice booms out “Hold it!” over the loudspeaker system. The cast freezes and Dave pushes a different button in the control room and communicates over the headsets to all of his cameramen. He would tell which camera to shoot from what angle. Each step could take anywhere from five seconds to five minutes at a time.
The most amusing dress rehearsal was when the show installed new cameras. During the entire dress rehearsal, there were about fifty Japanese guys in suits watching the cameras operate. It was, Hey, look at our shiny new Toyotas doing laps around the speedway. It was surreal. Just when you are trying to find a groove, the audience is composed of fifty men who don’t speak English and have their backs to the stage.
Rehearsals, however, were always the best time to shoot the bull with the other cast members. During the breaks, everyone would crack jokes and tease one another. If your rehearsal had either Farley or Sandler in it, you were always in for a good time. Sandler would tell these incredible stories. One of my favorite Sandler stories was the one he told us about the time that Mr. Belvedere sat on his own balls.
Adam had a small guest part on the show Mr. Belvedere early in his career. On his first day, everyone was sitting at a huge table waiting to start the read-through of that week’s show. The old guy who played Mr. Belvedere hadn’t shown up yet, so everyone was drinking coffee and talking until he arrived. Finally Mr. Belvedere walked in, looking very gay in a sweatsuit and with a matching monogrammed attaché case. When the old guy took his seat, he sang out “Goooood morning, everybody!” like a British Ted Baxter. As he took a load off, he apparently sat on one of his testicles. With his nut scrunched under his leg, he screamed, “Ooooooohhhhhhh!” and had to be carried out on a stretcher.
Farley didn’t need any stories. Just being around him made you laugh. Even if he wasn’t saying anything, I would just stare at him. I was convinced that I was looking at the greatest entertainer in the world. But when he did speak, he always seemed to come up with something funny.
Take Farley’s background talk. Sometimes the beginning of a sketch called for some white noise background talk. If the sketch took place in an unruly courthouse or at a ball game, everyone would have to mutter fake dialogue until the camera settled on the first person with actual lines. Some of the extras were real actors with real training, and they would have scripted sentences that they had learned to say during this time. I always just looked at whoever was next to me and said, “So anyway, I was talking to Mathew and he…” I don’t know why or when I picked that particular sentence, but it was my trademark blather. Farley would always belt out at the top of his lungs: “Murmur! Murmur! Spade’s gay! Murmur!” I would always piss my pants when he did that and end