Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [7]
I was looking forward to becoming one of the guys. I woke up the first morning around 9:00 A.M. and went downstairs to the lobby to hook up with somebody, anybody. It looked like I was the only person in the hotel. I wandered the enormous mansion by myself for an hour, wondering if I was missing an important meeting. It turned out that the people I went up to Mohonk with, specifically the guys I was looking forward to hanging out with, already had their weekends pretty much planned. Spade, Farley, Sandler, and Tim Meadows had gone to play golf. The writers from Harvard went somewhere to do something, and all of the producers had gone somewhere else. Mathematically, it seemed impossible not to at least run into someone from the show that morning, but I didn’t.
The next day, I passed Steve Lookner in the mansion and asked him if he wanted to shoot hoops. To my surprise, he accepted. Little did I know, but Lookner was a high school basketball star who had played a lot of intramural hoops at Harvard. The first game we played, he beat me 11–3. The rematch was 11–3. After he schooled me in the third 10–0, I quit. On the final point Lookner threw a move on me and dunked in my face. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he could have jumped over the trees if you asked him. I stormed off the court and cursed at him for hustling me. He couldn’t believe I was quitting. He offered to spot me some points, which pissed me off even more. I went back to my room and convinced myself I was glad that no one was around and I could be by myself.
Later that night, all the writers and cast members huddled around a television in one of the banquet rooms to watch the premiere of Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Conan had been a writer on SNL for several years, and many of the new guys knew him from Harvard. You could tell from the excitement that Conan was popular when he worked on the show.
After Conan’s first episode, everyone in the room broke out into applause and started giving out grades. Someone started out by saying, “I’d give him an A minus.” Another person gave him a B plus. Someone generously awarded him an A plus. I have been on Conan’s show eight times and have always had a wonderful time. I watch the show often and really enjoy it, but I thought the premiere episode was a disaster. To me, Conan looked really overwhelmed and nervous. I didn’t laugh at all the jokes like the other guys. I said to no one in particular, “I give him a C.” It was definitely the wrong grade. Everyone in the room looked at me cross-eyed as if to say “Who let this guy in?” and then went back to their conversations. That was the first time I noticed that my sense of humor was very different from that of the other writers.
On the way home from My Hunk, I bummed a ride with Dave Attell. Sarah Silverman, who had gotten the flu, rode along with us. For two hours we drove back to the city in silence. When we reached Manhattan, it was raining. We got out of Dave’s car at 30 Rock, but couldn’t get up to the offices because none of us had our elevator cards yet. Confused, we all stood in the rain for a while. Then we shrugged our shoulders and went our separate ways.
When I arrived at my apartment, my roommate was sitting on the couch reading a book. He asked me how Mohonk was and I told him it was fantastic. I asked him if he watched Conan. “Yeah,” he replied. “I’d give him a C.”
Two
Dude, How Did You
Get on SNL?
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to say that my lifelong goal was to be a cast member on Saturday Night Live because it was unattainable. Julia Sweeney once said that Saturday Night Live is “like an uncle you hate paying for all four years at Harvard.” Actually, it’s more like an uncle who touched you when you were seven, then paid for all four years of Harvard. The upside, however, is that Saturday Night Live is a much more precious pedigree. Thousands of students show up every year at the doors of Harvard, but how many people walk through the turnstiles each year at SNL? A