Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [8]
Even for the best and most well known comics, the odds were so great that I never considered being chosen to join the show. If you do the math, the chances are so remote that it is literally unattainable—until it starts becoming attainable. As a comic, you are working toward so many different avenues of success that you aren’t even cognizant of some sort of master plan. When you are the emcee at a boathouse in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, and you’re getting $25 and the middle guy is getting $50 and the next guy $100, you’re thinking, let me just get to the middle. If you succeed in clubs, that leads to landing an agent, a spot on The Tonight Show, and bigger paydays. You live incrementally; you don’t sit around thinking, yep, I’m on my way to Saturday Night Live.
But like most comics, I had always watched the show. Truthfully, I thought the original shows in the mid-seventies were overrated, and that the only reason they became so beloved was because they were new to the TV-viewing audience; no one had seen anything like them. Twenty years later, they aren’t really that funny. Personally, I never thought the Coneheads or the Blues Brothers were that amazing; I felt they were too obvious. The only exception to the weakness of the early shows is Bill Murray. Regardless of how poorly those early shows aged, Bill Murray was timeless. You could have put him in a show in 1820 and it would have been funny. But the show really caught my attention when Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Jim Belushi were on in the mid-eighties, because those guys could make anything funny.
Being a comic gives you a small leg up because many SNL cast members over the years were from comedy theater or famous improv groups, ranging from John Belushi to Martin Short to Chris Farley. I don’t know how noncomics got the job, but as a comic, the formula is quite simple. People who might want to hire you come and watch you perform. They either like you or don’t. In that regard, I’ve always thought comics had it easy. The hard part about comedy is that it’s not something that can be taught. A stand-up is a lot like a crackhead. They both know exactly what they want. And they both know exactly how and where to get it.
I was definitely born a comic. By the time I was seventeen, I was lying in bed at night wondering whether my parents would notice if I stole their car to drive to a gig. I never had to mull over the idea of whether I should go to a comedy class. What’s the old expression? “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” How is a guy with a polka-dot tie going to tell me what’s funny? What if he sucks? Even worse, what if he doesn’t like the Three Stooges? Keith Richards once said that the first time he heard a Chuck Berry record, his life went from black and white to Technicolor. I felt the same way when I first stood onstage clutching a microphone. I was fifteen years old, and up until that moment, my life certainly had been black and white.
I grew up in the small town of Verona, New Jersey. Verona is practically Utopia in terms of raising a family. A middle-class town of about 16,000 law-abiding citizens, Verona comes complete with clean streets, grassy backyards, lots of Little League, and a community pool. Unfortunately, when I grew up there, the kids my age were primarily guidos. Guido is the term that the Italians of my youth would use to refer to themselves. Translated literally, I think it means “really Italian.” I’ve always had a very fair complexion with blond hair and blue eyes. When I would go to the mall with a couple of pals, they would have their dark hair moussed up and slicked back and gold chains around their necks; they reeked of Drakkar Noir cologne. Problem was, so would I. At one time I even wore an Italian horn around my neck—you know, for the ladies. It’s safe to say that I looked a little different from the rest of the pack.
When I gave up on my lifelong dream of being Italian, I began to wear my hair the way I wanted, like a