Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [81]
I called Foreman “Champ”—which is a word people throw out all the time—because he really was. I asked him what his mindset was when he crawled through the ropes. “I’m scared,” he told me, “because that other guy across the ring trained his whole life to punch me in the face, and people get hurt in my business.” This was not what I expected to hear out of the mouth of the man who beat Joe Frazier like a redheaded stepchild.
While there was always some fear lurking in me, being on the show was hardly the same as entering the ring in a heavyweight title fight. I had overcome my anxiety about the lack of a take two, and I just wanted to show everyone what I could do. My feeling now was “Put me in, Coach,” and once I was in, it was “Please hit the ball to me.” There was no real fear of failure or success—just the fear of not getting to the plate.
Courtney Love’s band, Hole, was the musical guest the week that Foreman hosted, and she brought Frances Bean, her baby with Kurt Cobain, along with her. At first I was appalled at the number of nannies—male and female—doting on this baby. Then I realized something strange. They weren’t really nannies; they were guys from the neighborhood. They could’ve even been roadies. They didn’t look like they had had any formal nanny training or were even particularly good with kids. Halfway through the show, another thought hit me: It was past midnight and the baby was awake. Why wasn’t she in the hotel asleep? Because she was being passed around among these rocker maggot types while her mommy rocked the place.
TLC was even more ridiculous. They arrived with an entourage of at least forty people. It was as if there was someone to work the pinky, someone else to move the index finger, and another person to watch over the thumb. The band members all wore overalls with sweatshirts tied around their waists. After each rehearsal, a guy who probably made $50,000 a year would walk out onstage and adjust the knot in each of their sweatshirts. That was all he did. A different person measured the distance between the girls’ wrists and the cuffs on their sweatshirts. There was something silly about the whole TLC thing, like Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez’s not being recognizable without wearing a pair of eyeglasses with a condom in the left eye and the name of their hit, “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls.”
I was going to do my best not to go chasing any waterfalls in Manhattan.
Even when things were going my way, there was always a hitch. I had done Christopher Walken twice my first season on the show. My second season, people would stop me on the street and ask me when I was going to do more Walken. I didn’t want to do the same sketch over and over, so I tried working with a few of the writers to come up with something really different.
When I returned for my second season, I had come back with three other killer impressions to add to Walken: James Woods, Rush Limbaugh, and Phil Gramm, the U.S. senator from Texas who was then running for president. But Jim Downey told me that I was too young to play Phil Gramm, and no one was interested in my doing Woods. When a Limbaugh sketch hit the read-through table, I pleaded my case, volunteering to put on full makeup and a prosthetic and audition, but I was waved off. Instead, Farley was pegged to do Limbaugh and it didn’t work, which was too bad. Even though Farley had a free lifetime pass as