Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [83]
As I was walking from the stage to my dressing room, I saw Lorne walking toward me with an Amstel Light in his hand. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Finally I was going to get some love from the big man. As we were about five feet from each other, I slowed a bit, and sure enough, Lorne waved his hand for me to lean close to him. “That was a fucking minute and twenty seconds!” he said. And then he walked away.
I was crushed. I had just done one of the stranger and funnier sketches of the year, and here Lorne was tearing me a new asshole for going over fifty seconds. I wanted to turn to him and say, “Hey, sorry, they laughed so hard that they fucked up the time!” I was on Lorne’s shit list for a week because of thirty seconds. My bad.
Fifteen
Weekend Update
I NEVER THOUGHT that there was a conspiracy at Saturday Night Live to keep me off camera, nor do I believe that I was being forced to pay my dues. I can’t recall anyone who has ever been hired on the show who immediately ate up major airtime. I do think, however, that the general belief on the show is that if you are new, the unspoken rule is that you are to be broken into the rotation gradually. But I felt like John F. Kennedy when he ran for the U.S. Senate: I refused to wait my turn.
I didn’t see any benefit in waiting, either. I was a performer, and the show needed performances. Jim Downey once told me that the show goes through stages when it is performance-based and others when it is writer-based, and that when it goes through the writer-based stage, it suffers. When Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest were on, it was amazingly funny because they were allowed to do whatever they wanted. How do you pitch Billy Crystal doing “You look maaa-velous!” at a table read? When I was there, Ed Grimley would never have gotten on the air because it would have had to be written, formatted, and put on the table for read-through on Wednesday, at which time Martin Short would’ve had to stand up on the table in front of a roomful of people and dance around. When I got there, they hired around sixteen new writers. It was like ROTC guys from the Harvard newsroom coming into Vietnam telling you which hill to take.
I had spent my whole life taking the stage and making people laugh. Sometimes I’d take a nap, wake up, and go onstage fifteen minutes later—and make people laugh. Other times I’d get high or drunk and go onstage—and make people laugh. Whether I was working a black room, a gay and lesbian club, or a college auditorium, there was always one constant: I would go onstage and make people laugh. I never understood why Saturday Night Live should be any different. After all, why hire a guy like me if you don’t want a guy like me?
Of the cast members who were on the show during my stay, all of them were seldom used when they first arrived. Whether it was Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, or David Spade, they all spent more than a year or two saying one or two lines a week, if any. The fastest way to break this waiting period is to create an original character so funny that it’s in the show’s best interest to continue to put the character on air. Spade’s was the Receptionist, Rob Schneider had Copy Guy, and Sandler’s were Opera Man and Canteen Boy. The NBC gift shop located in the 30 Rock lobby sells coffee mugs and T-shirts with the most famous recurring SNL characters on them. I used to browse through the gift shop knowing I had a 20 percent NBC discount and dreaming of the day I could use it for merchandise bearing the imprint of one of my own original characters. I would look at the paperweights and greeting cards with my coworkers’ faces on