Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [86]
After you were given this news, the piece would quickly be written out onto cue cards. You were never told in advance exactly when during Weekend Update your piece would be performed. If more than one piece was submitted, you would be told the order in which they were being done, but that was it. You would have to stand off to the side of the Update desk as Norm Macdonald or Kevin Nealon read the news. Suddenly, Bob Van Rye, the stage manager, would whisper “Go,” and you would slide into the chair next to the news anchor as quietly as possible. If none of the Update pieces at read-through were picked to be on the show, Adam Sandler was usually asked to come up with a song in ten minutes, and that was what they would go with.
The key to a Weekend Update piece, I learned, was that it had to be from the news. I remember Sarah Silverman doing an Update piece about her sister’s wedding and Rob Schneider being furious that it was picked. When I defended the piece as funny, Schneider shot back: “It’s not fucking news! It’s the Weekend Update desk. A Weekend Update piece should be news.”
I wrote a great Update piece that I never submitted my first season. It was a travel piece about England, and it went like this: “Hi, I just got back from England and they are still mad at us because they lost the Revolutionary War. Who could blame them? There were only nine of us. But hey, it’s not our fault that they fought in the white snow wearing bright red uniforms. They were always standing in a straight line, too. Is that fair? They would charge with drums and flute while our guys sat behind rocks looking at each other and saying, ‘I think I hear someone coming.’” It was written the week of the Jeff Goldblum show, and because my idea of his playing a dog had bombed, I chickened out.
I did get to do a “Dick Vitale: March Madness” Update piece. Originally it was written as an eight-page sketch by Steve Lookner. I read it at read-through. Halfway through it, I was out of breath from screaming. On page 6, I actually stopped reading, put the pages down, and reached for a bottle of water. I continued, and by the end I was ready to pass out. People around the table broke out into a sort of golf clap. A few were laughing and giggling. I didn’t know if they thought it was funny or were just impressed I got through it all. Turns out, it was both.
The piece was edited down to a page and a half and submitted for Weekend Update. In it, I dressed up as Dick Vitale and mixed up my Oscar predictions with the NCAA basketball tournament. “Toughest region…best actress,” I began, spraying my words à la Vitale. “No doubt about it, baby, number one seed is Holly Hunter in The Piano. Let’s see her in action.” Over a clip of Hunter in The Piano, I continued: “Look at her act. She’s silent but deadly. She ain’t talkin’ for no one. She’s just playin’ the piano.” I did each of the main categories, picking Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List for best supporting actor because “he does it all—he shoots, he rebounds, he’s a Nazi.”
My second season, I wrote what was undeniably the funniest Update piece I had in me. At the time, the gubernatorial race was heating up in New York. The race was getting an incredible amount of press because Howard Stern had announced that he was going to run. Howard was way ahead of his time. We know now with the election of Jesse Ventura and the like how fed up voters had become with the standard bipartisan bullshit. Preliminary polls had Howard Stern pulling up to 30 percent of the vote, and it was beginning to look like he had an outside shot at actually becoming governor. New York State law requires all candidates to release full, comprehensive records of their incomes and properties. Calling this requirement ridiculous and in no way, shape, or form relevant to an election,