Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [88]
Nicole came from Los Angeles to visit me in the middle of my second season. It was a relief for me to have someone close to me witnessing everything I was. I could tell by the way she reacted and behaved that she was seeing many of the things I had told her about.
As her visit preceded a break, I flew back to Los Angeles with her. On the flight, we didn’t talk about the show at all. When I left the building, I could no longer speak of the show. No matter who asked me about it or when, my descriptions of the show would deteriorate into a series of whines and groans. I was a great complainer. Even when I mentally reminded myself to act polite, I would soon be bitching and moaning. The people I complained to were either amazed or annoyed. There was seldom a middle ground.
The show was fascinating to everyone I spoke to. When I went on the road to do stand-up, I saw firsthand how diverse the show’s audience was. I would be at a college talking with students and they would tell me who their favorite cast member was. In one town, audience members would tell me they loved Sandler, but in the next town over, they would tell me they hated him. These weren’t shrug-of-the-shoulder types of discussions either. Everyone was overly passionate when they spoke with me about Saturday Night Live. They would fall all over themselves to tell me how much they loved the show, and I wouldn’t know what to say next. I felt like a phony.
Nicole and I were about an hour into the flight when I had finished reading the sports page of the New York Post. I leafed through the rest of the paper and saw something about the show in the Page Six gossip column. In bold type I saw SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and I stopped to read the item. The gossip column reported that Tom Arnold had had his birthday party the night before at the strip club Scores. The item detailed how Tom had partied well into the evening with his pals, Saturday Night Live stars Adam Sandler, David Spade, Tim Meadows, Chris Farley, and “Jay Moore.” My name was broken up in the margin of the piece so the Jay was at the end of one line and the Moore was at the beginning of the line beneath it.
I turned to Nicole and showed her that my name was misspelled in the New York Post. She read the item and looked at me curiously. “You were with me last night,” she said. She was right. I was with her the entire night, and was never near Tom Arnold or his birthday party at the strip club. I could tell that the false sighting bothered her, but my name being misspelled bothered me more than the false sighting. I laughed to myself. I was getting free publicity that wasn’t true, and my name had been spelled wrong.
Sixteen
Give Me Little Bits
of More Than I Can Take
RICKI LAKE ended my drought. It was the twelfth show of the season, and Tim Herlihy had done more than look out for me. He sat down in his office and stayed up all night writing with me. This was the first time one of the writers had actually sought me out, sat me down, and declared that we weren’t leaving the room until we finished the sketch. When Tim’s phone rang, he would answer it and tell the person on the other line that he was busy and hang up. When someone walked into his office, he brushed them off with a “not now.”
In the sketch, I played Ricki Lake. I dressed in drag and wore thick lipstick. Bob Newhart played a couples counselor, and as Ricki Lake, I had him give advice to all the freaks in the sketch. Being on the same stage as Bob Newhart was surreal. I had spent every Monday night in high school watching Newhart on CBS. My parents and I never missed an episode. After I started doing stand-up comedy, I bought The Buttoned Down Mind of Bob Newhart and memorized it. The Ricki Lake sketch got good laughs, and I felt like it had a chance of being on the air again. I wanted to hug Bob Newhart for not telling me that he was being typecast and cutting it.
The week after Bob Newhart, Deion Sanders hosted and I was shut out again. What I had at read-through wasn’t funny, and I knew it when I handed