Live From New York - James H. Miller [190]
JACK HANDEY, Writer:
Farley was such a sweetheart. He would come offstage after being in one of my sketches and put his hands together in a sort of prayerful motion toward me and go, “Was that okay, was that okay?”
I remember one time we went to Tom Davis’s wedding at some resort in upstate New York. The resort had a bowling alley. In front of everyone, Farley would just throw his body out parallel to the lane and land from about a three-foot straight parallel drop to the bowling lane as a joke. That’s the kind of stuff he would do all the time.
FRED WOLF:
Farley and this girl on the show were going out. She was really smart and pretty, and Farley really liked her a lot. But she couldn’t put up with any more of Farley’s stuff, so they broke up. And then she started dating Steve Martin. So one day Farley comes to me and he says, “Fred, I hear that she’s going out with some guy. What can you tell me about it?” And, you know, nobody wanted to tell Chris Farley that she was dating anyone else, particularly Steve Martin. So I just said, “Well, I haven’t heard. I don’t know.” And he goes, “I know she’s seeing somebody. You’ve got to tell me who it is.” And I said, “Well, I don’t want to get in the middle of any of that kind of stuff.” And Farley said, “Well, she may find somebody better looking than me, or she might find somebody richer than me, but she’s not going to find anybody funnier than me.” And what I couldn’t tell him was, he was wrong on all three counts. He had hit the hat trick of failure. Steve Martin was richer, better looking, and even funnier.
CHRIS ROCK, Cast Member:
He was my man. I loved Chris. He was one of the funniest guys. Not competitive at all. We all knew he was funnier than us and it was totally acceptable. He would try to break me up on the air. He broke Spade up a lot. You have to watch the sketches.
Farley had no qualms running around naked. That wasn’t a big thing to him. I probably saw his dick more than his girlfriend did.
MOLLY SHANNON, Cast Member:
I had some rituals before shows. Mostly I would pray. I’d say a little prayer. And Chris Farley did that too. I saw him once. It was so sweet. He’d kneel down and bless himself in his dressing room before every show. I peeked in one night and saw him, and I thought, “That’s sweet.” He was a very religious Catholic man. He was very Catholic. I was raised Catholic too. Lorne loves Irish Catholics. I don’t know why, but he really does seem to like Irish Catholics a lot.
FRED WOLF:
Farley once stuck his ass out the window of the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock and took a shit. Another time, in front of twenty or twenty-five people in a very crowded writers’ room — mixed company, women, men — Farley came in naked. He has his dick tucked between his legs and he was doing Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs. He took a golf club and shoved it about three inches up his ass, then pulled the golf club out and started licking it.
DAVID SPADE:
That Chippendales sketch where Patrick Swayze and Chris danced with their shirts off became pretty well known. It was early on, when we all thought you had to do whatever was asked of you. Chris took off his shirt then because he’s a fat guy and it is funny, and that was really part of the sketch. But I think later on he didn’t want to do that as much. Like most actresses — they’ll do the Cinemax movie, but then after that, they keep the shirt on.
KEVIN NEALON, Cast Member:
Most of those guys who came in — Farley, Spade, Rock, and Sandler — were much younger than the rest of us. It was almost like they were our teenage sons. All their offices were clustered together way down the hall, and when you would go back there, the offices were messy, with Playboy magazines strung everywhere, and they’d be talking about what kind of action they got the