Live From New York - James H. Miller [204]
DAVID MANDEL:
I was a fan of Rock’s from before I got there, and I had his original stand-up album. He’s a genius, obviously. And his stand-up acts are as close as it gets to perfection. At the time, I just don’t think what he was doing was just exactly right. I mean, even now, when you see the success he’s having in the movies and stuff, he’s basically still playing variations on Chris Rock. At the time, on the show, people were trying to write characters for him and things like that. And I just don’t think that’s what he does, and so it was sort of a bad match at the time. I don’t think anybody was saying that was genius and it wasn’t getting on. I just think it wasn’t a good match.
Chris seemed incredibly frustrated. So were a lot of people.
CHRIS ROCK:
It was the best time of my life. The show, that’s one thing. But then there’s the hang. The hang was the best time of my life. I honestly tell you, I made friendships that will last for the rest of my life. Most people had to share, they had a partner in their office. I had a four-person office: me, Sandler, Farley, and Spade, we shared an office. And those are my boys for life. For life. I love those guys.
ADAM SANDLER:
Backstage with Chris Rock, Farley, Spade, was the best. Nothing was better than having a read-through. You stayed up all Tuesday night — all of us did that — and then we’d do the read-through and you wouldn’t know what was getting on the show but you’d have an hour or so while those guys were figuring it out. So we’d all go to China Regency up on Fifty-fifth, and we’d eat and watch Farley eat more than us. Farley was so happy; I think we went there the most because they had a lazy susan. It’s easier that way. That’s all we did, we just talked about comedy — what we just heard in the read-through, what was funny, what we didn’t like, what we thought was going to get on, what was going to get past dress, that kind of stuff. We lived for comedy. We still do. Every one of us — sadly, I think. The women and the other people in our lives have to deal with the fact that we think of our comedy first. I’m not saying that when something important comes up we can’t drop it, but it’s on our minds more than you would think. We wake up thinking about jokes, we go to lunch together and that’s all we talk about. I think we’ve become pretty obsessive with it. “Obsessed” or “obsessive”? I don’t fucking know.
JANEANE GAROFALO:
I was on from September ’94 to March of ’95. Less than a year. I’d been a longtime fan of SNL. I mean, it certainly has had its highs and lows — lows being the Jean Doumanian era and then another low being the brief time that I was on it. Those are the two lowest of the lows. The season that I was on it, the system was geared toward failure. The prevailing comedy tastes were certainly none that I could support or get behind. I did not think we were doing a quality show, and if you mentioned that, you found you were an extremely unwelcome guest. You’re a very unwelcome family member if you do not wholeheartedly accept whatever the level of comedy is at the time.
CHRIS ELLIOTT, Cast Member:
All the performers there are required to write. That was another thing that bugged me when I got there, was that there was this pressure that, if you wanted to get on the air, you had to write some material for yourself. And I had stopped doing that. I was at a point now where people were writing for me, and when I did write, I was getting paid for that. But at SNL performers are sort of just expected to write. For nothing. It’s not a separate sort of deal. I remember mentioning that to Herb Sargent once while he was urinating. And he sort of, you know, blew me off. How does this show get away with having these guys write stuff and not pay them through the writers guild? And I guess there’s just some loophole about performers writing their own material that gets away from the guild.
The only thing I can remember actually enjoying doing on that show was something that was very Lettermanesque, where I just started a skit that