Live From New York - James H. Miller [206]
FRED WOLF:
Janeane Garofalo was awful on the show. She had it completely and totally wrong. She’s a very, very insecure person. She was my friend. I helped get her on the show. And she’s a very insecure person and she’s unwilling to sort of stand on her own body of work and ride on that talent. Instead, what she does is sort of tears everything down around her, (a) to make her feel better about what she’s doing, and (b) so she doesn’t have to really actually attempt anything upon which she could fail.
And so she was an infection in that show in that she was going to the press — at that point she was a darling of the press because she was sort of an articulate female — and going on about how it’s a men’s club at “Saturday Night Lifeless.” And that’s just bullshit. It’s an absolute total bullshit label. It just so happens that men are wildly more successful than women at Saturday Night Live, but not by design. It’s just genetic makeup, in my opinion.
Janeane Garofalo never spent an all-nighter. The writers and performers that went on to do very well never missed an all-nighter session. Janeane Garofalo never got with the writers and wrote sketches that she was dying to perform and would do anything that she could to get on the air. What she did instead was glom onto the host and just tear the show apart for the whole week, about how it’s a boys club there, and how they don’t let creativity flourish, and if they see certain initials on sketches they won’t laugh at them at read-through. All these negative things that were just patently ridiculous. And then she was a spectacular failure on the show.
CHRIS ELLIOTT:
Janeane and I hung out a lot that year, because in a way she was in the same boat as I. But she was a lot more capable in that arena than I was. And I guess she had the whole female issue to deal with there, which was a big issue, especially with guys like Sandler and stuff who were at their peak. So a lot of the humor was not up her alley.
PAUL SIMON, Host:
Janeane Garofalo has no case. She wanted to be on the show. She came on. It was during one of the show’s low points. She signed on for, you know, whatever — for the year. And she had a miserable time. And she asked to be released and Lorne released her.
You know, she messed him up. In the middle of his season, he had to go replace her. She could’ve had some aesthetic disagreement with the show, which she did. I mean, no doubt about it. I mean, she vocalized it. She actually said it in public. He didn’t say in public anything about her. What harm did SNL do to Janeane Garofalo? Any harm that she was on Saturday Night Live for, you know, five months? Did anybody ever say, “Except for stuff you did on Saturday Night Live, what a great career you’ve had”? And nobody there bad-mouthed her either.
FRED WOLF:
It was all just such a crock of shit.
I had this one sketch. It was about five idiot guys who were working on oil rigs in North Dakota. And they’re drilling a hole deep into the earth and out of the hole pops sort of a subterranean human — some crazy alien person. And it’s Janeane Garofalo. And these five idiots see her come out of the hole and she tells them that she lives in an underground kingdom, that they’ve been watching earth’s progress over millions of years and they have all the answers to any question that we might have about life on earth. And that she has five minutes until exposure to the air will kill her. “Ask any question you’d like.”
Well, when she first pops out of the hole, Chris Farley screams a really high-pitched scream, so after she gives her speech about how they could ask any question they want, the next thing out of Adam Sandler’s mouth is, he turns to Farley and says, “What the hell kind of scream was that? When you saw the fish lady pop out of the hole, you screamed like a girl.” And