Part 24 (1/2)

My frustration was half that, and the other half like the black comedy boom was happening and I wasn't part of it. In Living Color was a big show, and Def Comedy Jam was on HBO, and Martin Lawrence was on. So there was all this stuff happening, and I was over here in this weird world, this weird, Waspy world. But the things I learned there - there'd be no Chris Rock Show, I never would have had the success that I had with that, if I hadn't been on SNL learning how to run a show. I didn't go to college. So it was all school to me. Everyone was a professor - Professor Al Franken, Professor Phil Hartman.

NORM MACDONALD, Cast Member: I always hear about how Chris Rock was underutilized and stuff. That's not really true. I mean, they let you do whatever you want on that show. So you can't blame anybody. It's just that Chris is a great stand-up comedian, a great voice. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean he's a great sketch-comedy comedian.

CHRIS ROCK:.

”Can't compete with white people, man. You'll lose your mind.” My mother told me that a long time ago. ”Just find your spot. Find your spot, work within that spot.” Okay, everybody's writing sketches for the host. They've got to do something without the host, let me write something without the host. I was a separate thing.

With Tim Meadows being on the show, you know somewhere in your mind that if there's two nonwhite, pretty good sketches, they probably won't both get on. And they'll never go back-to-back, even if they have nothing to do with each other. One could be about medieval times and one could be a drag-racing thing, but you're never going to see this sketch with a bunch of black people, and this other sketch with a bunch of black people, back-to-back. One might go near the top of the show and the other would be at the end of the show.

That's how it was in comedy clubs too. One black comic goes on at nine o'clock, they will not be putting me on at nine-fifteen. Same goes with women. It was just men in power overreacting, overthinking things.

FRED WOLF:.

The one thing I will say is that while Chris was on the show, I would walk somewhere with him and everyone was recognizing him. Everyone out there knew who he was, and typically he'd have more of a black slant to some of the stuff he was doing. And I think he felt like his audience wasn't really watching Sat.u.r.day Night Live, and that may be the case. But I also think he's been able to cross over quite a bit, and I think some of the stuff he learned at Sat.u.r.day Night Live or was able to sort of do at Sat.u.r.day Night Live probably helped him prepare for that.

If he had started at In Living Color, maybe he would have jump-started much faster than he did at Sat.u.r.day Night Live. My observation was, yeah, he was having a rough time. But I don't think Sat.u.r.day Night Live hurt him in any way.

CHRIS ROCK:.

Maybe I could have worked harder. As I think back on it, I worked just as hard as anybody else, but as my father raised me, ”You've got to work harder than the white man. You can't work as hard; you're not going to get anywhere.” I don't want to say anything bad about the place. They're good people.

It's not the place for a black guy, it's not the hippest place, man. We used to always get the black acts the year they were finished. Like the music acts. So we got Hammer when he did ”Too Legit to Quit,” when he did The Addams Family theme song, on his way out. We get Whitney Houston on the way out. I'm just telling the truth, man.

Who wrote for me? Me, man. Just me. No black writers and no one really got into that side of the culture. Half the culture's into some form of hip-hop sensibility, half of the white culture, it's not just a black thing, but the show's never really dealt with that part of the culture. Even now.

DAVID MANDEL:.

I was a fan of Rock's from before I got there, and I had his original stand-up alb.u.m. 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 f.u.c.king 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 was really lame and then, you know, broke in and just told everybody, ”That's it for me. I'm leaving SNL. Good-bye.” And walked out of the studio. And as soon as I went through the studio doors, it turned black and white and it was kind of obvious - it looked a lot like, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald being brought down the hallway at the Dallas precinct, and then I get shot at the end. Anything else that I did on that show, I didn't do very well.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

I had desperately wanted to live in New York City and do a live comedy show from that building - 30 Rock. I just thought it would be the greatest job in the world, and I had friends who had done it and friends who were on it - even though, oddly enough, I had been warned by everyone who had been on it not to do it. I had friends who were writers who had left and a couple of cast members who had left who I was friendly with who said, ”You're not going to like it.” They just felt it would not be a place where I would thrive, especially coming off of Larry Sanders and Ben Stiller's show, which were very progressive, intelligent, and collaborative television programs.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:.

I think people just thought I would go there and do my own thing and, you know, be great on the show. And I was thinking the total opposite - that I would go there and everybody else would write for me and I'd have an easy walk through the show. And neither happened.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

I can still remember one sketch in particular, where aliens had taken some of the male cast members on the s.h.i.+p and had a.n.a.lly probed them and written ”b.i.t.c.h” in lipstick on their chests. Is that funny? It was a Maalox moment every five minutes. I had irritable bowel syndrome every day. My drinking just got out of hand. I would credit SNL with being very instrumental to some bad habits that certainly increased.

I wanted to quit after the first week. I phoned my agent and said, ”This is not a good fit. There's something wrong here.” There is a tangible, almost palpable - perhaps the word is ”visceral” - feeling of bad karma when you walk into the writers room. There is something rotten in Denmark.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:.

There were so many people in the cast. There was no reason for there to be so many people. There were times when I'd get in my Munchkin makeup and sit until, you know, five to one and come out and do one sketch. There was no reason. When the show first started and there was a smaller cast, it was funny to see, like, Belus.h.i.+ doing Marlon Brando and then having to run and change and be in some other sketch back-to-back. And that never happened with us.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

Every Wednesday there was always a great show in there. There were always funny sketches on Wednesday. Just somehow, I don't know why, writers were doing some really great, funny stuff that was not getting on the air. I don't know. For whatever reason, that season seemed to be the year of f.a.g-bas.h.i.+ng and using the words ”b.i.t.c.h” and ”wh.o.r.e” in a sketch. Just my luck. I was always surprised that a chapter of ACT UP never showed up to protest - honestly.

If you stepped out of line presswise, you would hear about it, and if they didn't appreciate what you said in the press, there would be Xerox copies of it for other people to read. It was the tactics of intimidation. There was so much pressure not to complain. If anybody got antifan mail or a disparaging note, it would be posted. I didn't understand that. It was another tactic of breaking you. Lorne enjoys the house divided syndrome. I think he prefers the house divided.

I learned that I made the experience even worse than it should have been. I was defeated. I was weak. I drank too much. I will go with the Eleanor Roosevelt quote, ”No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” I gave my consent freely. And every time I waited for Lorne for five hours - luckily, I didn't do it more than once or twice - but once I did it the first time, I gave my consent to feel inferior. I gave my consent to Marci Klein to feel inferior because I was intimidated by her. I gave my consent to the other writers and my coworkers that I was just weak, you know? I was a loser. And so I definitely learned from that experience. Other than that, I don't know what I took away from it. But I guess that's pretty significant.

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 ”Sat.u.r.day Night Lifeless.” And that's just bulls.h.i.+t. It's an absolute total bulls.h.i.+t label. It just so happens that men are wildly more successful than women at Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day Night Live for, you know, five months? Did anybody ever say, ”Except for stuff you did on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, what a great career you've had”? And n.o.body there bad-mouthed her either.

FRED WOLF:.

It was all just such a crock of s.h.i.+t.

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 h.e.l.l kind of scream was that? When you saw the fish lady pop out of the hole, you screamed like a girl.” And then they proceed to spend one minute of her last remaining time on earth arguing over how he didn't scream like a woman, he screamed like a man. And back and forth. The point of the sketch was that these guys were idiots and that they were blowing their chance at, you know, at great knowledge.

Janeane Garofalo raised h.e.l.l with three or four people before I got wind of it that I was being ”disrespectful to women” in that it is a fault of a guy to scream like a girl, that because Farley screaming like a girl would bring chastis.e.m.e.nt, she said that meant that women therefore are deserving to be chastised for the way they scream. It was one of the most convoluted, strangest, most ridiculous reasons I've ever heard to dislike a sketch.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.