Andrew Lutzke
The recent broadcast of Saturday Night Live’s 40th Anniversary special, which provided millions with a dose of “nostalgia porn” brought me back to my early teenage years. In the early 90’s, I was wandering away from staples of my childhood like He-man and turtles of the Teenage Mutant Ninja variety and finding hipper entertainment like Conan O’Brien, Tales from Crypt and Saturday Night Live as my bedtimes grew later into the night.
SNL at the time featured a plethora of comic talents like Dana Carvey, David Spade, Tim Meadows, Norm Macdonald, Adam Sandler, Phil Hartman, Rob Schneider and Mike Myers. The stand-out cast member for me however was the rotund, whirling dervish of comedy named Chris Farley.
Farley and I shared many common traits, as both of grew up as obese kids, uncomfortable in our own skins, offering up large doses of humor to try and cover for our insecurities. Chris and I also shared a similar upbringing, his being in Madison, Wisconsin and mine being a ways upstate near Green Bay. The life of a mid-western kid was one of snowball fights, swimming in lakes, recreational sports and other such fun. As we get older though, amusement comes more from imbibing on forbidden alcohols away from the prying adult eyes. Wisconsin’s drinking tradition can’t be denied, as every small town has at least three bars for every one church and five months out of the year we rush home from Sunday mass to indulge in frothy beverages while hooting and hollering for Da Pack. Farley himself played football in High School and kept a lifelong devotion to the Packers:
Farley was always a prankster growing up, as his family and friends can vividly recall when he used a mouth full of tic-tacs and a well-timed pratfall at church to try and trick the congregation into thinking he had knocked his teeth out. Other times Farley bared his rear end to a classroom of his contemporaries, exposed his man parts to an unassuming girl on a dare, accidentally started a house on fire with a smoke bomb and was known for sliding naked down bars while living it up in college.
Farley ended up graduating from Marquette University in 1986 with degrees in communication and theater. He then worked for his father’s oil company while trying to catch on with a improv theater in Madison. After gaining experience there, Farley moved on to Chicago’s Second City Theatre, where he worked his way up to their main stage. By 1990, Farley had caught the eye of SNL producer Lorne Michaels and he was offered a spot on the show that same year.
It only took four episodes for Farley to break-out from the pack as he was given a memorable role opposite of Patrick Swayze in a skit where the two men of opposite physical attributes competed for a spot at Chippendales. After that the next several season saw Farley create laughs in many roles, such as Matt Foley, the beleaguered motivational speaker who “lived in a van down by the river”:
A member of Bill Swerki’s Superfans, who loved “Da’ Bears”:
A member of the high maintenance and low IQ’d “Gap Girls”, a stereotypical lunch lady, and innumerable send ups of celebrities ranging from Jerry Garcia to Rush Limbaugh.
Along the way Farley started to also appear in memorable bit parts of films such as Coneheads, Wayne’s World, Airheads and Billy Madison. Unfortunately with fame came greater access to drugs and booze. Farley spent the early 90’s constantly in and out of rehab. His destructive acts included appearing at Second City while drunk – he ended up booed off the stage. At other times, Farley would ditch SNL meetings to buy heroin, carrying clean urine samples with him in case a drug test came up. Finally Lorne Michaels told him to clean up or be fired.
This helped spawn Farley to finally kick the bad habits, and he went on to enjoy three years of sobriety and with it came great career success. He and his real life best bud David Spade made a pair of movies together – the amazingly hilarious and quotable “Tommy Boy” and the fun but not quite as enjoyable “Black Sheep”. Both films proved to be successes and the studio raked in over 30 million dollars in profits from each film. Farley’s follow up “Beverly Hills Ninja” opened at number one at the box office, but Farley felt the film was of poor quality and the humor was more about laughing at a fat guy flailing about more so than a broader form of humor. Reportedly, he even cried while attending the premiere screening.
The feelings of insecurity over the content of the film and what his career seemed to be turning into drove Farley back to the bottle and the drugs, a relapse that he’d never recover from. His next film, Almost Heroes, had to stop filming several times due to Farley having to be sent to rehab. Then a disastrous appearance as guest host on SNL followed, where he showed up with two hookers to the rehearsals and ended up spending the live show looking sickly and ashen.
After that, another trip to a detox center became Farley’s 17th and final attempt to go straight. With December upon him, Farley was seen attending church in Chicago, and buying a Xmas tree for his apartment there. He was in high spirits and looking forward to another big family Christmas celebration in a few weeks. His merriment couldn’t shake his demons though and on December 13th Farley began a four-day binge of booze and drugs. December 16th, Farley began another day of his dark indulgences. At 8:30 in the morning, he hired a hooker and spent the day smoking pot and drinking massive amounts of booze, using her more as a companion than as an object of sexual recourse. She eventually helped him score cocaine. The pair then smoked crack and snorted heroin back at his apartment. Eventually an argument ensued over money and she tried to leave. Farley ended up collapsing as he tried to follow her. As he lay, struggling to breathe, he begged her “Don’t leave me.” She took a picture of him in his desperate state, then stole his watch and wrote him a note saying she had fun. She then left. Farley died alone. He was only 33.
Farley’s desire for positive attention can be deciphered as another case of a funny man who sought to bring a smile to others to help mask his own pain. The recent suicide of Robin Williams displayed to the world another example of this, as Williams had spent the past forty years making America laugh, all the while never being able to shake his own emotional abscess’. Steve Martin’s memoir “Born Standing Up” covers the complex inner conflict that Martin also suffered from. The beloved John Candy also suffered bouts of manic depression and sought laughs to cover for his emotional maladies.
Farley’s demons were said to be aided by his father, who himself was a man with massive appetites for food and liquor. Chris once took his dad to a weight-loss group to try and goad him to getting healthier, and perhaps help encourage Chris to do the same. His father instead deemed that they had no such problems, and instead he and Chris went on a food and drink filled vacation to Florida together. During his final downward spiral, Chris’ worried friends asked his father to freeze Chris’ finances, so that he could be limited in his indulgences. His father refused. A few weeks later when Chris died, his father dragged his six hundred plus pound body out of the wheel chair he was often confined to and draped his body over the casket that held his son. Overcome with grief, Chris’ father gave up drinking cold turkey. He too would die just over a year later.
What May Have Been
Had Farley regained his sobriety and been able to carry on his career he had several projects in the works: He had already completed over 80% of the voiceover work for Shrek, where Farley was to be the titular character. Farley was also being courted to star in “The Cable Guy” in a role later taken by Jim Carrey. Other roles he had been earmarked for included being an Amish bowler in Kingpin and starring in a dramatically tinged movie about the troubled life of silent-screen era comedian Fatty Arbuckle.
Past that, it’s not hard to speculate that Farley could have slipped comfortably into a number of roles that were taken instead by comedians like Jack Black, Zach Gilfianakis, and Kevin James – to name a few. (In particular Rock of Ages and Paul Blart: Mall Cop seem to be a custom fit for Farley’s talents. Perhaps a big screen adaptation of Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker would finally give us a chance to glimpse at that van down by the river?)
A return to the small screen could have proven to be fruitful as well, as SNL and improv shows such as “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” would allow Farley’s manic boisterousness to be freed without the confines of a script to hold him back.
Goodbye
Chris Farley would have turned 51 on February 15th. It’s almost incomprehensible for me to envision Farley in a more mature role as a father figure, an offshoot of his leaving us too soon which provided him an aura of eternal youth. His death left a mark on a generation of young people like myself and Chris always be remembered by my peer group as one of the cultural icons whose star fell before it could burn out. For us Tupac Shakur, Dale Earnhardt, Kurt Cobain, and others will forever be larger than life to some degree in our minds.
My personal love for Farley’s body of work manifested in a trip to Madison to visit the mausoleum where he is laid to rest.
In closing, I’d like to share Chris’ favorite prayer, one that explains Farley’s goals quite well:
A Clown’s Prayer
As I stumble through this life, help me to create more laughter than tears, dispense more cheer than gloom, spread more cheer than despair.
Never let me become so indifferent, that I will fail to see the wonders in the eyes of a child, or the twinkle in the eyes of the aged.
Never let me forget that my total effort is to cheer people, make them happy, and forget momentarily, all the unpleasantness in their lives.
And in my final moment, may I hear You whisper: “When you made My people smile, you made Me smile.”
You always made me smile, Chris.
