God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem

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God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked

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By Darrell Hammond

HarperCollins

Copyright © 2011 Darrell Hammond
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780062064554

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Chapter One

Chapter One
The Hall
Studio 8H, 30 Rockefeller Center
New York City
1995
To say it's intimidating to walk into 30 Rockefeller Center
to audition for Saturday Night Live is one of the century's
greatest understatements. The building itself, once known as
the RCA Building until GE bought the company and NBC
along with it, is one of the city's great landmarks, built during
the Depression in classic Art Deco style. You could get dizzy looking up at
the Josep Maria Sert mural Time on the ceiling above the main entrance.
Thank God it was summer, because if the enormous Christmas tree had been
up out front, I'd probably have passed out.
Trying to ignore the hordes of tourists lined up to take the
NBC tour, I checked in at the security desk—Yes, Mr. Hammond,
here's your pass, go on up, they're expecting you—and
stepped into the same elevator that for two decades had ferried
a seemingly endless cavalcade of comedians to stardom.
I got out on the eighth floor and was escorted to makeup,
where a lovely young lady dabbed me with powder to douse
the shine of nervous sweat on my forehead. At least I had a few
months of sobriety under my belt, so I didn't have withdrawal
shakes. Although I could have killed for a slug of gin right
about then.
When I'd been sufficiently fluffed and primped, I was led into the theater that
I'd fantasized about forever, Studio 8H, or the Hall, as I call it, where legends like
George Carlin, Buck Henry, and Andy Kaufman had performed,
a few feet from where the Rolling Stones and David Bowie have played,
and where Lorne Michaels, who hatched this comedy phenomenon
a generation earlier to replace weekend reruns of The Tonight
Show, was sitting on a chair in front of me.
I almost said, "You know what? I'm thirty-nine years old.
I'm on lithium. Do you know what lithium is for? If I may
quote the National Library of Medicine at the National
Institutes of Health:
Lithium is used to treat and prevent episodes of mania
(frenzied, abnormally excited mood) in people with bipolar
disorder (manic-depressive disorder; a disease that causes
episodes of depression, episodes of mania, and other
abnormal moods). Lithium is in a class of medications called
anti-manic agents. It works by decreasing abnormal activity
in the brain.
"So yeah, it's too late, and I'm too fucking scared, and
apparently I have abnormal activity in my brain. Thank you.
Good-bye."
Lorne looked at me and said, "Are you okay?"
"I think so," I lied.
Then he smiled at me. Fuck it, now I have to go through with
it. I had been asked to do ten minutes, which is an eternity. I
proceeded to peel off every impression, like Phil Donahue speaking
Spanish, that I could pull together in the short amount of
time that I'd been given to prepare. But really, I'd been preparing
for the previous twelve years for a moment like this.
When I left, I thought, If my life ends right now, it's okay. I
was in that theater. Lorne Michaels was there. And I performed
well, despite my terror. Whether I was any good or not was
immaterial. I knew I wasn't going to get called back.
And yet I was. Lorne wanted to see if I had any more
impressions, so I came up with Ted Koppel in German and
another ten or so and did it all over again a week later.
I guess I did okay, because then Lorne wanted to see me
move on my feet. He took me to the Comic Strip. Fuck, that
place? Really? I'd been dismissed by a lot of New York clubs,
but the Comic Strip held a special place in my pantheon of
rejection.
When I auditioned there in 1990, I had as great a set as I'd
had up to that point. I totally killed. Afterward, Lucien Hold,
the manager of the club, who was renowned for having discovered comic
greats like Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Adam Sandler,
sat me down in a booth up front.
"How old are you?" he asked.
I told him I was thirty-four. He didn't flinch.
He pointed to pictures on the wall of comedians who had
worked there. "Look at these faces. They're stars. That's what
we're about here. Stars."
Lucien was smiling at me.
"They have it."
Could my luck be changing?
"And I don't think you have it," he said.
Apparently my luck wasn't changing in any way whatsoever.
"I don't see any reason why you should come back here
or call here again." He stood up and walked away without so
much as a "Good-bye, thanks for coming."
I went home with absolutely no reason to believe that I was
ever going to make it. I had only enough money for a subway
token. It was one of those horribly cold February New York
nights, and I took the train back to my hovel in Brooklyn. I
even slipped on the ice on the sidewalk outside my apartment. It
was perfect, going home without hope. I sat in the dark, smoking
cigarettes. If I'd had any money, I'd have gotten drunk.
It was kismet that, five years later, Lorne would have me go
there for part of my audition, unwittingly giving me a dose of cosmic payback.
With Lorne watching and Lucien Hold hovering
nearby, I got onstage and, once again, I killed, although
with so many performances and impressions since then, I no
longer remember exactly what I did. As much as I would have
liked to tell Lucien what I thought of him, I figured that performance
for Lorne was as much of a fuck-you as I needed.
The next challenge was dinner with Lorne and his producer,
Marci Klein, Calvin Klein's daughter, who to this day
works as a producer on Saturday Night Live as well as with
Tina Fey on 30 Rock. Marci had chosen a restaurant over on
the West Side near Broadway. It was a casual evening, and we
just swapped stories. The problem is, the highlight of one of
my stories might be, "And then when we got to the store, they
didn't have any long-handled spoons!" and Lorne's would be
something like, "When I was sitting on the Berlin Wall with Paul McCartney . . ."
I was never going to be able to compete with his material, but somehow
I made it through the evening without humiliating myself.
A few weeks later, I was lying on my futon on the uneven
floor of my apartment in Hell's Kitchen, where the night before
a small furry creature had run up the side of my head, stomped
on my face, and then run back down the other side. My wife
was with me when the phone rang. I don't know why, but we
looked at each in that meaningful way they do in the movies.
It was my manager, Barry Katz, and my agent, Ruth Ann Secunda,
calling at the same time, which never happened.
I got the job.
Holy shit.
My wife and I decided to celebrate by opening a bottle of
champagne and dancing in the fountain in front of the Plaza
Hotel.
Okay, no, we didn't. What we really did was run like crazy
from my apartment on Forty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue
down to Forty-fifth Street between Eighth Avenue and
Broadway to the Imperial Theatre, where Les Miz was playing.
I loved that show. I'd seen it about ten times. I couldn't get
enough of it; we bought the most expensive tickets they had
left. I reckoned that play is my life story—unjustly treated by
life, resolutely angry, but things kind of work out, and along
the way there's a little bit of love and light and, not for nothing,
a couple of bucks in it too. That's my Tenth Avenue synopsis of
one of the great literary works of all time.
A few days later, I was having dinner at Umberto's Clam
House down in Little Italy, and I ran into Colin Quinn, whom
I'd met years earlier when I'd been hired, then fired, as his
warm-up guy on the MTV game show Remote Control, which
he hosted in the late 1980s.
"Hey, what's up?"
"I just got Saturday Night Live!"
"Me too!"
On Monday, September 25, 1995, I reported to work for
the twenty-first season of Saturday Night Live.
As I walked through those halls and saw those photos on
the wall of the greats who had worked there—the late John
Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Chris Farley; Dan Aykroyd,
Eddie Murphy, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Molly Shannon—I
couldn't wrap my lithium-quenched mind around the fact that
this was really happening. Two decades of comic genius and
me? It was tremendous validation, and yet I was certain it was
a cosmic joke of some kind. Maybe the antidepressants were
making me hallucinate?
I was assigned an office on the seventeenth floor with, who
else, Colin Quinn, who had been hired that year as a writer and
featured player. We hung out there until an intern knocked on
the door and yelled, "Pitch!"
The pitch meeting in Lorne's office down the hall is a little
bit tradition and a little bit meet-and-greet, where whichever
legend of stage or screen or music or sports or politics is hosting
that week is welcomed by the writers and the cast. Lorne sits behind his
desk, the host sits in a chair by the desk, and everyone else sits wherever
they can squeeze in, including the floor. Lorne's office was plenty big,
but it's a shitload of people who crammed in there.
Lorne's right-hand men in these festivities, alongside Marci
Klein, were SNL producers Mike Shoemaker and Steve Higgins.
These guys had, and still have, to be able to do all the jobs on the
show—like a restaurant manager who can cook, wait tables, and
make a nice Caesar dressing. They had to know how to write a
joke, manage people, craft a sketch, and above all they had to be
fucking funny. Higgins is great with impressions and helped me
build almost every impression I would do on the show.
Mariel Hemingway was the host of my first show. I remember
thinking at the time, She's had a conversation with Woody
Allen, hell, she's kissed Woody Allen, and I'm sitting just a few feet
from her. And she's more beautiful than anyone has ever been in
the history of people.
Do my socks match?
Fuck.
Even major stars are often a little intimidated when they
walk into those offices, but Lorne makes sure the SNL crew around them
is very hands-on in the most unintrusive way
possible. Everybody is extremely welcoming, and any thought
the host might have, the slightest grievance, the slightest knitted
brow, is addressed clearly and immediately. And the host
has tremendous say in what the show will be that week.
During the pitch meeting, everybody throws out ideas to the
host about what they might like to do for that week's show. If
you don't have an idea, it's entirely okay to make up something,
even if it's hideous. The staff laughs, but often the poor host sits
there thinking, What? Grecian Formula 44 on toast? What?
I tossed out a crazy idea for a cold open—that's the sketch
at the start of the show that always ends with, "Live from New
York, it's Saturday Night!" The show had been receiving a lot of
criticism for not being as funny in recent seasons as the nation
thought it should be, and Lorne was being battered a little bit
in the press for the way the show had gone downhill. So I had
this crazy idea of doing a Wizard of Oz sketch in which the bad
press was just a dream. It was completely ridiculous, although
everyone was very kind about it.
It was the first of nearly three hundred weeks I would spend at SNL,
and lithium isn't exactly Ginkgo Bilbao when it
comes to memory, so I'm going to admit the details of that first
week are a bit murky all these years later, but here goes.
After the pitch meeting the cast and writers, per custom,
spent some time with Mariel, chatting, swapping compliments,
and drinking coffee. Some writers started to work on
the sketches that got the nod during the pitch meeting, and the
rest of us went home.
On Tuesday, people started coming in around noon.
Tradition dictates that the host visit with the writers in their offices to talk
about proposed sketches. A lot of the writers are
Emmy winners, and it's really an honor for the host as much as
anything. Meanwhile, the writing began in earnest, so a lot of
people would end up staying all night working, including Lorne.
The cast members conferred with the writers, and each one
participated in putting together anywhere from five to ten sketches.
My role on the show was a little different from the rest of the
cast's. I wasn't very good at coming up with sketch ideas, but
that's not why I was there. I was a field-goal kicker. You need
a voice? I was the guy who could kick that football. I didn't
know how to punt, pass, or tackle, but I could kick. So I came
in on Wednesday mornings around 10:00 a.m. Sometimes I'd
have gotten a call Tuesday night that would be a tip-off: "Can
you do this guy?" But lots of times they would simply assign a
role to me, and I would walk in having never heard the voice.
That first week they gave me Ted Koppel in a Nightline sketch in
which Koppel interviews Republican presidential candidates Colin Powell
(Tim Meadows) and Bob Dole (Norm Macdonald).
I usually had four or five hours to study videotapes
I got from the research department and cobble together some
semblance of a voice before read-through with all the cast and
crew, which happened Wednesday afternoon.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked by Darrell Hammond Copyright © 2011 by Darrell Hammond. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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