Free Gasping for Airtime by Jay Mohr Page A

question becomes, when do you see that? Him being in the sketch isn’t the reveal; him being in drag is. You also don’t want to make it too jokey, Herlihy explained, or hit it too on the head. You just want to knock out the beats—the jokes—and make it work.
    Some of the cast were amazingly self-contained and didn’t need much help from anyone. Mike Myers was at the top of that list. I never saw him around the offices for more than twenty minutes after the pitch meeting, let alone watched him go from door to door asking for input. He was a strange bird because he was the model of efficiency. Rhythm, shmythm. The Mike Myers sketch was a science, and he perfected it.
    Myers wrote his sketches alone. He knew exactly how they should sound and how long they should be. The sketches were always funny, they made the host funny, and they were often franchise sketches. At no time in my two years did any of his sketches ever need rewriting. He would hand in a “Coffee Talk” sketch and it would be flawless. The Harvard writers in particular really disliked seeing one of his sketches on the table. One night Dave Mandel was reading a “Coffee Talk” sketch full of Yiddish, and he threw up his hands. “I don’t even know what any of this means!” Mandel yelled. Duh, that was the whole point. I remember once asking why Myers’s sketches even needed to be rewritten. No one responded or even gestured. You can respond to an eye roll or a shrug of the shoulders, but not to a blank stare.
    One of the few true collaborations I experienced was when Travolta hosted. The sketch was “ Welcome Back, Kotter Directed by Quentin Tarantino.” The Sweathogs were Travolta as Barbarino; Tim Meadows as Washington; Mike Myers as Kotter; David Spade as Horshack; Sandler as Epstein; Janeane Garofalo as Julie; and I played Mr. Woodman, the principal. Dave Mandel, Al Franken, and I were hammering out the beats late one night in Franken’s office and things were clicking. We weren’t tipping the sketch or making it too jokey, and it felt great.
    Mandel knew Reservoir Dogs the best, Franken knew the show, and I know both well enough to round out the beats. All the lines I suggested were good, and they were met with positive reinforcement. Franken would throw his head back, slap his knee, and bellow with laughter. There was a slight hesitancy on my part, thinking that he might just be fucking with me. I didn’t know how to react to someone actually liking my ideas. We hammered that sketch out in six hours. That was an evening of quality.
    The sketch opened with Myers (as Kotter) asking, “Did I ever tell you about my uncle Sid?” Then it launched into a rendition of “Little Brown Bags,” the Reservoir Dogs theme song. This was followed by the Sweathogs walking in slow motion to “Little Brown Bags.” I enter the room as Mr. Woodman and complain about the noise, at which point they all tie me to a chair and pour gasoline over my head. Travolta then dances toward me with a razor. Just before Travolta cuts off my ear, the door flies open and special guest Steve Buscemi bursts into the room brandishing a gun. The Sweathogs all pull their guns. It’s a Mexican standoff. Finally, all the guns go off at once and everyone drops dead.
     
     
     
    Mondays quickly became my favorite night of the week because each one brought with it hope and opportunity. I would meet the host, who was usually one of the hottest stars in the country at the time, and afterward the host and a few people from the show would all go out to dinner. After dinner, we would all pile into cabs to go play basketball together. The dinners with the other cast members were when I felt the best. I was one of them. More important, I was one of them in public. It was amazing to sit in a restaurant next to David Spade and across from Chris Farley. Other patrons in the restaurant would point and ask for autographs. Even though no one ever asked for mine, I didn’t care. I was with