Free The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts by Tanner Colby, Tom Farley

my favorite things were the subtle little characters he would do.

DENNIS KERN:
    The Motivational Speaker appeared onstage for the first time at the Ark. It wasn’t the same as on Saturday Night Live , but it was there in its infant form.

PAT O’GARA:
    The Motivational Speaker actually started back in high school and was based heavily on our coach, Joel Maturi, who would go off on these inspirational speeches. He’d be prepping us for the game, briefing us on the other team’s defense and all that, and Chris would be right there behind him, imitating him, making all these faces and forcing us all to laugh.

JOEL MATURI:
    The Motivational Speaker is based in part on me; there is some truth to that. Mostly some of my mannerisms, the hiking up the pants, the spreading the legs and crouching down to get serious. I was pretty vocal with the pep talks and the Knute Rockne speeches. Those kinds of things. I think the more philosophical side of the character was actually based on his dad.

DENNIS KERN:
    We taught Chris the basics of improv and scene work at the Ark, but the natural talent he had was already present. As a performer, he was just there in the moment, like Johnny Carson used to be on the Tonight Show . What Carson was so brilliant at was just reacting and responding naturally to the environment around him in a way that made you laugh. Chris had those same instincts. He just knew what to do.

BRIAN STACK:
    He could do the same thing fifty times and somehow always make it funny. If a pretty woman walked by he would drop and start doing push-ups, starting out “. . . 198 . . . 199 . . . 200.” I’d seen him do that lots of times. It shouldn’t have been funny to me anymore, yet it always was. It’s hard to explain why it was; it just was. You could videotape it and analyze it with a computer, like you would a golf swing, but you still wouldn’t understand it, and you could never hope to replicate it.
    One night after a show we went to this bar, and Chris was making this middle-aged couple in the bar laugh. He was dancing with the guy’s wife and doing these cat-eye things with his hands. The husband was laughing so hard that he was actually falling off his bar stool, and he eventually said to Chris, “What’s your name? I want to be sure and remember it. I’ve never laughed like this.” It was strange. Everyone sort of sensed that there was just something unique about him. Chris wasn’t famous, but it was the same reaction he would get years later after he left Madison and became a movie star.

DENNIS KERN:
    Chris and Brian Stack had just started rehearsals on Cowboys No. 2 , a Sam Shepard play that we were going to put on. And Chris, meanwhile, had been taking trips down to Chicago here and there with his father. Then it became clear what all those trips to Chicago were for.

BRIAN STACK:
    When Chris decided to leave, it was pretty upsetting. He loved the Ark, but he was bursting at the seams to get out, and Chicago was the first step. I think Dennis was happy that Chris was leaving to pursue his dream, but he seemed kind of angry on his last night.

DENNIS KERN:
    I was happy for him, but at the same time I thought it was too soon. I thought that he needed to be more in contact with the source of his creativity before he went to try at the professional level. I always knew he would make it, but I don’t know that he was grounded enough in the technique of acting to have something to hold on to. He was immensely talented, but that talent was sort of at the whim of whoever needed the next laugh.

TOM FARLEY:
    The experience he had at the Ark told him he had to get out of Madison. Plus, he couldn’t take the job at Scotch Oil anymore. As much as he wanted to please Dad, after a year of selling asphalt even Chris was like, “I gotta get out of here.”

JOHN FARLEY:
    Dad had made the ultimate sacrifice. He would have been a great lawyer, smartest man you ever met. Dreamed of going into politics. But he had