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

given all that up to raise a family. And so he wanted everyone to stay in Madison, because that was what he’d sacrificed everything for. Years later, Chris had to cry for this scene when he filmed Black Sheep . So he turned to me and he said, “Johnny, make me cry.”
    I said, “Well, Dad’s all alone in Wisconsin with two ladies. All his boys have gone and moved on with their lives.”
    “Shut up.”
    He really got angry that I had said it. Somehow it had triggered the wrong emotion.

MIKE CLEARY:
    When Chris was working for his dad, he called me up one day and said, “I gotta talk to you about something.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Well, I have an opportunity to go to Chicago to study at Second City. What do you think?”
    I really wasn’t sure about taking risks like that. I said, “Chris, you need to just work with your dad. Establish a solid career and maybe do this stuff on the side.” That was totally my mentality. Finally, I said, “Well, what does your dad say about it?”
    And his exact words were, “My dad says I should definitely take the opportunity and go for it. He’s gonna back me one hundred percent.”
    I said, “Well then there’s no conversation here. You have to go.”

TOM FARLEY:
    We thought Chris would come running home in six months, and he never came back.
    In June of 1987, Chris left for Chicago. He moved into a small apartment off Armitage Avenue, just north of Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. There he rejoined his Marquette rugby and acting friend Pat Finn.
    The yellow porch light of Second City had led Chris to Chicago, but he quickly found that the doors of the renowned comedy institution did not immediately open for untrained unknowns fresh off the bus from Wisconsin. Forced to look elsewhere for a place to learn and perform, he found it at ImprovOlympic.
    Today, ImprovOlympic has become an industry mainstay in its own right, producing a steady stream of bankable film and television stars, among them Mike Myers, Vince Vaughn, John Favreau, Andy Richter, Tina Fey, Steven Colbert, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and director Adam McKay, not to mention a healthy chunk of the writing staff at Late Night with Conan O’Brien .
    But when Chris arrived, ImprovOlympic was still a fledgling outfit of vagabond comedians looking to make the funny anywhere they could. Teacher and director Charna Halpern had founded the group in 1981 with several goals in mind. Second City used improv as a means to create sketch comedy. Halpern wanted a curriculum in which improvised performance was the end in itself. At Second City, only a handful of seasoned performers trickled up to the main stage. Halpern gave ImprovOlympic a communitarian ethos, allowing even new and less-experienced students the chance to practice and learn in front of a paying audience.
    In 1984, comedy guru Del Close joined Halpern’s cause. As a director in Second City’s early heyday, Close had trained and mentored a who’s who of comedy, from John Belushi to Harold Ramis to Bill Murray. He was instrumental in shaping the forms and conventions of the Chicago school of improvisation. Perhaps his most notable contribution was the Harold, a long-form, fully improvised performance in which a whole cast works together off of a single audience suggestion to create a cohesive, continuous series of scenes.
    For Close, the goal of improv was not to get laughs but rather to find the real, emotional truth of the characters that created those laughs. He found the perfect instrument for that in Chris Farley. With Halpern’s instruction and Close’s inspiration, Chris began his comedy education in earnest. Some expressed doubts about his raw, unschooled talents, but those doubts quickly vanished. Chris, performing full throttle at night and bumbling through a comical parade of semiemployment by day, proved to everyone that he was destined for a life onstage.

PAT FINN:
    After I graduated from Marquette, I went down to Chicago. Chris followed