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

about a year behind me. We had no jobs, and we had no idea what we were doing. He moved into his place off Armitage, and we went from there down to Second City one day around two in the afternoon. We just kind of paced around in front of the theater, back and forth. In our minds, the scenario literally went something like this: Somebody up on the second floor would say, “What? We need two more people for the Second City main stage? Where are we going to find— Oh, wait! What about these two people out front? They look hilarious. ”
    That was about how far we’d thought things out. Then, after about ten minutes of pacing around, Joel Murray—Brian and Bill Murray’s brother—walks by. He was at Second City at the time, and he and I had gone to the same grammar school, so I knew him a little.
    Chris said, “There’s Joel Murray. He’s Bill’s brother. You should talk to him.”
    “I don’t know, Chris.”
    “You got to! C’mon. That’s why we’re here.”
    So Joel walked up, and I said, “Joel. Hi. I’m Pat Finn, from St. Joe’s.”
    “Yeah. Little Finn,” he said. “What’s goin’ on?”
    “Um, nothin’. This is my friend Chris. We wanna get into comedy.”
    He just kind of looked at us. Chris’s eyes had this look like the next thing out of Joel’s mouth was going to be the keys to the kingdom. And, actually, it turns out it was.

JOEL MURRAY, cast member, Second City:
    So one day here’s Pat Finn, who I haven’t seen since high school, standing there with this big guy. I could tell that the big guy was restraining all of his energy to just listen and be attentive to what I was saying. But I basically told them, “Go find Charna Halpern and Del Close at the ImprovOlympic and study with them, and then see if somebody’ll let you paint the bathroom at Second City.”
    It was funny, knowing Chris later, just to watch him holding it in, trying not to be an idiot.

CHARNA HALPERN, director/teacher, ImprovOlympic:
    ImprovOlympic didn’t even have an actual theater at the time. We performed at Orphans, this bar on Lincoln Avenue. We had to be out by ten o’clock so the band could come on. We got kicked out of Orphans, and we moved around to like fourteen different spaces. It was an insane time. But I kept attracting these really brilliant people—Farley and Pat Finn, Mike Myers, Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Andy Richter—and the shows kept getting better and better. But even though we were getting thrown out of these places, the audience was following us. It just kind of kept snowballing, getting bigger and bigger, and that was what it was like when Farley showed up.

BRIAN STACK:
    I went down to Chicago to visit him at ImprovOlympic. He was taking classes, but Charna hadn’t let him go up onstage to perform yet. After the show, he was pacing outside, and I could just see he had all this pent-up, frustrated energy that had nowhere to go. You could see how he was bursting at the seams, how he needed to get up onstage.

CHARNA HALPERN:
    One night after a couple of weeks, Chris came up to me with Pat Finn and said, “Let me go onstage! Let me play tonight!”
    “You?” I said. “God, no. You’re definitely not ready.”
    He started getting violent. He was banging his fists on the wall above me, like, “Let me go! Let me go onstage! I’ll be great! You’ll see!”
    “I’ll tell you when you’re ready to be onstage,” I said.
    He was just not hearing it. After a good seven minutes of his badgering, I finally got fed up myself. I said, “All right, I’ll tell you what. You can go onstage and play tonight, but if you’re bad you will never ever get on my stage again. Do you wanna take that chance?”
    Before I even finished my sentence, he was bounding out into the room to tell the guys he was going on. Everyone was looking at me like, “Are you crazy?” But he got up there and was absolutely hilarious.
    The good thing about it was that when he got back to class, he started to calm down.