The Chris Farley Show
Reading The Chris Farley Show immediately after Wired is perhaps not the best idea if the goal is to lighten one’s mood, but I figured, what the hell — I have them both in the house, the comparisons between the two men in life and in death are constant, why not.
But TCFS is an oral history, and it succeeds where Wired fails because it puts Farley in three dimensions.The interstitial writing is not very good — it’s trying too hard for profundity, but I can imagine Tanner Colby feeling pressure to bring it with the grand pronouncements because Tom Farley, Jr. is the co-author — but it’s a relatively small percentage of the overall narrative, and I would rather hear Chris Rock talk about the Chippendales sketch than Tanner Colby, which Colby understands.(Colby also co-authored the Belushi biography mentioned in the Wired comments.)
The depiction of Farley’s addiction and how it manifested seemed off to me initially; there is a curious lack of detail.I own a book called The Death of Elvis, in hardcover no less, so I can’t sit here and pretend I don’t like to grub around in the backyard dirt of this kind of thing, but it’s not the sordid specifics themselves I needed…the narrative doesn’t really even tell you exactly what drugs Farley is doing at various times, and a reader does need to know that, sort of, because different drugs prompt different kinds of acting out, and you can’t just lump them all together.Farley also presented with classic OCD symptoms; that comes up and then gets dropped for a while.The overeating is mentioned, but late in the book, and not really explored.Various people discuss Farley’s motivations, the root causes of his addictions, which is worthwhile, and again, I don’t need to hear about every line or gram (Wired does this with the last few days of Belushi’s life, and the point had already been driven home and tucked into bed a hundred pages before that), but it has the effect of abstracting a lot of the comments about Farley’s impetus for abusing everything he could get his hands on.
By the end, though, I was fine with it.It is an oral history, and if your interview subjects choose not to get into detail, or didn’t have firsthand knowledge of what went on, there you have it.And the feeling, too, is that Farley did overindulge in everything, and the “everything” is the bottom line — in other words, it didn’t matter which drug or drugs, or whether he could eat a whole bucket of KFC or two whole buckets.He needed to drown himself in order to feel like he could live; you don’t need an ingredients list to make that point.
I can recommend TCFS where I couldn’t recommend Wired because these people did know Farley and the book does capture the elegiac tone that I think is appropriate to it, the way you talk about the dead, laughing at the things they used to do and then sighing a little bit because they won’t do those things anymore.It sheds some light on various situations and it isn’t too clinical about its subject; it engages with Farley so that the reader can do the same.
Tags: books SNL TV untimely demises
Sars, thanks for the review. I’m in the early pages of TCFS.
I read excerpts from TCFS in a magazine earlier this year (Playboy? Vanity Fair?) and found it to be compelling. It’s hard to compare Belushi and Farley because they were two different generations. I felt Farley’s death in some ways more than Belushi’s, perhaps because Belushi was already this ICON OF COMEDY and therefore untouchable whereas with Chris, he hadn’t quite gotten there yet, but you could see where he was headed.
Anyway, I agree that his addiction ultimately boiled down to “TOO MUCH” of everything. It’s sad to read about how he sort of knew what the end result would be of all this and yet still couldn’t stop.
Thanks for both reviews.
I guess my question now, Sars, is: do you get why Chris Farley is funny? Or did you already find him funny?
Me, I couldn’t stand him. I never got why people found him funny (although I did enjoy that Chippendales sketch). He seemed to be funny just because he was fat, which I don’t get. Notwithstanding my ignorance, I get that everyone who worked with him at SNL thought he was a genius.
I guess I feel about him the way you feel about Belushi. Me, I was graduating high school right about when SNL debuted, so that first cast will always be the funniest ever to me. Merely seeing Belushi hook up that one eyebrow is enough to leave me dissolved in laughter. And I still imitate his hypertense jumping to check for observers from the horse scene in “Animal House.”
Maybe we all love the SNL we grew up on. Plus, Belushi and those guys were the first. Not the first to do sketch comedy (I wouldn’t have the balls to assert that), and not even the first to do subversive sketch comedy, but the first to pave the SNL highway, and set the standards. I mean, everyone since has basically been walking in their footprints, though some may have walked taller than the originals.
But, back to my question: if someone didn’t find Farley hysterical in the first place, would TCFS change that? And, if not, can Wired be blamed for the same flaw?
I thought Farley was funnier than Belushi (but obviously that isn’t saying much). I laughed at Chippendale’s, I laughed at the van down by the river the first couple of times; a lot of it seemed desperate to me, and like it was being overused, but that’s SNL generally.
I do think this book gives a better sense of what went into Farley’s comedy and his comedic style — that even if you didn’t really dig his stuff, you could appreciate how it was built. There are several mentions of the Matt Foley character working because of the little mannerisms Farley put into it that he borrowed from his salesman father: the pants hitch, the eyeglasses adjustment. I hadn’t even noticed those little parts, but he definitely did them and it definitely mattered.
Farley’s genius is probably oversubscribed at this point, in part due to his untimely demise. Farley himself wanted to get away from the “fatty falls down” genre, but that genre consistently worked for him, so he didn’t try as hard as he could have to do something different. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle — he wasn’t a genius, although he probably could have become one; nor was he as one-note as some people like to say.
It’s interesting. The deaths of Farley and Belushi are sad, of course, tragic even, but the sheer grimness of the death of Phil Hartman doesn’t inspire the same kind of “death of a genius” encomia, perhaps because of its violence.
@ Alessandra: It was Playboy. (See, I DO read it for the articles. Heh.)
@ Sars: I loved loved loved Live From New York, I re-read sections of it once every few months. (Usually the parts about Chevy Chase to get myself all worked up… Eat a dick, Chevy Chase.) I have hesitated buying The Chris Farley Show because I’m worried it will be a rehashing of a book I’ve read a dozen times. Did you get a sense of that, or is it new enough to be worth the $30 for the hardcover? Or should I just re-read the Farley parts of LFNY?
Good point, @PreppyLouche (and great name). As far as I’m concerned, Hartman really WAS a comic genius, and I still get weepy over his passing. Maybe it’s the self-destructive aspects of Belushi’s and Farley’s deaths that garner the attention, but I suppose an argument could be made for Hartman’s death as self-destructive as well (when you tell a crazy woman you want a divorce, you then Get Out of the House).
And, Sars, you’re right: the Matt Foley character was also pretty good, and the dad mannerisms helped make it so. But there are so few moments like that. The tongue-tied fanboy talk-show host character was funny the first time, but since the 2nd through 10th versions were the Exact Same Formula, it kinda lost its punch. I suppose you could say that about a lot of SNL recurring characters, but something like, say, Bill Murray’s lounge singer always felt fresh to me.
@Noelle: I’ve read LFNY several times myself, and while I don’t know if the Farley book is worth $30 in hardcover in a vacuum, as compared to LFNY it doesn’t repeat the Farley sections. LFNY’s treatment of Farley seemed overly reverent to me; oddly, a book that’s about him is less kid-gloves in its treatment of him and better rounded in the portrayal.
But I think you can probably find it on Half.com or Powell’s for a more reasonable price. I would lend you mine but it went out the door to a friend as soon as I finished the review.
Noelle: you could also check your local library!