FULL BLAST
IT IS THE evening of Saturday, October 27, 1990. At NBC Studios, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, show four of Saturday Night Live’s 16th season is a few minutes into its live broadcast. In the wings Chris Farley, a 26-year-old newcomer to the cast, is waiting for his cue. He is wearing male stripper garb: tight black trousers, a tearaway shirt and dickie bow and collar. Next to him is one of the biggest movie stars of the moment, Patrick Swayze, who is similarly, and perhaps more credibly, attired.
Beyond a tinsel curtain, Loverboy’s Working For The Weekend strikes up, and the two burst through the glitter and begin gyrating around the stage. Chris Farley doesn’t know it, but he is about to become a star.
Farley had arrived at the Mecca for American comedians, Studio 8H, just weeks earlier. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, after college he’d decamped to Chicago, the training school for the nation’s funnymen. There he’d studied improv under legendary guru Del Close, who had midwived the careers of Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and John Belushi, Farley’s hero.
Now he had arrived. He hadn’t had much screen-time in the previous three shows because the writers were still figuring out what to do with him. And, on paper, his first real sketch was not promising. It simply had Farley and Swayze auditioning for a single spot in the then-ubiquitous male strip troupe, The Chippendales. It probably onlystar’s sexy moves. Nobody had high hopes for it. At the very least, even if it wasn’t funny, everybody would get a couple of minutes of Swayze’s pecs.
