Baby Don't Hurt Me, page 3
Another problem with bringing Mr. Peepers back a second time on live TV was finding a guest host who saw the humor in getting face humped. Tom Hanks’s enthusiasm is the reason I got to do Mr. Peepers on the show in the first place. But not everybody is as cool as Tom Hanks. (To answer the question that everyone always asks: Yes. Tom Hanks is by far one of the greatest guests I ever worked with on SNL.)
I got another shot at making Mr. Peepers into a recurring character that January, with guest host Kevin Spacey in the first episode of 1997. This time, the setting was a monkey lab. Will Ferrell played Spacey’s lab assistant. I cast him not just because he’d done Peepers before and was reliably funny in any sketch, but because he was really the only cast member capable of holding me. Will was tall enough for me to wrap my legs around and swing upside down from—which I did—while Spacey riffed off his domineering, abusive Swimming with Sharks character and yelled at me. At one point, I stood on my stool face-to-face with Spacey while we shouted “Baa!” back and forth at one another. I devoured an apple with the usual gusto, and then Will chased me around the lab and got his face violently sucked when Peepers went into “attack mode.”
Not only did the sketch land better with the live audience this time, it was also appreciated more by the audience at home. In fact, this time Peepers worked well enough that the show would bring back the apple-spitting, dry-humping, half man, half monkey a dozen more times.
One day in 1997, Adam McKay, one of the best writers on the show, called out my name as I passed his office. He told me he had an idea for Mr. Peepers and wanted to write it up.
Adam didn’t tell me what the idea was, but I was so dumbstruck that he actually wanted to write a Peepers sketch that I didn’t even ask. Of course, McKay would go on to co-write and direct various movies with Will, including the Anchorman series, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers, and then to write the critically acclaimed dramas The Big Short and Vice. With The Big Short, Adam became the only writer to come out of SNL, write a dramatic screenplay, and win an Oscar for it. In fact, he was the first SNL alumni to ever win an Academy Award at all. SNL cast members had been nominated, but they’d never won. It’s really quite impressive to succeed in writing both comedy and drama, and even back when I was on the show, everyone knew how gifted Adam was.
In the past, whenever I’d gone to Adam’s office to pitch him an idea, he’d offered to take a look when I was done but never seemed interested in working together. But he did write this sketch for Mr. Peepers. And during the read through, the sketch got more laughs than Peepers ever had before. I performed in the room like I always did now, but the laughs this time had nothing to do with my antic agility. It was all the script.
Well, almost all—there was one person seated at the table who was laughing at my antics, and that was the guest host, Claire Danes.
In the sketch, Will is once again Peepers’s handler, and Claire plays Will’s assistant. The two of them stand behind a jeep in the heart of the jungle, having brought Mr. Peepers back home to where he was found and saying a last goodbye to him. Unlike the written jokes that got the best reactions in the read through, the biggest laughs when the sketch aired were once again my circus-level humor and dry humping. This time I am humping the back of the jeep, and Claire Danes keeps breaking character and laughing.
The joke of the sketch is that every time Claire completes a heart-wrenching goodbye, Peepers runs off into the jungle . . . and then immediately comes running right back and jumps into Will’s arms.
In the scene, there are four of these very emotional goodbyes where Will and Claire think Peepers is finally off to find his real family, but no. The cute, spastic, slaphappy little simian has no interest in leaving his captors at all. Will, by goodbye number four, is completely fed up, so eventually he grabs a prop gun from the back of the jeep and starts yelling, “Get the hell out of here! Now! Go!” At last, Peepers gets the hint. He waves his fifth and final goodbye to his Homo sapiens friends and leaps over to the set’s foliage, twirling and “baa”-ing as he exits. Suddenly, a Peepers family of three—Ana, Jim Breuer, and Cheri—appear among the leaves to welcome Mr. Peepers home.
It didn’t come to me until a few days later: They were trying to keep Peepers from appearing on the show ever again! Even though the audience liked Peepers, it had become pretty obvious that almost everyone else on the show was tired of him. Will might not have been performing when he yelled at Mr. Peepers to get the hell out and just go.
But you can’t keep a good monkey/man down, and in November 2000, the high-strung primate ne’er-do-well finally found love. And I experienced something I will never forget: working with a female guest host who was unabashedly fearless, a woman who wasn’t afraid to “unleash the beast” during a sketch. No surprise, this was Charlize Theron. She seemed to turn her performance into an extended dare, taking it as far as she could within the limits of not-ready-for-prime-time sketch comedy. I may have been responsible for creating the atmosphere with the scenario in the script, but what she did with it was 100 percent her own—we never discussed it prior to walking on set.
The sketch took place in the high-rise office of a conservative sex therapist. Molly Shannon played the therapist, and Charlize played a patient diagnosed as unable to experience any level of arousal. Amazingly original plot, I know. Charlize is on a couch, and Molly, seated in an armchair, hands her a blindfold to cover her eyes. Then, instead of bringing out a compatible human match for Charlize’s character, Molly calls for Mr. Peepers to come out and perch next to Charlize on the couch.
We practiced all this at dress rehearsal.
“Now, Mr. Peepers is going to eat some fruit,” Molly says, and as expected, a juicy fat delicious-looking apple is scarfed up and annihilated.
“Now, open your mouth. Peepers is going to try and arouse you,” and I begin spitting chunks of what’s left of that poor juicy apple into Charlize’s mouth.
“How does that make you feel?” Molly asks, which Charlize can’t answer because of the unpeeled banana that I’m stuffing in her mouth, followed by a bottle of milk. Most of the milk spills down her neck and all over her blouse. Charlize, drenched in this fruit massacre, is now yelling, borderline Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, “Give it to me! Ohh, I want you so bad,” as scripted.
Never had I seen a guest this committed to a scene, completely trusting. After all, she was blindfolded. Was it funny? Yes, but probably in an “I guess you had to be there” way. I was actually a little surprised the sketch made it into the lineup, not because it didn’t work—it definitely worked—but because the network censors weren’t exactly enjoying themselves watching us.
After dress rehearsal, Lorne had one note for the three of us in the sketch—and yes, I do mean the three of us because apparently Molly had been getting pretty riled up as well and I hadn’t even noticed—and that was, “Could you pull back on the . . . not go so far with . . . you know.” He didn’t even know what to call it! He just couldn’t come up with a word for whatever the fuck was happening.
I’m not sure what it says about me, or maybe human nature, that when an authority figure says something that could be considered controlling, my natural reaction is to rebel. But, well . . . ten seconds before the sketch went to air after the commercial break, while we stood by the set’s door waiting for Jenna the assistant director to wave a two-finger silent cue to enter, Charlize looked at me and whispered, “Let’s just fucking go for it!”
Without a beat, I answered, “Yeah! Let’s just fucking go for it!” I mean, why would I say no to anything Charlize Theron asked me to do?
Halfway into the sketch, Molly says, “Now take off the blindfold.” Charlize whips off her blindfold and chases after me while I spin and twirl around the office. When I perform, every now and then when I’m not nervous, I’ll have a sort of out-of-body experience and watch myself in the sketch as if behind the cameras, from the audience. This is what happened. But my vision is not always accurate: I saw myself spinning around the room just like the Tasmanian Devil, when in reality, I twirled around maybe two times. Not even close.
Anyway, after knocking over everything in the room, as scripted, I jump over the couch and land on all fours on the coffee table, facing the camera. Charlize lands right up behind me, her legs cradling mine. Meanwhile, Molly’s unleashed beast is cheering us on.
Then—unscripted—Charlize grabs hold of my wig while her other hand is latched onto my waist, and she starts pumping me from behind. I don’t mean to get graphic, but she was doing some crotch slamming! I remember thinking: What the fuck did I do? It’s like I’m Dr. Frankenstein, and I’ve created a monster with barbarous hormones!
And then—not only have I never experienced this, but I’ve never seen it happen again—after a few intense dry humps, the screen went to black and the sketch ended before it was technically over. Someone pulled the plug.
Afterward, Charlize and I walked offstage, out of breath, trying to process what had occurred on stage. Then she started laughing.
“I can’t believe I tore your wig off!” she said. “What just happened?”
I tried to think of an answer, but I couldn’t. But I knew one thing: whatever it was, around eleven million people had just watched it.
If Charlize Theron brought out the sexual side of Peepers, then Katie Holmes produced the romantic one.
When I first met her, a few minutes before the cast gathered outside Lorne’s office for the pitch meeting, she was in an empty office down the hall with her publicist. She wore a fitted tan trench coat and sunglasses sitting on top of her head. I introduced myself, and she stood up and shook my hand. It was 2001. She was still on Dawson’s Creek, so there was no Tom Cruise, there was no Scientology, and she seemed genuinely like that one girl you would always dream about in high school. She had the most delicate smoky eyes, and when she smiled, the right side of her lips turned crooked, and her bottom lip curled up when she laughed. I was so infatuated with her. She was the kind of girl you would write a song to and then stand outside her bedroom window and serenade. During every sketch we did together, and there were a few, it was almost impossible for me to communicate with her without flirting. And most of the time, she flirted back.
I remember rushing from the seventeenth floor down to studio 8H Friday afternoon to watch her rehearse the opening monologue. In it she takes her clothes off, revealing a sexy outfit, like something from the musical Chicago, and dances with all these buff guys in ties. It was a strange choice for the monologue to have her do a Broadway-themed song-and-dance routine, because she wasn’t known as a singer or dancer. It was also not very funny. But I remember saying, “Oh, my God. The monologue is amazing. Did you guys see it?” and “Her voice is so beautiful, I didn’t know she could sing so well!” and “Did you see her dancing? It’s so good.” I was so smitten that week I thought everything she did was unbelievable.
In the Peepers sketch, which had three sets and a pre-tape, the last set was her bedroom. The sketch was a parody of Dawson’s Creek, and the story was that the school had a new exchange student named Mr. Peepers. In the last scene, Katie’s depressed because she’s gotten pregnant, so she takes a bunch of sleeping pills and passes out on the floor, as one usually does when depressed, according to teen dramas. Suddenly, Peepers appears, looking in through the back window. He backs up a few steps, spins around, and crashes in through the frame. He rushes over to Katie on the floor, realizes she’s possibly near death, and then lies on top of her and humps her back to life. I should specify that when I humped her, my genitalia were not placed over her . . . area. I was humping a few inches down on her upper thigh.
When I’d gotten as many laughs as I could humping her leg, I moved my face up to hers—keep in mind that she’s pretending to be dead, so her eyes are closed and she can’t move until I give her the cue to come back to life by tapping the left side of her ribs. As rehearsed, I started sucking various parts of her face, then listened to her heartbeat, sucked her face again, and listened to her heartbeat. When I moved back up to her face a third time, she whispered—with her teeth clenched and her lips barely moving so the audience couldn’t see—“Don’t you dare touch my mouth.”
I was slightly taken aback. It felt like that moment when you go out to dinner or a movie or something with someone, and then afterward you drive her home, or walk her home or whatever, and when you get to her front door, you move in for a kiss goodnight . . . and she pulls away and says, “Don’t you dare touch my mouth.”
So I didn’t. I may have been spoiled by Charlize’s fearless method performance and gotten carried away, who knows, but after that it seemed safe to assume that Katie probably didn’t want to hang out any time in the near future, ever. At the after party, she arrived wearing a blue bob wig, the kind Scarlett Johansson wore when she sang karaoke in Lost in Translation. I have no idea why Katie was wearing the wig; maybe she thought wigs were a way of letting loose and celebrating, I don’t know. But she looked great, regardless, and I did talk with her for a few minutes. We had the kind of brief conversation you have when the music is so loud that you need to lean in to each other, put one hand over one ear, and then yell directly into each other’s ear canal.
Imagine my surprise me when she gave me her phone number. She wrote it in ink on a dinner napkin, but the strange thing is that she wrote it in what I guess you’d call a code. It was a poem about how she’d enjoyed working with me, but every line had a number hidden in it, looking just like one of the letters. It was really clever and almost brilliant in a kind of Da Vinci Code way, to be honest. Eventually, I figured out the number—by asking one of the SNL writers from Harvard to do it for me—but I wanted to play it cool, so I waited a couple of weeks to call her, and when I did she wasn’t home, so I left her a message. These were the ancient days when people left messages for each other on actual machines they kept for this purpose at home.
A few days later, I got a message from her in return. This was the message:
“Baa! Baa! Baa!”
Despite his successful run on SNL, I never felt Mr. Peepers fully translated from stage to screen. I eventually concluded that part of the problem was framing. When an audience member is watching you perform on stage, they can, at least peripherally, see the entire stage and every activity that’s happening on that stage. Regardless of where the main “action” is, they can choose to look at any part of that stage at any time they want. Sometimes the best part of a sketch is watching the reactions of the actors who aren’t even meant to be the focus of the scene. Or the actions of background characters that another character is failing to notice.
Back when I was a young little tot watching an old comedy in my dad’s garage, a lot of the scenes that I found the funniest were those that stayed on a wide shot. Especially those in silent films like Buster Keaton’s The General or College, which are full of visual jokes. Or his short film One Week, which has that insane and unforgettable shot of the side of a house with an open window frame collapsing over Buster as he stands directly beneath it and just barely slips through, avoiding what could have been a tragic death. Or the famous mirror pantomime in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, where Groucho is in pajamas and Harpo is dressed as Groucho, also in pajamas, and pretends to be Groucho’s reflection.
But on SNL, in order to sell the joke, it was pretty common for the director to have the studio camera shoot whoever had the line or was speaking at that moment, and seldom would they have the camera on someone’s reaction unless by chance they decided to cut to it. In almost any modern film or TV setting, the camera does a lot of close-ups. For example, in almost every Norman Lear sitcom, including All in the Family and The Jeffersons, there was always a cult character with a famous catchphrase. And when it was said, the camera would almost always go to a close-up. When it was Archie Bunker whining “Aww, Edith,” the camera would focus the audience’s attention where the director thought it ought to be—on the joke. Sometimes that focus makes sense to a director mostly because it makes sense to the writer, who already knows where the jokes are. But for a performer, especially when you’re doing something physical, it’s not always your first choice. In pretty much every Peepers sketch on SNL, when we blocked it for the camera, I found myself constantly asking the director to stay on a wide shot so the sketch wouldn’t suffer and fall into the standard close-up comedy trap. To me, Mr. Peepers worked best when the audience had a view of the whole scene. Maybe this was why Lorne wasn’t initially a big fan of the sketch. Who knows? Maybe even though we never mentioned it to each other, we both felt that it would never work as well on television live from New York as it had onstage back in LA.
Now I often wonder if Peepers should have been left back home, at the Groundlings. Instead, Peepers made the leap from LA to New York like I did—which is to say after a long journey of multiple false starts, and an unfortunate incident with a poodle.
* suck-slap sƏk-slap probably a verb: 1a to draw recipient’s face toward mouth through suction force produced by movements of the lips and tongue, meanwhile or/and then striking same or second subject sharply with or as if with the open hand; 1b as unpleasant for recipient(s) as it sounds.
* You can watch the 1993 Mr. Peepers Groundlings sketch on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dsFjN4niDE
Chapter 2
I MAY HAVE KILLED THE POODLE
Months before we formally auditioned for SNL in 1995, Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri, and I each met individually with Lorne Michaels and head writer and producer Steve Higgins up in Lorne’s office on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rock. (Higgins no longer serves as head writer for the show, but he still does the voice-over and narrative for all the sketches today. And, of course, he’s Fallon’s “second banana” on The Tonight Show. Their SNL history is the reason they play off of each other so well. Because impressions were Jimmy’s forte, he had a consistent spot as a contestant in the popular “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches, and whenever Higgins was writing one, you’d always find Jimmy in his office adding jokes.) (By the way, Jimmy does an amazing Chris Rock.)
