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

or any opportunity for a laugh, you’d just look over at Chris. One game, we file in for this line out. Everyone is waiting for the inbound pass. Chris kind of looks over and then pulls up his pants into his ass like a thong. The whole other team just turns and stares, like, “What the hell’s with this guy?” Then, with the whole team distracted, Chris takes the pass and gets about twenty yards on the play. He was always hilarious.

DAN HEALY:
    Freshman year of college, a group of us had done a road trip for some winter festival. It was freezing, snow everywhere, and we were goofing around, diving and playing in the snow. And while we were all screwing around, Chris just stopped cold. He stopped, and he turned to me and said, “I think I can make people laugh.”
    He’d had an epiphany, literally. He was starting to realize that he had this ability, a calling in life.

FR. MATT FOLEY:
    He saw his talent as a gift from God—there’s no doubt about that. I went away to seminary after his freshman year, but one thing I found fascinating about him in those two semesters was that he had a tremendous faith life, devoted and disciplined. He was not evangelical; he didn’t preach about it, but it was something in the fiber of his soul.
    At Marquette, there’s the Joan of Arc Chapel, this beautiful chapel brought over stone by stone from Europe, and they have a daily mass. Inevitably, you would find Chris there, disheveled and partied out and just sort of scruffy. There’s not a doubt in my mind that he was in church more than any other student on that campus, at least three or four times a week.

PAT FINN:
    After I met Chris, we signed up for a class called the Philosophy of Humor. We thought, could there be an easier A? I don’t know why we thought that, since we’d never gotten an A before. Truth be told, Chris got a D. But Father Nauss, who taught the class, gave us each a copy of “A Clown’s Prayer.” The last lines go, “Never let me forget that my total effort is to cheer people, make them happy, and forget momentarily all the unpleasantness in their lives. / And in my final moment, may I hear You whisper: ‘When you made My people smile, you made Me smile.’ ” It meant a lot to us, and we kept it in our wallets.
    There were times, for instance, when Chris and I’d be on the highway, going through a tollbooth. He’d do a bit in front of the tollbooth taker, and it’d make the guy laugh. At first you were kind of like, oh, that was a little weird. But on the other hand it was like, you know, he just made that guy’s day. That guy’s gonna go home and tell his wife, “Yeah, this big guy came through in a car today and did this thing with the steering wheel . . .”
    One of the cool things about Chris, and one of the noble things about Chris, is that if he made somebody’s day better, if he could ease the pain and sadness in the world just a bit, that was why he felt he was here.

MARK HERMACINSKI, friend:
    The thing about Chris was that he always made all of us feel like we were the funny ones. He always listened and anything you’d throw out there, he’d bounce it back as a joke, so he made everyone feel like they were a part of what was going on. Even if you’re not a comedian, it’s fun to sit around and laugh together, and he could pull the humor out of you.

MICHAEL PRICE, dean, College of Communications:
    I was going through the student registrations for the spring semester of his sophomore year, and I saw that Chris hadn’t preregistered. I called him in. He said he really didn’t want to be there anymore. He didn’t want to be in school, period. I said, “Chris, what do you want to do?”
    “I want to be at Second City,” he said. “It’s a comedy company in Chicago.”
    “Well, I can certainly see you doing that,” I said, “but why don’t we talk it over with your folks? See what they say.”
    He seemed a little reluctant to even bring this subject up with them. His father