Last night, I finished reading The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in 3 Acts by the late comic's brother, Tom Jr. and co-writer Tanner Colby. The book, like Live From New York, another SNL-based must-read, is an oral history, comprised of interviews with family, friends, classmates, castmates, girlfriends and other trusted members of his inner circle.
This book is equally funny and sad, moving me at times to audible laughter and dripping tears. It shows Chris Farley as more than just the Belushi-obsessed self-destructor that he is sometimes reduced to. He is portrayed as the deeply-religious son of an Irish-Catholic family and subject to the guilt, father issues, and addiction of that upbringing. His energy and talent were unmatched and he emerged as a break-star of the Bad Boy fraternity of early 90s SNL that also featured Spade, Sandler, Rock, Schneider, and Meadows.
Chapters are led with passages by the comic's brother and other factual asides, as wel as a poignant selection of a speech Chris gave at an AA-meeting, giving hope to others and helping keep them from relapsing, as he had.
Chris' addiction and his attempts to get sober (sometimes in earnest and sometimes attending rehab only in order to appease those who'd prevent him from working) are very scary but the depths wouldn't be so deep without the heights of his success to counter. Interviews with Tim Meadows, David Spade, Chris Rock and Lorne Michaels, track him from his early career at Second City through SNL and to his string of three consecutive #1 movies.
Like a lot our talents gone too soon, the sting of Chris Farley's tragedy is worsened by the body of work undone and the potential squandered. He was working on Shrek and developing a biography of Fatty Arbuckle, written especially for him by David Mamet, when he overdosed.
For some insight into one of the saddest clowns we've had, check out the book. I flew through it in a few days. In the book, many of his peers point at his string of "Chris Farley Show" sketches on SNL as the truest expression of the real Chris that ever came out in his work, here's one with Martin Scorsese that shows his wide-eyed naivety and desire to please.
