The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t even have to have a part for him. Just put him up onstage. One time he did “Hound Dog” dressed up like Miss Piggy.

FRED ALBRIGHT, counselor, Red Arrow Camp:
    When people ask “Where did Chris Farley get his start?” I say he got it at Red Arrow Camp. As a kid, he was just a miniature version of what he would become. Dick Wenzell used the expression “He was always onstage. ” And that was the case. A lot of it was a diversion, because down deep Chris was one of the most sensitive guys you’ll ever meet. Even though he came across as this kind of rough, gruff, jovial guy, you could hurt his feelings with just a word or two. Incredibly sensitive guy.

MIKE CLEARY:
    Chris was the very first guy I met at Edgewood. I grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and moved to Madison in high school. Edgewood can be a little clubby. For days, the rest of the kids didn’t even come near me. Then one day I was sitting in the commons, getting ready for football practice. Chris came up and said, “You’re the guy from New York? Hi, I’m Chris Farley.” He was the first person to make me feel comfortable being there.
    ROBERT BARRY, friend:
    At school you always wanted to be around Chris. He was a blast, but his focus was always on you, talking you up, making you feel better. “This is my buddy Robert,” he’d say. “He’s all-state basketball.” He’s this. He’s that. He’s the greatest. It was never about himself.

TODD GREEN, friend:
    We had the closest thing to what I would call a dream high school situation, where six or seven guys were as close as brothers and laughed their asses off every single day, and Chris was the glue that kept us together. He was such a pivotal part of our high school experience. Chris was the type of person who didn’t see social class, or ethnicity, or anything like that. He came from a lot more money than most of us, but you would never know.

MIKE CLEARY:
    One time I was visited by an old friend of mine from back east. He’d been a big football player, but he’d had this horrible car accident, and now he was in a wheelchair. A lot of kids could be uncomfortable around that, but Chris just embraced him. He spent the entire day making this kid feel welcome and totally at ease. And the thing is, he did it with no effort. His generosity was so commonplace that it was utterly unremarkable.

DAN HEALY, friend:
    Chris made people feel good about themselves. Everyone was on a pedestal for some reason or another. He drew people together, naturally, and it was cathartic to be around him. To me, Chris would bat his eye and I would lose it laughing so hard my sides would hurt.

GREG MEYER:
    People ask me what it was like going to school with Chris Farley, and I say, “You’ve seen him on SNL , right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, crank that up times ten.”

JOHN FARLEY:
    With the birth of the VCR, we memorized Animal House , Stripes , Caddyshack , Meatballs , History of the World , High Anxiety , and Blues Brothers . And I’m not talking about memorizing the lines. We memorized everything, every inch of footage. The foreground, the background, we memorized it all. And Chris pulled from that constantly.
    One of Chris’s favorite bits to do was to put his arms out like Frankenstein and make this monster voice, “Urgggh duugggh!” That was from an obscure scene in Meatballs with Spaz introducing himself to the cabin where, in the background, some fat camper was doing that Frankenstein thing. The whole thing was maybe half a second of film, maybe. But even that we had down. Take the original cast of Saturday Night Live , add in Mel Brooks, and you have our childhood.

NICK BURROWS, guidance counselor/assistant football coach:
    Every time you’d walk down to the cafeteria, packed full of three-hundred-plus kids, all you had to do was listen for the roar of laughter and you’d know where Chris Farley was sitting. As I remember, Chris didn’t really tell jokes. It was just who he was. He just was