Odenkirk Wrote That Farley SNL Sketch

Bob Odenkirk walked Rich through the SNL years most fans don't know he had.

Odenkirk wrote at Saturday Night Live from roughly 1987 to 1991. He overlapped with multiple cast generations, Jan Hooks, Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz, then Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman, then the year with Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, and David Spade.

He said the show was hard for him. Really hard. It took him three years to figure out what the show wanted. Monty Python had been his comedic north star, which is a fundamentally different thing than what SNL needed from a writer. By the time he started clicking, the new class was arriving, Sandler, Spade, Chris Rock, Farley, and Odenkirk was finally in a position to help them. That, he said, felt good.

He also knew his ceiling at the show. He wanted to perform, but he wasn't going to ask Lorne Michaels to put him on. He called Lorne, told him he needed to leave because he wanted to perform sometimes, and said plainly that he wasn't good enough yet. Lorne was gracious. Odenkirk left for LA, did one-man shows, did stand-up, and kept writing for television.

Then Rich asked about "Van Down by the River."

Odenkirk confirmed he wrote the Matt Foley motivational speaker sketch. He wrote it for Farley at Second City during a summer between SNL seasons. The origin was layered. He'd seen Farley do an improvised coach yelling at kids about drugs. He'd also been listening to Tony Robbins. Those two ideas collided in his head and produced a motivational speaker who uses himself as a cautionary tale. He sat down, wrote the sketch exactly the way it gets performed, handed it to Chris, and it worked on contact. Lightning.

Odenkirk offered a craft note that's easy to miss. In sketch comedy, the writing isn't the star. The performance is. He estimated the motivational speaker sketch might be 60/40 performance-to-writing, and even that, he said, is generous to the writing. The moment Farley walked on stage dressed that way, the movement alone did most of the work.

He added a detail from the sketch's Second City run. Odenkirk played the dad on stage next to Farley. Farley refused to finish that sketch until he'd made every performer on stage laugh, seven shows a week, every single show. He won every time.

Odenkirk's daughter once asked him, at about seven years old, what was the most fun he'd ever had doing his job. It was years before Better Call Saul. He didn't hesitate. The most fun, he said, was doing that sketch with his friend Chris Farley. Every single time.