Wait... Bob Odenkirk Wrote the ICONIC 'Down By the River' Chris Farley SNL Sketch?!

Rich sets it up like a man holding a winning lottery ticket. You wrote the van down by the river. Bob Odenkirk does not flinch. I did. He wrote it for Chris Farley at Second City, and he says it has been a big deal to him for a long time. The full origin story is better than the legend.

Odenkirk walks Rich through the night it was born. He was on stage at Second City with Farley and Jill Talley. Farley did an improvisation as a coach yelling at kids about an anti-drug message. Odenkirk had been carrying a separate idea around in his head, a motivational speaker who uses himself as the cautionary tale of what not to become. Watching Farley find that coach character flipped the switch. He went home, sat down, and wrote the sketch exactly the way it eventually played. He brought it in, handed it to Chris, and as he puts it, boom. Magic.

Then the conversation turns into a tiny clinic on sketch comedy. Rich plays the foil. He notes that writers want the writing to be the star. Odenkirk pushes back, gently. In sketch, the performance is the star. Down by the river, he says, is closer to fifty fifty, maybe sixty forty. The writing earns up to forty percent of the credit, the rest belongs to the performer who walks out in that ill fitting jacket, slamming a coffee table, snorting and bellowing about living in a van. Odenkirk played the dad in the original Second City run, so he had a front row seat to the alchemy.

The story he wants Rich to remember is the one that explains Farley as a person, not just a comet. At Second City, every show, seven nights a week, Farley refused to finish the sketch until he made every cast member on stage break. Not the audience. The other actors. He would not stop until they cracked. Odenkirk says he won every time.

The softest moment lands at the end. His daughter once asked him, around age seven, what was the most fun you ever had doing your job. The answer came instantly, and it had nothing to do with Mr. Show or Better Call Saul or anything else he is famous for. It was that sketch, with my friend Chris Farley. Every time I did that sketch was the most fun I ever had. Rich lets the line breathe. A piece of comedy history just got annotated by the person who actually wrote it, and it turns out the writer remembers the friendship more than the credit.