Bob Odenkirk recalls how, many nights, he would watch his comedian pal Chris Farley “stumble off into the night after killing it onstage and my mind would write ‘Taken from us too soon!’ and all that.”
It’s just part of the heartbreaking picture of the late “Saturday Night Live” star that Odenkirk paints in his new memoir, “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama” (Random House).
The two met in the late 1980s while performing at the famed Second City Chicago comedy club. Odenkirk sadly admits that it was clear Farley would die young — and that there was an “inevitability” about watching his friend’s career soar and knowing that it would ultimately crash and burn. (Farley would die in 1997 of a drug overdose.)
In the book, the “Better Call Saul” star remembers a particularly poignant moment with the “Tommy Boy” actor after both attended a memorial service for a deceased Second City alumna at the improv group’s theater. Odenkirk was there with his then-girlfriend Claire, and Farley, who had snuck in two bottles of wine, got drunk and began “tossing furniture through the air.”
Odenkirk offered to walk the inebriated Farley home; when they got there, Farley proceeded to overturn the furniture in his own apartment. He was so loud that Odenkirk’s girlfriend, who was waiting outside, considered calling the police.
The actor writes that he just kept talking to Farley in the hopes of defusing the chaotic situation. Farley suddenly stopped and became emotional.
“‘Odie … do you think Belushi’s in heaven?” Farley asked of John Belushi, the “SNL” star who had died in 1982. “I was stumped … ‘I don’t know, Chris. I guess so.’ I tried to reassure him: ‘Yeah. I mean, probably. Now, put down the recliner.’”
The 59-year-old actor writes that Farley may actually have enjoyed “fulfilling the hackneyed arc” of a comedian whose life is cut short by too many drugs — just like his comedy idol Belushi.
Odenkirk and Farley went on to work together at “SNL,” where the former wrote one of Farley’s most famous sketches and characters — clumsy motivational speaker Matt Foley, who was always issuing warnings to teens that they could end up like himself: “35 years old, eating a steady diet of government cheese, thrice-divorced, and living in a van down by the river!”
But Odenkirk hated the sketch that made Farley a star in his first season — the “Chippendale’s Audition” with Patrick Swayze, in which the audience shrieked with laughter while an overweight Farley writhed on stage.
“I know it confirmed Chris’s worst instincts about being funny, which was how he proved his worth — that getting laughed at was as good as getting a laugh,” Odenkirk writes. “F–k that sketch.”
The last time he saw Farley was in Aspen, Colo., in 1997 and he writes that it was clear to him that the troubled performer’s days were winding down.
“He was in a limo parked in an alley in Aspen, Colorado, with a neon sign on the hood that was flashing LAST CHANCE TO SAY GOODBYE,” Odenkirk writes, explaining that “Chris was in Aspen to do cocaine” and attend an “SNL” anniversary party.
After performing with his comedy partner David Cross, Odenkirk was told that Farley wanted him to come by the limo to say hello.
Odenkirk writes that he encountered “a bad scene inside” the car. Crammed into the limo were four strangers, including one “skeevy guy who’d offered Cross cocaine a few hours earlier.”
“Chris looked like a big zit, about to pop. Red, bloated, stubble-faced and sweating profusely. We chatted, and the whole time I’m thinking, ‘Goodbye, my friend,'” he writes.
The “Breaking Bad” star toyed with the idea of urging Farley to “kick these sh–ty people out of your limo and get to rehab tonight!” but knew, he writes, that Farley had heard it many times before. “I watched the limo pull away, and a few weeks later we all had a funeral. What a dumb story. S–t.”
Farley died Dec. 18, 1997, at the age of 33 — the same as Belushi. Also like his idol, an autopsy revealed that he had died of an overdose of cocaine and morphine, commonly known as a “speedball.”
