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Published - Oct 28th, 2009
By Ben Forrest
I was in a bookstore in Nanaimo, B.C. in June. It was my first time outside Ontario in nearly a decade, and the first time in my life I’d perused a Chapters 4,000 km from home.
Seeking a decent novel when I walked in, I emerged with a copy of “The Chris Farley Show,” a book of interviews about Farley, the Saturday Night Live legend who died in 1997 from a drug overdose.
As anyone vaguely familiar with Farley’s life could guess, the book is both hilarious and painful.
Farley was by many accounts selfless, self-effacing and impossible to dislike. In the book, he also appears insecure, woefully addicted and the author of his own demise.
The book relates Farley’s life through vignettes from many of the people who knew him best.
In one section Nick Burrows, a guidance counselor at Farley’s high school, recalls a day when Farley crawled on his belly to the front of a classroom, hid behind a curtain and waited for his instructor to tell a bad joke.
Just as the teacher delivered his punch line, Burrows says, Farley exposed his buttocks and stuck them out from behind the curtain, leaving many of his peers in hysterics.
The instructor thought everyone was laughing at his joke, which he knew wasn’t amusing.
Burrows says the teacher “(stood) there scratching his head, going, ‘Jeez, I didn’t think it was that funny.' And then of course everyone really (lost) it.”
Another story recounts an evening later in Farley’s life when, thoroughly intoxicated, he crashed through a hotel window 15 stories from the ground.
According to the speaker, Farley’s body hung out the window at a 90-degree angle, a waist-high radiator the only thing keeping him from tumbling to the street below.
Farley soon entered rehab but battled substance abuse the rest of his life, ultimately succumbing to his addictions at age 33.
Near the end of the book, its co-writers quote a friend as saying if Farley were alive, he’d probably be working for Adam Sandler, who graduated from SNL to make a few good movies, a number of bad ones, and millions of dollars in the process.
It’s equally possible that Sandler would be working for Farley. It would have taken wiser career decisions and greater devotion to his craft, but Farley was that good, at times – he could have been an icon.
The lessons of Farley’ missteps were known long before “The Chris Farley Show” was published last year: alcoholism and drug addiction can flatten the greatest of talents.
It’s a lesson that bears repeating, not only because Farley is still revered, but because lives are ruined daily by the types of things that tethered Farley to the ground.
Any celebration of his life is also a lament for what could have been, and “The Chris Farley Show” is certainly that.
The book is perhaps Farley’s last, greatest gift to a world that was better with him in it.
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