Read Gasping for Airtime for Free Online

trying to come up with an idea, people like Al Franken and Adam Sandler were telling the host what they had in mind. That’s some pretty difficult stuff to tune out. Even more difficult to ignore was a pitch from Tom Davis, a writer from the highly regarded comedy team of Franken and Davis.
    Tom excitedly pitched Charles Barkley doing a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial. Before he had gone far, Charles interrupted with a frosty “What?” But Tom pressed on about how Charles could tap-dance for spicy chicken, slowing only to refer to his notes. Soon Sandler began laughing, followed closely by Farley. The rest of us were staring at Tom, horrified that he was standing by his idea of Sir Charles peddling chicken. I thought I was off the hook. Even if my idea—the one I had not yet conceived—sucked, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as Charles Barkley tap-dancing for chicken.
    I overheard someone on the floor talking about Barney the Dinosaur’s new kids’ album. I thought of Barney the Dinosaur. I thought about Charles Barkley. I pictured Barney the Dinosaur and Charles Barkley. The ideas were creeping through the semicircle and looping toward me. Sooner than was comfortable, I was next. Life all comes down to a few moments, and this was one of them. If I didn’t pitch something decent, I was a dead man. Then it hit me. Charles Barkley had a Nike commercial out at the time where he played one-on-one basketball with Godzilla. What if Charles Barkley played one-on-one basketball with Barney the Dinosaur!
    “Jay?” Lorne said.
    I steeled myself and pitched “Barkley vs. Barney,” a one-on-one pickup basketball game to the death. Everyone in the room smiled. Sometimes it’s just a roll of the dice. All those clubs I worked in all of those cities in all those cornfields, and my entire career seemed to have been determined by which side of the room I was on. No matter now, I had delivered big-time. “Barkley vs. Barney” was chosen as the opening monologue of the show that week—the first show of the nineteenth year of Saturday Night Live .
     

     
    Talk about strange. Two days later, at 6:45 A.M ., I walked into the gymnasium at Hunter College and saw Barney standing under the boards next to Al Franken. The show must have gotten a great rate on the gym, because for some reason we all had to be there by seven in the morning. I knew why the guy in the purple dinosaur suit was there, but I wasn’t exactly sure why Al was. He wasn’t in the sketch.
    It turned out that the producers had assigned Al Franken to “oversee” the sketch. No one told me this, I gleaned it from his body language. I had naïvely assumed that if I wrote a sketch, my role during filming would be to explain how everything should go creatively. After all, they told me that’s why I needed to be there. That’s why I went. But I quickly became a spectator to my own sketch.
    Putting Al in charge wasn’t a bad idea, but I felt that someone should have filled me in on the protocol. Al was from an entirely different generation than most of the cast members. He was a grumpy fellow with a constantly furrowed brow who was fast approaching fifty. Despite the fact that Al was going into his eleventh year on the show, he was still a featured player and not a full cast member. He clearly didn’t want a rookie’s input on the “Barkley vs. Barney” sketch. From the get-go, Al took over the entire production. I can’t say I blame him. I had no idea how to produce a sketch with an entire camera crew and sound guys. Whenever I offered a suggestion, Al would look at me like I just farted.
    The first thing I discovered was that my sketch had been rewritten. When I asked Franken why several of the jokes had been removed, he replied that I had gone home and someone had to do the rewrite. True, the night before I had left around midnight, about the time it was clear that “Barkley vs. Barney” wasn’t going to be discussed for a few more hours. What was there