In compiling the stories of Chris Farley's life, we had far more than we could actually fit into a book that any publisher would be willing to publish. A complete digest of the funny things Chris did in his life would run roughly the length of Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, only with fewer baked goods and more potty jokes. Many of these "Chris stories" were funny, smart, and illuminating, yet still couldn't be fit into the larger story we were trying to tell. So, we present them to you here, much like those "deleted scenes" you're always disappointed by on special edition DVDs. Only, hopefully, these won't disappoint. Read on.

On Chris’s youthful exuberance:

JILL TALLEY, cast member, Second City: 

I used to do a pretty good impression of Ruby Streak, our musical director and piano player. So for April Fool’s Day, I decided to pull this prank. I called everyone in the cast, as Ruby, and I told them I was unhappy with their performances, that all the musical numbers were flat, and I was mad and I wanted everyone at the theater two hours early to go over the problems in the show. Ruby loved the idea.

Most of the actors didn’t really seem to care at all. The show had been running for a while, and at that point they were like, “Show’s good enough. Why bother?” If anything, they were just annoyed and crabby at the idea of having to come in early. Except for Chris. 

I called Chris as Ruby. “Chris, your performance is flat,” I said. “You’re phoning it in. You’re just not trying,” and so on, and so on. 

And he was crushed. “Oh my God!” he said. “Ruby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’ll try harder, I promise. Please just give me another chance. I’ll do whatever you want. What do I need to do?”

So about twenty seconds into this phone call the joke just wasn’t funny anymore. I felt horrible. And my impression wasn’t that good. I could only keep it up for so long, but Chris kept me on the phone forever, going, “What am I doing wrong? How can I fix it? I swear I’ll do better.” 

And the thing was, why I felt so bad, was that Chris never phoned it in, never. Every single night he was up there giving everything he had, always looking for new ways to make the show better, to keep it fresh. He would find completely new material halfway through the run. He just cared so much. 

Everyone was pretty pissed when they got to the theater two hours early for no reason, but Chris was just relieved that he hadn’t let anyone down.

TIM O’MALLEY, cast member, Second City: 

It was like trying to corral a happy pet that just wants to keep running around. His energy just never let up. He was so young, and young-minded, that he would go at everything full force. His clothes used to be in a big pile backstage. We used to get on him to hang up and organize his stuff so he’d be ready for his stage cues, because he’d be back there, sweating, pulling through this big pile of props looking for the right thing. Somehow he always found it. 

He was still learning how to control what he was doing, the energy he was putting out versus the energy he was putting back. It was always a matter of trying to rein him in. It was frustrating. He’d show up naked just offstage while you were doing a scene. The audience couldn’t see him, but he thought it was funny to try and break you up. And you’d have to say, “Chris, this is a professional theater. There are grown women back here. You can’t do this.” 

“But it’s funny.”

“Yes, it’s funny, but we’re working…”

The girls were very patient. They were like his big sisters, correcting him, telling him how to behave. Nobody was like, “I won’t work with that guy.” But it was a constant struggle just to rein him in.

On Del Close:

TIM O’MALLEY: 

Del was a drug addict and an alcoholic, and he spoke to those of us who had that disease. He had all kinds of terrible poisons inside him. He treated the women terribly. He would send them home from rehearsal and say, “We don’t need you today.” 

And the guys would all laugh because they looked up to Del, and they had been taken in by that guru status he had. So we absorbed that, and we treated the women pretty badly, too. It was rough for them, very rough.

I was just coming out of my Del-worship phase, because he had chosen someone else to be his prize candidate, and that was Chris. I had been a big star in his eyes when I was in his class, but that had passed. So I was jaded by the fact that Del had moved on from me. 

I was just the understudy, and Del would sit at the bar with me, saying cruel things about the cast, about how they would do anything he told them to. And he just laughed about it. “I’m creating the biggest, most expensive piece of crap that I can while making them think I’ve done something brilliant,” he’d say. 

It was a dark time. It was a horrible rehearsal process. They were creating material while they were high, and some of the people disagreed with that. But it was still a time when drugs were part of the process. 

Years before, when I was a young student, John Belushi came into town and did workshops with us and then performed in the improv one night. And Del told me, “You play your cards right, and I’ll let you watch me get high with John Belushi.” Like it was some kind of reward. Then he didn’t let me come up, and I stood outside his apartment in the rain, crying like a baby. I was an addict, and I’d been denied the ultimate experience—getting high with Belushi. But that was the kind of sick, twisted things that Del would come up with to manipulate all these young kids who looked up to him. 

I tried to relay that to the guys, but they wouldn’t listen. I looked like the disgruntled understudy. I remember Brian Doyle-Murray was there at a party and he told me, “You’re just jealous.”

And I was like, “No, I’m not. Del is sick. He doesn’t look at you guys the way you think he does.” 

It was a poison, and I think it only spoke to those of us who were drug addicts and alcoholics. There were a lot of us there at the time. It’s since detoxed one hundred percent. We used to throw chairs, break glasses, come in wasted, and produce material that was crap. Del spoke to that. He used to say things like, “The fine line between life and death is where art is.” 

And Chris used to say, all the time, “I want to be dead. I want to be famous, and I want to be dead.” 

He said it his whole life, and everyone around him was like, “You can’t say that. Don’t say that.” 

Del wasn’t the cause of it, certainly, but he was part of the catalyst in Chris’s idea that somewhere in this horrible self-tortured existence is where you found great art. Del was into witchcraft and all this black spiritual stuff, which was the last thing guys like Chris and I needed to hear. And, like I said, maybe everyone didn’t hear this from Del, but those of us who were addicts and alcoholics heard it, because we wanted to hear it. 

Del wasn’t all bad. This is just my perception of him, and it’s colored by my own resentments. But I do believe he passed on a lot of poison, and people don’t talk about it. 

HOLLY WORTELL, cast member, Second City: 

There was one scene where we played a bunch of Greek gods in a cabaret. Del wanted Chris to wear a red union suit, a pair of those one-piece pajamas, and do a crazy Bacchus dance around the stage. And Chris said to me, “I don’t want to wear that suit. It makes me look really fat. I feel uncomfortable wearing it.”

“Then tell Del you don’t want to wear it.”

“I can’t,” he said. “Del’s the coach, and the team has to do what the coach says.” He would always go back to his football references for the theater.

“Chris, Del’s not a coach,” I said. “He’s a director, and you don’t have to do what he says if it makes you uncomfortable.”

“But he’s the coach.” 

And that was that. He wore the suit.

On playing a male stripper:

HOLLY WORTELL: 

He was so easy to write for, and he could do so many things. He was a great dancer. In one show I put up a stripper scene in which I was upset with my husband, and so my girlfriends had ordered a stripper for me. I didn’t really want a stripper, but they got me a stripper, and the stripper was Chris. 

He’d walk in with the boom box, hit “play,” and the stage manager would cue up some disco/funk music. Chris’d start dancing around, whipping off his jacket and his tie and unbuttoning his shirt. I remember asking him if he would take off his shirt and just wear a collar and cuffs, but he said, “No. No way I’m taking my shirt off onstage.”

And of course later he did the Chippendales scene with Patrick Swayze and did that exact same thing. I was like, “Great. You’ll do it on national television, but not in my sketch.”

But it was still hysterical. The audience was howling. Part of the reason they were laughing so hard was because he was such a good dancer, and also because they could see how much fun we were having. He would chase me around the stage and throw his jacket around me like a lasso and pull me toward him. And what the audience would see was not just the character trying to escape the crazy stripper. They were seeing Holly the actress trying to escape from Chris the actor, and laughing hysterically the whole time. It got to the point where I’d run across the stage and “turn off” the fake boom box to try and end the scene, but the stage manager wouldn’t stop the music, and Chris would just keep going, chasing me around the stage. The audience would be laughing for what seemed like forever after the lights went down.

On Chris’s influences:

HOLLY WORTELL: 

We use to play a game called “Movie,” where you would say something like, “Do you mind if we dance with your dates? Movie!” And the other person had to say, “Animal House.” But very soon I realized that our movie-trivia quiz game only consisted of Stripes, Animal House, Caddyshack, and Blues Brothers.

TIM MEADOWS, cast member, Second City: 

Chris was a Belushi fan, but he liked comedy, period.  One of his favorite things to say was, “Yeah, I’m doing it. I just did it, and I’m about to do it again.” Which was a line by the King of France in Mel Brooks’s History of the World. And he’d do it in all sorts of contexts, like, “Yeah, I’m having the soup. I just had it, and I’m about to have it again.” He’d do that all the time. We used to quote Caddyshack and Monty Python. So whenever I hear about this supposed correlation between Chris and Belushi, I can see it a little bit, but he loved so many different comedians and was influenced by so many different sources.

NATE HERMAN, director, Second City:

What was disturbing was that when Del Close was directing he had made the comment to Chris, “You’re the next John Belushi” Chris took it literally, I believe. He thought, well, if I’m gonna be Belushi, I’m gonna have to live his lifestyle, I’m gonna have to be as wild and reckless as he was. But, you know, even John Belushi couldn’t live up to being John Belushi. So how was Chris supposed to? 

On Chris’s church attendance:

JOEL MURRAY, cast member, Second City: 

We were both Irish Catholic, and Chris was always asking me where I went to mass. I wasn’t really devout. I went maybe four times a year. But it would amaze me sometimes on Sunday when he’d be like, “Yeah, I just went to mass.”

“Really? Did you get to sleep first?” 

And maybe he didn’t, but he always made it to mass. 

On Chicago’s party days:

JOEL MURRAY: 

There was one time, early on, when Chris came into my apartment and said, “I got a callback on this movie audition.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“Yeah, but I’ve been up all night tripping, and I was still tripping at the audition and the callback is this afternoon. So, um, should I eat some more mushrooms for the callback?”

“Well, Chris, I’m not really sure on that one.”

JOHN FARLEY, brother: 

Chris worked for a shipping company. It’s this dark, giant industrial thing, looks like something out of On the Waterfront. Chris got fired from that job. He tired to being in this other guy’s pee for a drug test, but this was one of those tests where the guy actually watches you pee. Guy’s like, “Pee in the cup.”

Chris is like, “I can’t go with you watching me.”

“I have to watch you.”

“What’s the matter with you? Is that your job, watching guys go all day.”

“Yes, actually it is my job.”

“That’s sick.”

“Sir, just pee in the cup.”

So Chris said, fuck it, and went ahead. He said his piss damn near ate a hole through the bottom of the cup. 

PAT FINN, cast member, ImprovOlympic: 

Chris and I got on the El one time. We were going up north. This was around three in the afternoon. We’re both kinda tired, little bit hungover. He runs into a liquor store right by the EL, and I’m like, oh no. He comes back with a bottle in a brown bag. 

We get on the El, he takes off the top, and he takes a swig. I’m just like, “Oh Chris, c’mon.”

“You gotta have some,” he says.

“No, I don’t drink scotch, man. I’m hungover.” 

 “Just try it.” 

“Oh okay, fine.”

So I take a sip, and I’m like, “Oh my god. It’s delicious. What is it?”

“It’s white zinfandel. I love it. It’s really lame to drink it, though. So I keep it in the bag, and people think it’s hard liquor.” 

JOE LISS, cast member, Second City: 

When you do mushrooms—or at least when I did them—you look at people and you see them as they really are, in their natural state. And when we were doing the mushrooms up at the lake house, I looked over at Chris. He was sitting on the floor by the fireplace, assuming low status like he did. I looked at him, and what I saw was a big sheep dog. 

On (still) being the class clown:

TODD GREEN, friend: 

Bunch of us were going to go down to Chicago for St. Patrick’s Day. Chris was working at the Chicago Board of Trade. Friday, five o’clock, everybody’s getting out of work. We agreed to meet at the base of the escalators at the Board of Trade, which has this huge marble lobby with these big marble pillars. Typical finance establishment. Chris comes to the top of the escalator and yells, “Hey fellas!” He sticks out his foot, purposefully missing the first step, and falls down the escalator. People can’t believe what they’re seeing. Chris has got the whole five o’clock rush just staring at him. He his the bottom, stands up, and goes, “Oh, woopsy-daisy. That was something.” Then he brushes himself off, takes two steps and bashes himself into one of the marble columns. We were howling with laughter. Nobody else was, though. They had no idea what to make of it. 

On Chris’s apartment:

JOHN FARLEY: 

One time, years later, I parked in O’Brien’s parking lot on Wells Street near Second City. This was soon after Chris had gotten famous. I’d left my car in the lot and it was after hours and they were locked up. I went to this O’Brien guy and said, “Hey, I left my car in your lot and it’s locked up for the night. Can I get a key for that? I’m Chris Farley’s brother.” I figured it was worth a shot.

“The Chris Farley?”

“Yeah.”

“The same Chris Farley that lived over the Las Pinatas taco shop?”

“The one and the same. From Saturday Night Live.”

“Yeah. He owes me fifteen hundred dollars. I was his landlord at that apartment. Filthiest fucking apartment I ever had to clean up in my life. With the damages he left, his deposit didn’t cover it by half.”

“Huh. Well, can I still get the keys to my car? This really has nothing to do with him.”