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.

On being the class clown:

MIKE CLEARY, friend: 

There was a girl in our class. She had a hearing problem. She could make out sounds, but not distinct words. She was able to drive, though. So whenever she was driving, Chris would yell out, “Oh my God! What the hell are you doing?!”

Everyone in the car would jerk back, and she’d yank the wheel and slam the brakes. Of course, we weren’t in any danger at all, but Chris loved to mess around like that. She could lip-read, too, and Chris would mouth nonsense words at her without making any actual sounds. Then he’d pretend to get really frustrated with her when she couldn’t follow along. It was a tough ride home. 

ROBERT BARRY, friend: 

We were doing these experiments in science class with gunpowder, and, of course, the first thing they tell you is not to use any matches or flames around the gunpowder. So what does Chris do? He takes an entire book of matches, lights it, and tosses it in. He caused so much grief for the nuns. 

He made class fun. He wasn’t interested in studies, or learning. Another time he came into a class of mine. He wasn’t actually in the class, but we had a substitute teacher who didn’t know any better, so he just joined in and became the class clown for a class that he didn’t even belong to. 

NICK BURROWS, guidance counselor / assistant coach: 

There was one time, a homecoming game his junior year, I believe, where it was just pouring rain and Chris hadn’t gotten in. It was toward the end of the game, we were winning pretty big, and Coach Maturi said, “Nick, get these guys ready to go in!”

Everybody was lined up ready to go, except Christopher. He was behind the bench, running up and down the sidelines diving in the mud. I think he wanted to make sure his date saw that he’d gotten his uniform dirty. I yelled, “Farls, get over here!”

He ran up to the line. He was the only kid covered with mud, and he hadn’t even been in the game yet.

FRED ALBRIGHT, camp counselor: 

One night it’s around bedtime, a couselor goes by Chris’s cabin to make sure everyone was ready for lights-out, and one kids says, “Chris isn’t here.” 

So the whole camp starts looking for Chris. Chris, just to cause a ruckus, had crawled into his footlocker, shut himself in, and hid in there. Finally, after about an hour of everybody wandering the camp looking for him, Chris reappears out of his footlocker. That was typical. 

TOM FARLEY, brother: 

We were learning to ski, and Chris wasn’t as good as the rest of us, but he always wanted to tag along with me and my friends. So we decided to take him down these really tough black diamonds, teach him a lesson. We get to the top of this impossible run, we all zip down, and Chris is left stranded up at the top. He’s yelling at us, “You guys! Come on!”

So he starts going, and he takes this nasty spill. He’s screaming his head off in pain. We’re all down at the bottom going, “Oh my God, he’s hurt.”

Sure enough, the ski patrol comes along, they roll him onto the sled and bring him down the rest of this run. They get down to us, Chris hops off the sled, perfectly fine, and turns to the ski patrol “Thanks, fellas.” They were pissed. Then he turns to us and says, “You guys are jerks.” 

NICK BURROWS: 

I was on a senior retreat with Chris. I was in charge of eight kids, and we were doing an activity called the Hot Seat, one of those exercises that’s supposed to get you to talk about yourself. Father Monahan was the priest at that retreat, and he was very serious about making sure the kids were following the program. 

We go around this circle, Chris’s turn comes, and people just instinctively start to chuckle. I was laughing, too, thinking whatever was coming would be really good. I say, “Okay, Chris, what’s something you think you need to work on?”

“Well, this is really hard for me to say…” he says. And then he launches into this in-depth explanation of how this thing is really troubling him, how he’s got this deep-seated problem. “I’m really concerned because sometimes…sometimes I feel like…I’m a frog.”

“A what?”

“A frog. Every once and a while I feel like I’m a frog.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, sometimes it just overwhelms me. You know what I mean, Mr. Burrows?”

“I guess. Tell me more about it.”

“You know, sometimes I just—ribbit!—when I’m alone I—ribbit!”

He starts these gyrations and facial contortions like there’s this frog welling up inside him, getting bigger and more guttural with each one: Ribbit! RIBBIT!

“And if I get around mud or water or any kind of swampland—RIBBIT!—it just gets worse—RIBBIT!!”

Then he jumps up on the chair: RIBBBITT! Then he jumps up on the table, screaming: RIBBBBITTT! 

All these other groups of young boys in the room are seriously exploring their problems, and they’re just staring at us from around the room ’cause we’re all rolling on the floor laughing. The priest was not amused.

But at the same time, in that same retreat, he was the kid who shared some of the most powerful things, about his family, about his faith. He felt that he was blessed with a sense of humor and a quality that he was always able to make other people feel good about themselves. He was passionate about his faith, his belief in God. As funny as he was, and as zany and corny as he could be, there was a serious side about him that was unbelievable. Quality kid. 

On growing up Farley:

JOHN FARLEY, brother: 

Chris and I were on the school bus. He was in eighth grade. I was in third grade, and I was seeing this girl. Seeing this girl? I don’t know what you’d call it. Holding hands? Whatever. Her name was Chris Bair. She was really cute, and I sat in the front of the school bus with her. The back of the bus was Chris’s domain, and he got the entire school bus singing, “John-ny Farley loves Chris Bair-naked.” They were all chanting it.

And I turned around and yelled, “You fat fat fatty! Fatty likes to eat pork, you fat fat fatty.” 

And he just kept chanting, but it was getting to him. He was getting pretty mad. We got off the bus, and that started another chase across four or five neighbors’ yards. 

ROBERT BARRY: 

You never saw just “a Farley.” There were always at least two of them.

JOHN FARLEY: 

Tommy and Chris together equaled my dad. It was like that Schwarzenegger/DeVito movie Twins, where they separate the DNA and create two separate specimens, one perfect and one just a total fuck-up.

JOHN FARLEY: 

Chris, Kevin, and Tom would fight, I mean really fight. You’d be standing there at outdoor mass at camp and they’d just be bloodied. Big shiners, the blood around the gums on your tooth, skin scraped off. All three of them. The Fighting Farleys, they called us. Not me, mind you. I could take a punch, but I wasn’t much of a fighter.

JOHN FARLEY: 

Mrs. Coe was this nice ninety-year-old woman who lived next door. We shared a driveway with her, and we called her Paddington Bear, because she always had an overcoat and she’d shuffle around the neighborhood. And we used to play Naked Horse. If you lost the game, you had to strip naked, run to the top of the hill at the end of the driveway, touch the mailboxes and run back down. And the whole time we’d be playing Naked Horse we’d be cursing up a storm. “Fuck.” “Shit.” “You cocksucker.” And, without fail, by the time the loudest “cocksucker” was yelled, you’d hear the phone ringing in the house, and it was Mrs. Coe crying because we’d upset her by cursing and running naked up and down her driveway.

JOHN FARLEY: 

We went to Disneyworld in Orlando, and Chris got separated from the family. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Chris had these giant red suspenders on. Why he had giant red suspenders on, I have no idea, but that’s what he was wearing. We called him Rerun that whole trip, because he looked like Rerun from What’s Happening? We were all getting off the tram. There was some commotion at the stop, and Chris didn’t get off. All of a sudden you hear, “Where’s Chris?” And we all turn and look. I just remember seeing that tram pull away, and Chris standing in the back window in his suspenders with the saddest look on his face. We all waved to him as the tram slowly took him away. Of course this thing is going literally a hundred yards and then coming right back, but he looked like he was being shipped off to Boys Town. 

On Chris’s relationships with girls:

MIKE CLEARY: 

My girlfriend drove him nuts. She was, is, very good-looking. We went swimming one day, and when she got out of the water I instinctively got up and put a shirt on her, cause all these guys were around. Chris just yelled, “No! Mike! Why!!!” 

He was not very good with relationships, his own or yours. 

TOM FARLEY: 

He was a senior when he lost his virginity, and the girl was younger, like a sophomore or a freshman. She was so anxious and guilty afterward that she went and told the guidance counselor. She said that she thought he’d gotten her pregnant. So he had to sit down with the counselors and get a lecture on premarital sex and why it was bad. And then they called in our parents. Can you imagine if that was your first time? It had to have been a nightmare.

PAT FINN, friend: 

Chris didn’t have the best relationships with women. It was funny. I did the eulogy at Marquette memorial service. My wife was sitting next to me for the ceremony, and the audience in this church was probably seventy-percent women. My wife turned to me and said, “Obviously these women didn’t know Chris very well.” 

But there were a few girls that Chris really had great relationships with. He and Katie Murnane dated for a while. One of my favorite lines ever was when he said, “I’m not dating Katie anymore.” 

“Why?” 

“She lost weight.” 

On Chris’s superstitions:

ROBERT BARRY: 

Chris was deathly afraid of graveyards. One night as a prank we said, “Oh, let’s go to the graveyard!” 

We convinced him there was something we had to see, some grave. Chris was petrified, but he went in with us anyway. Once we got to the middle of the cemetery we all just booked and left him there. He froze solid. He couldn’t move. He was literally crying out, “Guys! You gotta come back here! You gotta come get me outta here!” 

We all went back for him eventually, laughing our asses off. It was pretty funny.  

GREG MEYER, friend: 

We had a little chapel at the high school. It was right in the middle of school. Chris was so spontaneous. You’d be walking along on your way to class, maybe it was the day of the big game, and he’d just grab you and say, “We gotta say a prayer for the game.” And he’d drag you into the chapel. You knew he was ninety-percent serious and ten-percent kidding around, but you always did it with him.

On early drinking difficulties:

KEVIN FARLEY, brother: 

My parents didn’t like it. He got in trouble a couple of times. One story was kind of funny—funny at the time, anyway. Chris was drinking and driving, and he pulled out onto the interstate and got plowed from behind by this car that was carrying a boat on a trailer. The trailer broke loose and this boat flew past him down the highway. He drove the car home, the back end of it all torn up, and parked it in the driveway. The next morning my dad just flipped out. “Christopher! What the hell happened to the car?!” 

Of course Chris didn’t remember too much. “I don’t know, dad,” he said. “I think I got hit by a boat.”

“Goddamnit!”

TOM FARLEY, brother: 

Dad leased a car for me for the summer in 1986, a little Toyota. Chris borrowed it and  was driving past Edgewood at night, drunk. He missed a turn, and his friend yelled, “No, turn here! Turn here!” 

Chris jerked the wheel, hit the curb, and just buckled the wheels underneath the car. The cops came, and they gave him a DUI. A week later he was on his bike riding around downtown. He was coming down a hill, drunk, and he completely wiped out. There was a screech of tires behind him, and who steps out of the car but the very same cop who’d busted him just the week before in the car. 

“Well,” he said, “I guess we can’t do the bike routine, either. You might want to start taking the bus.” 

Being busted twice by the same cop, that was Chris’s luck. 

TOM FARLEY: 

One summer when Chris was a counselor at camp, he’d been out drinking late one night. The next day he was hungover and just dog-tired. But he was running the boat dock and scuba-diving activities for the kids out on the lake. There was no place for him to sneak off and catch a bit of sleep, just the hot sun beating down on this dock. So he strapped all these weights to himself, took one of the rebreathers out of the scuba gear, sunk himself to the bottom of the lake, and took a nap. 

On college rebellion:

JIM MURPHY, friend: 

One time we go to get haircuts, and Chris gets a mohawk. It’s right before we’re going down to play rugby in Madison, and we were staying with his folks. We get to the house and Chris’s dad is like, “Jesus Christ, Chris! What did you do to your hair?!” 

And Chris says, “What? I just got a mohawk. It’s cool. It looks cool.” 

His dad just keeps yelling. His mother, meanwhile, is in the corner doing the sign of the cross, praying. 

We go out in Madison that night, and then we wake up the next morning and Chris’s mom has made an appointment with her hairdresser to do a patch job on Chris, try to make him look somewhat presentable. 

On getting arrested:

JIM MURPHY: 

We were in the Gym, this bar on campus, and we closed it. We were walking back to Schrader, and we both stopped to pee in this alley. A cop car drove by, stopped, backed up, and saw us. We took off and started running. We ran into this Mexican restaurant right across the street called Amigos, ran through the restaurant, jumped over the counter, and ran through the kitchen into another alleyway. 

So there we were, thinking we got away with it, and right at that time two cop cars came in from both ends of the alley. I took off, but Chris was frozen with fear. I ran and ran and ended up hiding in these bushes. I probably hid in the bushes for hours, until the sun came up. 

Around five in the morning, I crawled out of the bushes and started walking home. While I’m walking, a police car slowly pulled up next to me. He rolled down his window and said, “What’s your name?” 

“Jim,” I said. 

“Jim Murphy?”

“Yeah.” 

He threw it into park, jumped out of the car, came over, and arrested me. Then the paddy wagon pulled up, they threw me in the back, and took me to the police station. Turned out they had arrested Chris, and he had told them who I was. He ratted me out. Chris was a terrible liar. He’d rolled over like a dog. I got there, and he was in the jail cell going, “What? I was lonely?! You woulda done it!” 

On being Chris Farley:

PAT FINN: 

Chris was what they call Match Secretary on the rugby team one year, which meant he scheduled all the games. And he had us scheduled to play the team from Carthage one day in October. Well, we all get out to the field at around quarter to twelve. No Carthage. We wait. Twelve-thirty rolls around, and we’re like, “Hmmm. This is odd.” Then someone asks, “Who’s the Match Secretary?” 

“It’s Farls.” 

“Oh no.”

Sure enough, Chris had never called Carthage to tell them we had a match. He just put them on the roster and forgot to call ‘em. Everyone was beyond mad, but Chris was one of those guys you had a tough time getting mad at. Ultimately you’re just like, “Eh, it’s Chris.”

FRED ALBRIGHT: 

When Chris came back as a counselor, the camp really didn’t know where to put him. I said I’d be glad to have him out at the barn, so Chris was kind of my assistant riding director, believe it or not. Though Chris was very athletic, especially for a large guy, he wasn’t the best horseman by any means of the imagination. But we had a lot of fun. We had this fourteen-hand pony named Bam-Bam. This was a young horse; fourteen hands isn’t that big. But Chris was bugging me. “I wanna ride this guy,” he’d say. 

I said, “Well, I don’t know if you’re ready for him yet.” 

He kept pleading with me, so finally I said okay. He got on the horse, and, of course, Chris was a pretty stout boy. The horse kind of braced out on all four legs, just like in Blazing Saddles, and then completely flopped onto his side. It was the funniest thing you ever saw. That was the sort of thing that would only happen to Chris. The horse jumped up and Chris just lay there in the sand, his eyes were about the size of saucers. I said, “Well, I think we’ll wait a little bit on this one.” 

BRIAN STACK, cast member, Ark Improv Theater: 

I had been a TA in Madison when I was in grad school. One night after one of our shows at the Ark we went out and ended up at this party on campus. It was really late. I was slumped down in a chair and Chris was slumped down right across from me on this couch. We didn’t have an ounce of energy left. Then I saw him look over at this big plant that was on a table right next to the couch. Chris was taking his cigarette lighter and flicking it under one of the leaves, trying to singe it, you know, because living plants won’t burn. Well, it was a fake plant; it was made out of paper. 

So Chris is just absentmindedly flicking his lighter under this leaf, without any malice or anything, just with this childlike curiosity about what might happen. The leaf finally catches, and the whole plant just immediately goes up in this enormous tower of flame. Chris jumps up, the plant falls over on the couch, and then the couch goes up in flames. I jump up, and we both start trying to put the fire out with these throw pillows, which I found out later were very nice throw pillows. So we’re beating these pillows on the couch and the pillows are catching on fire and everybody’s yelling and suddenly Chris goes, “Man, I gotta get out of here. I’m already on probation for this other fire.”

Several years later I was walking down the street in Chicago when I ran into an old student of mine. I was like, “Hey, Michelle.”

And she said, “Hey, I haven’t seen you since you and Chris Farley started that fire in my apartment.” Chris had set one of my student’s apartments on fire.