It’s been over twenty-five years now since the self-deprecating master Chris Farley left our world on December 18, 1997. Though he is gone, he lives on thanks to his numerous roles. In film, we still laugh over his physical antics in Black Sheep, Beverly Hills Ninja, and his comedy masterpiece, Tommy Boy. Farley was on such a role that he had even been cast as Shrek. It is only due to his passing that Mike Myers got the job. Before all of that, though, was his star-making turn on Saturday Night Live.
Chris Farley was a part of SNL from 1990 to 1995. No matter what he did, he always got the biggest laughs, due to his willingness to do anything for a reaction. He’d dance with his shirt off, make fun of his weight, and fall through anything. In his first season came what would be the sketch he’d forever be most remembered for: “Chippendales Audition.” There he danced shirtless with Patrick Swayze and soaked up the roars of laughter from the audience. Then came May 8, 1993. On this day a nationwide audience got to witness “Matt Foley: Van Down by the River,” a Saturday Night Live sketch that just might be the best in the show’s forty-plus-year history.
Why “Matt Foley: Van Down By the River” Is Such a Popular Sketch
“Matt Foley: Van Down by the River” begins in a traditional American living room of the early ’90s, with SNL‘s perfect everyman, Phil Hartman, sitting on a couch to the left with cast mate Julia Sweeney. On the couch to the right sits another cast mate and Farley’s best friend, David Spade, as well as that week’s Saturday Night Live guest host, Christina Applegate. Hartman and Sweeney play the mom and dad with Spade and Applegate as their kids. The parents have called a family meeting because the cleaning lady found pot. In response to this, they’ve hired a motivational speaker to come to the house and have a talk with the kids. The kids are ready to bail, but Dad convinces them to stay. He then describes the motivational speaker. “His name is Matt Foley. Now he’s been down in the basement drinking coffee for about the last four hours, and he should be all ready to go.”
Hartman calls Foley up from the basement and in walks a wild Chris Farley, his hair slicked to one side, big black glasses on his face, and a white shirt, brown tie, and a bright blue and white checkered suit jacket wrapped around him. Just the look of him elicits laughter from the audience. He immediately goes into a crouch, pulling at both sides of his pants, wildly gesticulating with his hands, and speaking almost like some strange Muppet. For the next four minutes, Foley dominates the screen, bouncing back and forth from parents to kids, warning about the dangers of doing drugs. He uses himself as the best reason for why they should clean up their act, repeatedly telling the brother and sister about how he “lives in a van down by the river.”
Farley is so on with this persona that Spade and Applegate have to hide their faces so no one can see them starting to crack. Foley gets more and more animated, as he talks about moving in with the family, and then, because there’s a coffee table in the center of the room, (and Chekhov’s gun says that when Chris Farley sees a table, he must use a table), Matt Foley falls right on it, smashing the coffee table to bits. When he goes outside to get his stuff, Hartman locks the door and the traumatized family holds each other close.
This sketch personifies the brilliance of Chris Farley. Yes, he was the pratfall king. He could fall through anything and get a laugh. But it wasn’t that easy. He wound the audience up before that, contorting his body, his face, and his voice into whatever was going to get the best reaction. And he could act. Farley became Matt Foley, an intense man who, though he might be a motivational speaker, is in way more need of help than anyone he talks to. Farley did tell us that with his words, yes, but he also showed it in just how desperate and over-the-top Foley acted. It was comedy at its best. SNL tried to recapture the magic, bringing the Matt Foley character became a few more times, and while Chris Farley was great in all of them, none of them worked as well because the wildness had been a bit tamed. We’d already seen it before. Some viewers of Saturday Night Live had even seen it before 1993 as well.
Chris Farley Played Matt Foley Before Joining ‘Saturday Night Live’
The character of Matt Foley wasn’t a Saturday Night Live creation. It didn’t start in 1993. No, it found its roots in 1990, in the famed Chicago improv group, The Second City. It’s where many future SNL greats got their start, from Bill Murray and John Belushi, to Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler, and more recently, Cecily Strong and Aidy Bryant. It’s where Chris Farley perfected his calling, too.
Farley started with The Second City in 1989. The next year Matt Foley was born, with the character getting its name from a childhood friend of Farley’s who would later go on to become a priest. Chris Farley was the mastermind physical force behind Foley and the one who gave him his name, but he’s not the one who created the character and wrote those first sketches. That distinction goes to another member of The Second City troupe, a man by the name of Bob Odenkirk. Before he became such a staple of drama thanks to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Odenkirk worked in comedy, most notably on his HBO sketch comedy series, Mr. Show with Bob and David (the David being David Cross). After Second City, he was even a writer for Saturday Night Live for a few years.
In a 2021 interview with Howard Stern, Odenkirk spoke about writing the motivational speaker character. “I wrote that alone in my apartment in Chicago when we were doing Second City together… And, of course, Chris elevates it to a whole nother place.” Odenkirk went on to explain where the character came from. Part of it came from seeing Farley play a coach character in Second City who warned kids against doing drugs. “I went home that night, and I’ll never forget, sitting there with a yellow legal pad, and just writing out, I grew up in Naperville, Illinois, and when I was a kid, there was this contingent of hippies, Howard, who used to hang out on the bridge down by the river, and I just pictured this guy, and Tony Robbins was becoming big at the time, and I thought, what about a motivational speaker who’s living in that, and I pictured that very place in my hometown, and he uses himself as like, ‘I’m a piece of shit, do you wanna end up like me?'”
Bob Odenkirk Talks About How Much He Loved Working With Chris Farley
Chris Farley and Bob Odenkirk are forever linked due to Matt Foley. Odenkirk has always had great things to say about Farley over the years, though he did make headlines last when he criticized the SNL “Chippendales Audition” sketch in his memoir, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, saying, “It was a huge bummer to me to see that scene get on the air and get such attention. 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. Writers I knew and respected defended this sketch because it had a funnyish idea buried in it: the Chippendales judges prefer Swayze’s dancing over Chris’s but can’t put a finger on why. But that idea is not what produced the gales of cackling (and gasps) from the live audience. Chris flopping his overstuffed body around did that. I feel like I can see it on his face in the moment when he rips his shirt off. Shame and laughter are synthesized in the worst way. F— that sketch.”
Bob Odenkirk has done so many amazing things in his career. The man had his own HBO show with his name in it. He became a household name as Saul Goodman. He’s been nominated for countless Emmys and even got to be a John Wick-like hero in Nobody, but he told Howard Stern, “My daughter once asked me, ‘What’s the most fun you’ve had in show business?’, and I said, ‘Without a doubt, it was Second City Theater main stage doing that sketch seven times a week with Chris right in your face, and he would not stop until he made every actor on stage laugh.'”
Bob Odenkirk also credits Farley for sending him on his path to becoming a Hollywood megastar, saying in an interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers that, when working with Farley on Second City, “Chris and I are acting and I think, ‘I should be in a drama. That’s what I should do.’ And I really had that crazy thought. I think I was just loving his presence so much and he was so wonderful and I thought ‘I can’t compete with that. So put me in a drama and I’ll be so funny.'”
Chris Farley’s superstardom may not have happened without Bob Odenkirk writing a sketch about a raving motivational speaker, and Odenkirk may have never become the huge name he is now if not for Farley’s comedy greatness making him feel like he should try something else. The two are not just forever linked, but their careers needed each other, right from the beginning. Well la-di frickin’ da.