Saturday Night Live alum Robert Smigel recalls never-aired Chris Farley sketch

Seth Meyers has made a whole segment out of “Second Chance Theater,” where he brings on Saturday Night Live alum to recreate sketches that never made it to air. But this particular sketch can never be recreated, because it’s all about the late, great Chris Farley. On a new episode of LateNighter’s podcast Inside Late Night With Mark Malkoff, Robert Smigel (a former writer famous for “TV Funhouse” and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) shared the script of a sketch he wrote when Farley returned to host the show in 1997.

Smigel says he has “nothing but bad feelings about that episode,” which was filmed shortly before Farley’s death from a drug overdose. However, he did read one of the sketches he wrote for that episode, which he wrote with the intention of “making a comment on how Chris is being exploited for being fat.” The sketch begins with Farley as Rosie O’Donnell hosting her eponymous talk show, before Farley rips off the wig and demands a new idea. He and SNL boss Lorne Michaels brainstorm another fat celebrity he could play, and Farley re-enters doing a bad Marlon Brando before scrapping the idea again. Michaels then demands another cast member bring out Tracy Morgan, the cast’s “fat Black guy” (“Sorry, the fat African-American guy”) to come up with a list of possible celebrities for Farley to play: “‘Get me a list of fat celebrities. I mean as fat as Chris, okay? Get me double chins, saggy breasts, pregnant women are okay. I need fat. I mean ridiculously fat,” Smigel reads (as Michaels). 

The sketch concludes with Farley singing, “Why must I always be the fat guy? Why must I dance the fatty dance? There’s a whole world of thin people that I could play, if you’ll only give me half a chance.” While Michaels and Morgan brainstorm “fat celebrities,” Farley sings about how he wants to do impressions of other icons like Pee Wee Herman or Richard Gere. At the end, “Chris warmly acknowledges applause,” Smigel reads. “Lorne runs up with Tracy trailing. ‘Chris, you’re a hit. What did you do?’ ‘I was just myself, Lorne.’ ‘You mean fat?’ Chris nods and they hug.” (You can hear Smigel read the whole thing for yourself here.)

Smigel admits that his sketch “could easily be misinterpreted as saying all Chris can do is be fat guys, but I don’t think that was the point.” His point was “mocking the show and the comedy world for just going to ‘the fat guy’ well over and over and over and then creating just this absurd joke that he can play Jennifer Aniston or whoever, Richard Gere, which he obviously couldn’t.”

Sketches surrounding Farley’s weight and appearance have become divisive in the years since the comedian’s death. Some of his friends and co-stars, like Chris Rock, have condemned bits like the Chippendales sketch (where Farley and Patrick Swayze both auditioned to be Chippendales dancers) for exacerbating Farley’s issues with his body. Smigel has defended the Chippendales sketch, praising Farley’s athletic performance and “fantastic energy”; he told Howard Stern in 2021 that he found it to be “very empowering.” 

His 1997 Farley “fat” sketch is definitely of the time, and it’s hard to imagine current-day SNL ever even writing something like that, let alone airing it. As it is, this one only ever made it to the read-through stage before getting cut. Smigel had almost forgotten writing the sketch entirely, but “I remembered when I heard Lorne say, ‘Where’s the fat Black guy?’ I remember being at read-through and feeling uncomfortable. Even though I had Chris call him out on being crude, I felt uncomfortable even just making Lorne say it at read-through,” he says. “But there it is. It made me laugh at the time. And it’s making me laugh, maybe not for the right reasons now.”