Chris Farley - Supersizing SNL

In my opinion, Chris Farley ranks as one of the top ten comedians of all time.  He was a legend on Saturday Night Live during the early 1990’s, when the show was at its prime.  Farley used his overweight size and unbridled enthusiasm to create larger than life stage characters that were utterly hilarious.

Sometimes, Farley used his chubbiness to directly poke fun at fatties in America.  For example, during the skit “Superfans,” Farley takes the overweight sports fan stereotype to the extreme to create hilarity.  In the skit, Farley and his three friends are all diehard Polish fans of the Chicago Bears and Bulls.  They are all very out-of-shape and overweight because their main activity is to sit around a table with each other talking about sports while drinking beers and eating fast foods.  During the scene, Chris Farley’s character has a heart attack, which he explains to his friends “…[is because] there’s a small piece of polish sausage on the inside lining of my heart.”  Rather than express concern over Farley’s unhealthy eating practices, his friends congratulate him for his successful recovery from his 12^th heart attack.  The nonchalant way that the superfans talk about heart attacks makes the skit incredibly humorous.

However, Farley’s use of his extra pounds to generate laughs on SNL was not always so direct.  In many instances, Farley portrayed characters who were more memorable for their energetic personality than their chubbiness.  For example, in the “Motivational Speaker” skit, Farley plays Matt Foley, who is a desperate motivational speaker with a firecracker-like personality.  During the scene, Foley gives a desperate over-the-top lecture to a family’s two teen-aged children, telling them to not screw up in life or else they will end up as a failure like him and be “livin’ in a van, down by the river.”  Farley’s extra chubbiness in this scene helps to add to the ridiculousness of Matt Foley’s motivational speech because during his lecture, Foley continuously bumbles around the set adjusting his trousers for his large girth, wrecking havoc upon the family’s living room in the process.