Review: Baby Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live

Baby Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live by Chris Kattan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was never especially a fan of Chris Kattan in his Saturday Night Live days. (OK, so I bought the book because it was on sale and because I have been working my way through a lot of comedy memoirs.) I suppose I wasn’t really a fan of the show at all back then. Once Adam Sandler and his backup band left – and I hadn’t loved a lot of their stuff either, though they did pave the way for a pattern of regular and ever-more-exaggerated characters to become the backbone of the show – it felt like “this year’s cheaper model.” It took me years to realize that Will Ferrell really was a deeply talented comedian, and by that point he was gone and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were already going.

In any case, Kattan always annoyed me, even when all I did was see him on movie posters or in 10-second promos for his Roxbury guys. He seemed to be playing off the fact that he’s a funny-looking guy, seemed to think it was sufficient just to mug for the camera.

To my pleasant surprise, though, this is a mostly thoughtful and revealing memoir. Yeah, it gets into the controversy about how he broke his neck while performing a skit – and it actually become a weaker book as he dances around trying to blame anyone while also getting it out there that he was a real victim – but its best parts are early and middle when he reflects on the nature of comedy.

As a member of the Groundlings (and the son of one of the founders of that comedy troupe) Kattan explored a raw, physical comedy. I hadn’t really known his Mr. Peepers character – a simian figure who clambers over straightmen/women, licks faces, chomps apples, and breaks everything in his way – until this book, and now I find him fascinating to think about.

Kattan describes the experience of creating Mr. Peepers at the Groundlings, and it seems a lesson in comedy. In workshops and then in early skits, he kept pushing the limits of the character. As he did it live on stage, he fed off the energy of the audience. The physicality of the performance made it urgent, made it something that felt dangerous not just for its stunt work but for the sense that something could go wrong. It was live theater, and I suspect I’d have loved it.

When it translated to TV, though, it was a different phenomenon. There was a studio audience, one I gather was farther from the actual stage, but the real audience was the millions on TV, and it couldn’t play the same way. If the directors kept the camera pulled back far enough to see the full scene – as Kattan says he wishes they did – then we home viewers could get a sense of the physical possibilities and other actors’ reactions, but the performers’ faces would be diminished by distance. If they went with the directors’ preferred close-ups, then we couldn’t see the reaction shots, couldn’t see the way the real energy of the character affected others. And that’s where the humor lay.

That got me thinking – and following the thoughts of Kattan – that TV sketch comedy is often necessarily safer than the kind of comedy that brings SNL performers to the attention of the producers. It’s a different sport, almost as if Major League Baseball players had to prove themselves as softball stars before they could join the big leagues.

In any case, Kattan writes the first parts of this well as he weaves back and forth between chapters about his unusual childhood – he lived weekdays with his mother on Mt. Baldy with Carlos Castenada as a neighbor and weekends with his comedian father – and his discovering how to be a better comic in his years on SNL. Unlike some memoirs I’ve seen, this one has a structure, one that turns it into an argument supported by the particulars of Kattan’s life rather than a narrow recounting of that life.

There are a lot of spots where you can feel Kattan pulling his punches; it’s a little moving to hear him take responsibility for the bad choices that cost him most of his friendship with Will Ferrell, and there are times he expressly refuses to name someone whom he thinks might be hurt or offended by being revealed. But the through-line for much of this is a persistent hunger to understand what makes something funny.

Kattan himself isn’t always funny, and it’s surprisingly effective when he offers a lame gag in the writing – like his persistent reminders of the ways technology like answering machines has changed. That’s not funny, or not quite, but we know it because we see a comedian exploring how his medium functions. I’ve read some fairly weak memoirs, but this one mostly works. I not only enjoyed it, but I went looking for some of that era’s SNL shorts on-line and find more to like in them than I remember.


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