Gasping For Airtime: Two Years In the Trenches of Saturday Night Live (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "IT WAS glorious..." (more)
Key Phrases: live dress rehearsal, new dressing room, fake pitch, Saturday Night Live, New York, Jim Downey (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Twenty-three-year-old actor and stand-up comic Mohr was playing college campuses after a brief stint hosting an MTV game show when he landed every comic's dream job: featured performer and writer on Saturday Night Live. In this stilted but honest memoir, he chronicles his frustrating two seasons on the show, from 1993 to 1995. Few of his sketches aired, and aside from his impressions of Ricki Lake, Christopher Walken and Dick Vitale, he was rarely on camera. (When he was on air, he admits, he often couldn't keep a straight face.) Mohr treats readers to some affectionate, entertaining tales of the late Chris Farley, but his book is less a juicy inside story of the comedy institution than a tale of an immature young man's struggle with a high-stress, erratic workplace: "The schedule for putting together Saturday Night Live was made back in the seventies when everyone was on coke.... Problem was, no one did coke [anymore] and we were expected to keep the same hours." Floundering in the unstructured work environment, Mohr suffered crippling panic attacks, which he treated with alcohol and pot until he finally found real relief with a prescription for Klonopin. Even panic-free, Mohr still felt like the odd man out and chafes at his less than meteoric rise. He serves up mostly superficial dish (watching Nirvana rehearse, shooting hoops with various celebrities) and offers unflattering self-revelations (desperate competitiveness, jealousy and sulking)-resulting in a memoir that will appeal only to die-hard Mohr fans.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Most know Mohr from his role in Jerry Maguire or from his stand-up comedy. Most will not remember him from his time on Saturday Night Live, a two-year stint during which the 21-year-old served as a writer and secondary cast member. Mohr chronicles those years with the sly wit he's become known for, as well as nostalgia for both the time he had and the kid he was. That's not to say things went well. He barely got any sketches on air, his dressing room was once an elevator shaft, and he suffered panic attacks so severe he thought he would die on camera. But he also met some encouraging people (Mike McKeon) and was able to spend a little time hanging out with various luminaries (Eric Clapton), so even though he moans and whines about what he endured on the show, he ends up describing the experience as glorious. Fans of the show will especially like the snippets about such SNL figures as Chris Farley, Lorne Michaels, and Mike Myers. Good insider dish. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (June 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401300065
• ISBN-13: 978-1401300067
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #680,460 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Saturday Night Live Fans Will Eat This Up, November 28, 2005

By	Brian Markowski (Cedar Rapids, IA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It's amazing, for how long Saturday Night Live has been on the air, that there have been so few books written on the subject. And as far as I know, Jay Mohr's "Gasping for Airtime" is the only book from an ex-cast member who focuses solely on his own SNL experience.

Causal watchers of Saturday Night Live may not even know that Mohr was a regular on the show for two years. Though never a feature performer, Mohr was responsible for such timely skits as Charles Barkley versus Barney the Dinosaur and Christopher Walken's Psychic Hotline. Unwilling to wait his turn or play the political games that have become associated with the show, Mohr turned to other ventures. His rocky two season at SNL however provide a telling first hand account of how the show operated in the early 90's as Phil Hartman and Mike Meyers moved on and Chris Farley and Adam Sandler moved in. The fact that Mohr never became a big celebrity on the show grounds his tale in honesty, and makes his story even more compelling.

Mohr speaks of run ins with Rob Schneider and Chris Farley, his often chilly meetings with Lorne Michaels, clueless and vain guest hosts as well as his own frustration with his inability to become a star.

There are better tell alls out there and there are better Saturday Night Live book as well, but Mohr brings a relatable underdog tale to these pages. Anybody who's ever had to work under the shadows of others can sympathize with this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Solid book., June 14, 2004

By	"philatmachardidotcom" (gainesville, fl United States) - See all my reviews

This book is a pretty interesting career move, and if anything exists as a shining example on how to turn something that could be considered a 'failure' into something, well, else. The fact that someone who spent two years in the wings of a show now has more or less the (de fact) definitive work about a show is impressive, to say the least. Very cunning.

This book is a ridiculously easy read, for reasons that are probably easy to discover on your own, so I won't belabor them here. Its conversational tone makes it really easy to dismiss it as a gossip-book (which it might still be, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with gossip books. And neither do you, or you wouldn't have clicked on the book in the first place) but there's a lot of real humanity within as well. His love and respect for Chris Farley are well documented as well as his frustration with various people, most of all himself. The fact that he committed the theft (which has already been discussed in review) is almost as astonishing as his admission.

I don't have any major critiques (the chronology skips around a little bit unnecessarily , at one point he's visiting a doctor for a panic-disorder, but then he hasn't visited at all). Being Mohr's book, the book is very Mohr-centric, and it would've been interesting to find out more (no pun intended) about how he interacted with other members, but given the nature of the story that's essentially impossible.

I think the take home message is the key to this book, and I don't even think it is a conscious one:

It seems that in SNL (and almost any artistic field) only by writing/creating do you have any control of your life and career. If you can't, then you are at the whim of whomever -is- doing the writing. Throughout the two years Mohr spends a lot of time doing a lot of different things, but he never indicates that he spent any time trying different things to sharpen his ability to just sit down and write. If he had, I'm willing to bet this book wouldn't exist. Or at least not for a few more years.

Now finally, after sitting down and writing this book his career has taken a strong, positive turn, and I don't think that's coincidence.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wish it were longer, March 22, 2007

By	John S. Harris "The Voice of Reason" (Memphis, TN) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

An insider's view of working in the trenches of "Saturday Night Live". This book is not meant to be a tell-all book nor a production diary. Some other reviewers have bemoaned the dearth of juicy gossip tidbits in the text. But Mohr's account is open and honest and rightfully one-sided. "SNL" has long been a fascinating cultural phenomenon, and Mohr gives you a peek behind the curtain. He speaks as a lower-rung writer/performer, and is certainly unjaded by the whirlwind success that other "SNL" alums achieved, mostly because he never achieved it himself.

He fawns over a musical guest or two, and has nothing but loving things to say about Chris Farley, but the rest is basically a week-for-week, show-for-show account of how the show's inhumane production schedule brought out both the best and worst in him (and everybody else).