Unpleasant Stimuli

I laughed really hard at this. On Dec. 8, 1990, Chris Farley played a sweaty teenager named “Kevin” in a skit called “Unpleasant Stimuli” (this was Farley’s eighth episode of SNL, and Tom Hanks’s fifth turn at hosting). In the skit — which he totally steals, by the way — Farley enters through an upstage kitchen door, slams it and causes a prop spice rack to fall (like true pros, they simply look at it and move on). Now, I don’t believe the prop fell because Farley slammed the door so hard; rather, I believe that wherever Farley went, he was surrounded, at all times, by an invisible whirlwind of physical chaos. And this chaos was the source of a lot, a lot, a lot of comedy. Just watch the video: The spice rack hitting something on its way down, followed by the bric-a-brac shattering on the stage floor sounds like an announcement of Chris Farley’s walk-on in the scene. Yeah, I laughed really hard at this.