On Dec. 8, 1990, Chris Farley played a sweaty teenager named Kevin in a sketch called “Unpleasant Stimuli.” This was only Farley’s eighth episode of SNL, but 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 professionals Jan Hooks, Farley and Hanks simply look at the fallen spice rack and move on. Now, I don’t believe the prop fell from the wall 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. 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.
