Profile · Madison, Wisconsin
Christopher Crosby Farley
SNL/film comedian from Madison / Maple Bluff (not cousin Jim Farley, Ford CEO)
$6 million
Christopher Crosby Farley was the Madison-raised Saturday Night Live and film comic whose physical abandon made Matt Foley a national catchphrase. He was dead at thirty-three; Madison buried him a few miles from the church where the real Matt Foley said the Mass. He was born in Madison on February 15, 1964, the third of five children in an Irish Catholic house across from Lake Mendota in Maple Bluff. He wore No. 59 for the Edgewood Crusaders in 1981; teammates remembered the coach impressions on the bus more than the tackles. After Marquette he came home to work for his father at Scotch Oil, the family paving company. He could not spell asphalt. Clients loved him anyway. He did not love the work. Stand-up at the Comedy Cellar in 1985 froze him so completely he stopped going. Then he stumbled into the Ark, a ninety-nine-seat theater carved from a Brinks garage on North Bassett Street, and found the thing he was built for: other people. Within months he was inventing a motivational speaker who had not yet moved into a van down by the river, handing out two-for-one coupons on State Street, and flashing plumber’s butt when a scene went cold. Chicago, Second City, and Saturday Night Live arrived so fast that Lorne Michaels hired him without an audition. An early Matt Foley voice was already on the Ark stage in 1987; the squat came from Edgewood football coaches and from his father when angry. At Our Lady Queen of Peace, the funeral priest was Rev. Matt Foley, a Marquette rugby friend whose name Farley had borrowed. He is buried at Resurrection Cemetery.