10 Dooming Details Surrounding Chris Farley’s Sad Last Days

6 /10 Fat Guy Falls Down

The underlying reason was his profound feeling of self-inadequacy, which he knew how to capitalize into comedy an instrument of coping, but could never exorcise properly.

He would often joke seriously that his whole comedy style was based around the idea of “fat guy falls,” and many believe that part of his frequent regressions to overeating and abuse came from a deep-seated, potent fear that he would no longer be funny if he became thin and stopped being coke-fueled.

Coke would (in part) by the weapon that killed him, but in many ways, it was this inner fear and desire to please what killed him in the end.

5 /10 Not Exempt

In the end, it seems that Farley easily believed that other people’s approval would make everything right. Behind all that noise and all those shocking gestures, a person was struggling with fear.

In an interview to Playboy magazine on the year of his death, he would clear-sighted state: “Once I thought that if I just had enough in the bank, if I had enough fame, that it would be all right. But I’m a human being like everyone else. I’m not exempt… It’s still life on life’s terms, not on movie-star terms.”

4 /10 I Can't Breathe

By January 1997, Chris Farley appeared in The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, evidently in an altered state by consuming drugs. In the show, he screamed, he jumped and did gymnastics, and he made the audience roar with laughs.

But a poignant moment came, which foreshadowed his nearby death, when in the middle of a sentence, he interrupted himself and very softly said, “I can’t breathe.”

This moment is what many spectators of that day’s show still remember as a turning point in his downhill spiral, and many would find it hard to watch again.

3 /10 Gasping And Panting

And indeed, during that same year, he was gasping and panting at every one of his television appearances.

Later in the year, he appeared in a sketch of the Nickelodeon series All That, and he couldn’t perform the many stunts and sudden movements that made his comedic style famous.

For most of the sketch, he would scream and move around a bit, then having to rest against a kitchen island used as a prop while he wasn’t talking.

By all accounts, “he looked really bad,” as a waitress who served him a couple of days before his death would later recall, in a piece for the Rolling Stones magazine.

2 /10 Speedball

It was winter when he began his final spiral of substance abuse and drinking on December 14, 1997.

He would appear dead before the eyes of his younger brother John, on December 18, in his bathroom, after being seen only sparsely since the 14th.

The coroner’s ruling indicated an overdose on a combination of cocaine and morphine (called ‘speedball’) as the cause of his death. It was the same thing that killed John Belushi, his hero, in 1982.

1 /10 My Hero, John Belushi

Indeed, many of the behaviors evident in Chris Farley can be traced to his devotion to John Belushi, the mythical SNL cast member. His friends would often have to remind him that he wasn’t Belushi and that he didn’t have to be.

And even himself was aware of it, as he said to Rolling Stone magazine on his cocaine addiction: “I worry about talking about this, because I worry about kids who might think, ‘Whoa, man, that’s cool!’ Because in some ways, that’s what I did with my hero, Belushi. I thought that this is what you have to do to be cool. But all that s*** does is kill someone. It’s a demon that must be snuffed out. It is the end.”

It was the end. Like Belushi fifteen years earlier, Chris Farley was thirty-three years old in 1997.