Many, many years ago, corpulent cut-up Chris Farley hosted a fundraiser for a blow-dried, super-slick local anchorman-turned-Republican-politician Scott Klug’s congressional campaign at State Street Brats, a fraternity-friendly beer and burger joint. I remember thinking very vividly at the time, “You know, if a giant meteor were to hit Madison I have a pretty good idea where I would like it to land.”State Street Brats was notorious for their “Big Ass Burger," a two-pound monstrosity that came with a mess o’ French fries and a 32 ounce beverage. If you gobbled it all down in a half-hour without dying instantly of a heart attack you got a free t-shirt. Or some such horseshit. My girlfriend at the time was all, “Hey, you’re a voracious sack of shit with no dignity or self-respect. Why don’t you take the Big-Ass Burger challenge, you worthless waste of space? Oh, what exquisite pleasure I will derive from your pain!”Being a weak-willed, passive-aggressive soul I acquiesced meekly and stared daggers at her as she giggled and pointed while I tried to prove what a world-class chazzer I could be. Needless to say, the Big-Ass Burger conquered me. I did not conquer the Big Ass Burger. Only the Chris Farleys of the world had the stomach, literally and metaphorically, for such a Herculean undertaking.I feel terrible writing this now but I hated Chris Farley. I hated, hated, hated him. To my 19-year-old, co-op-dwelling, painfully self-righteous self the fundraiser represented a perfect storm of everything I despised: oily Republicanism, slick newsreaders, frat boys, and the fat blowhard who ruined Saturday Night Live with his frenetic mugging.Yet I found myself very much liking the subject of Tom Farley and Tanner Colby’s engaging oral history The Chris Farley Show, today’s entry in the Silly Show-Biz Book Club, in part because he was such a Madison/Chicago kind of guy. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that Wisconsin has a culture of alcoholism and excess. But Wisconsin has a culture of alcoholism and excess.In the introduction, Tom Farley writes that a favorite pastime among his family and friends is swapping Chris Farley stories and that the book is an attempt to preserve for posterity those wonderful little vignettes while constructing the ultimate Chris Farley story, an overarching narrative that would put all the puzzle pieces together to form a grand mosaic. This is Farley's story as told by the people closest to him so unlike Bob Woodward's Wired, which reduced subject John Belushi to the sum of his urges and addictions, it's perhaps overly generous. The fact that it's co-written by his brother certainly doesn't hurt. Though some of the people interviewed are refreshingly blunt and candid in their appraisal of Farley. David Spade in particular is refreshingly unsentimental about his relationship with Farley. They may have been the Aykroyd and Belushi to an army of jocks but towards the end Farley was just an obnoxious junkie Spade didn't want to deal with it. Farley grew up in an environment where dad drank all the time and ate like food was going to be banned the next day and was beloved by one and all. Farley’s dad was a professional schmoozer (he owned a paving company), a man whose workday consisted of taking clients out for drinks and eating meal after meal.Farley grew up fat and insecure but blessed with an almost preternatural ability to make people laugh. It was an ability he cultivated above all others. It was a gift and a curse, for Farley could never be sure if people were laughing at him or with him, if they were laughing in appreciation of a superb physical comedian or guffawing derisively at fatty acting a fool. In a brutal, patently unfair, queasily voyeuristic New York magazine evisceration of one of SNL's bleakest eras the writer captures this conundrum when he quotes veteran writer James Downey telling a fart-happy Farley, “Look around. All these people are laughing at you. Not with you. And they’re your friends now, because you’re the big clown. But they’re gonna all go on…and you’ll still be there, just farting away.”Downey’s depressingly prescient words anticipate the sad period just before Farley’s death where he’s reduced to hanging out with asshole stockbroker types—the kind who furtively call friends and gush, “Dude, I am so doing rails with Chris Farley! High five!”—because the people who genuinely cared about him had no interest in watching Farley kill himself with coke, heroin, and alcohol.