Christina Applegate recalls “SNL” sketch when she and David Spade couldn’t stop laughing: 'They were mad at us'

The actress says she was "on the precipice of losing it" even before Chris Farley stepped out to debut his iconic motivational speaker, Matt Foley.

Three decades after Chris Farley introduced the world to his legendary Saturday Night Live character Matt Foley, Christina Applegate and David Spade are still cracking up about it.

During Applegate’s recent appearance on the Fly on the Wall podcast with Spade and Dana Carvey, the Joe Dirt star told her that to this day, he is still recognized for the fan-favorite “Van Down by the River” sketch. But while viewers love that he and Applegate could barely contain their laughter, their SNL cohort felt differently.

“No one really wanted us to laugh,” Spade recalled, and Applegate was quick to agree.

“No, that’s like 'in trouble' stuff. You get in trouble there, if you laugh,” she said, before arguing that Spade was at least partially responsible for inciting her laughter. “You came down the stairs at the beginning and we had just done 'Gap Girls,' and you still had purple eyeshadow on. So now, I’m already done.”

Applegate added that Spade wasn’t wearing a small amount of makeup but a “full eye of purple eyeshadow.” So where did that leave her? “I was already on the precipice of losing it,” she said.

Holding it together wasn’t easy, but she managed — at least until Farley emerged in-character. “And then Chris comes out and does his thing, but he’s taking it to 11. Whereas in rehearsal it was 9.5,” she said. “He went so far into loony town, and Dave and I could not handle.”

The infamous sketch sees Spade and Applegate playing siblings whose parents hire a motivational speaker to get them back on track after the family’s cleaning lady discovers weed in the house. But rather than motivate them, the abrasive, down-on-his-luck Foley screams in their faces, shuts down their dreams, and tells the kids that they’ll just end up “living in a van down by the river!”

“I think we broke at the same time,” Applegate recalled. “It was one thing he did and I could feel both of us trying to hold it in as much as we could. And then I put my hair in front of my eyes because I knew I had a line coming up. Like, my only funny line in the sketch, and I was like, ‘I’m going to say this freaking line.’”

She continued, “And I, with everything that was in myself, was like, ‘Pull it together, pull it together, pull it together, pull it together,’ just to deliver the line, and then I was done again.”

Though she and Spade weren’t the only ones who broke, Applegate remains convinced that Julia Sweeney and the late Phil Hartman, who played their parents in the sketch, were pissed at them for laughing.

“Julia and Phil were so— kinda looking at us like they were mad at us. They were very professional… And we were not.”

Sweeney has fessed up to being upset during the fan-favorite sketch — but her anger was directed inwards.

“I break all the time and I hate it about myself," Sweeney confessed in 2020. “When Chris Farley did the 'down by the river' Matt Foley, I was in that. They had to cut around me because I was laughing. Because it was like I had the best seat in the house for the funniest friggin' thing that was happening on the planet."

Laughter caused by Matt Foley extended far beyond the walls of Studio 8H, leading Farley to reprise the role seven more times throughout his SNL run.

Listen to Applegate's full interview on Fly on the Wall above.

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