Early into the 16th season of Saturday Night Live in 1990, one of the biggest stars in the country pushed aside a row of red and silver streamers, and stepped onto the stage. The crowd laughed at him.

Or rather, they laughed because of the man who walked out next to him.

Patrick Swayze, who was fresh off Road House and Ghost—and whose hair was immaculately feathered—was simply the setup for the punch line of Chris Farley, whose very presence onstage was enough to set the crowd into hysterics.

At this point, barely anyone knew who Farley was. He was 26 years old, from Madison, Wisconsin, and, until very recently, seen only by comedy junkies at The Second City in Chicago. He had never had anything resembling a serious job (his parents looked after him financially in Chicago), and it wasn’t even clear to Chris’s brother, Kevin, if Chris had ever been to New York before getting cast on SNL. David Spade, who called his new SNL office-mate “Wisconsin Dundee,” said in his 2015 memoir Almost Interesting that, in those early days, Farley would take out just $20 at a time from the ATM, unable (or unwilling) to accept the fact that he had NBC money now.

And yet here Farley was, next to Swayze, the original (and superior) Channing Tatum—a soon-to-be Sexiest Man Alive, as declared by sexiness authority People magazine. It was Farley’s fourth show, and he had never starred in a sketch. Within seconds of his appearance, however, the crowd felt a deep attachment. And they would never let him go.

[Read Nate Rogers's piece celebrating and critiquing the iconic Chris Farley Chippendales sketch.]