Ideas for skits, says Ferris, come to him any time of night or day, now that he has "stopped working at any legitimate job. I watch a lot of television. But most of the time, I meander around the streets and just think.
"I remember when I got the idea for the foreign language cursing detector. I was sitting on a bench in the park, smoking grass, when some foreign tourists came and sat down, and started talking about me in German like I was a bum. And I thought, why not have a portable siren that goes off whenever a swear word is spoken in any language?"
He describes himself as "a very unregimented person who can't jive with the mainstream industry." This accounts for much of the spontaneity in Waste Meat News. The performers sometimes don't see the scripts until the taping session. Each segment requires several run-throughs before it is smooth enough to be filmed. Frequently the filming goes on far into the night. Although the show is done with a single camera and half-inch videotape, the final result makes up in charm what it lacks in professional gloss.
"Maybe I'm a little rough in the way I produce it," says Ferris, "but I'm being a pioneer and I'm not worried about perfection as long as the audience has a positive reaction."
His cast is an irregular group of about 15 unpaid actors and actresses, most of them young. Two current stars of Waste Meat News are Pat Profito, a master of comedy who injects an infectious vitality into all of his performances, and Laura Suarez, a Strassberg-trained actress and former Playboy Bunny who frequently portrays the naive sexpot who crops up in many of Ferris' sketches.
Most of the filming is done on the Upper West Side — usually on the street or in someone's apartment, but also in such diverse places as stores, restaurants, the waterfront, boiler rooms and lobbies. A recent skit was shot at a Westside swimming pool; it features Pat Profito as a swimming instructor who teaches three bikini-clad beauties his "jump-in-and-swim" method, in which he pushes them into the pool and expects them to swim instinctively, or drown.
Ferris, who grew up in Queens and Brooklyn "and departed as soon as was possible," studied filmmaking at New York University under Martin Scorsese and was encouraged to pursue comedy writing. For the past five years he has been married to Beverly Ross, a composer with many hits to her credit including "Lollipop."
It's 10 seconds before midnight on Sunday evening. Time once again for Ferris to bid his viewers goodnight. "And remember: stay alienated, stay wiped out, and stay wasted."
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EASTSIDER SAMMY CAHN
Oscar-winning lyricist