November 8, 2002
By D.K. Holm
Dead, from New York, It's Saturday Night!
Pause with us now for a moment of silence for some of the great names of Comedy Past; names that shall ring in the Annals of Comedy forever. Whenever great punchlines are discussed; wherever brilliant skits are re-enacted; wherever bits of business are studied for their arcane secrets; wherever clever recurring characters get re-created for the Children; who then shall know better their Elders and their Times; these names shall live and breathe again!
The List of Great Comedy Names is a roll call of sketch comedy at is zenith. Yes, such beloved names as Ellen Cleghorne, Denny Dillon, Robin Duke, Melanie Hutsell, Tony Rosato, Gail Matthius, Ann Risley, Pamela Stephenson, Terry Sweeney, Danitra Vance, and Gary Kroeger. Yea, by these names shall ye truly know great comedy!
Wait a second, you might ask at this point. Who are these people? What, you mean you don't recognize some of the names from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE's sterling past? You didn't rollick with laughter at Terry Sweeney's Joan Collins impression? You didn't nod your head with quiet recognition at Tony Rosato's Ed Asner? You didn't wait with bated breath for Gail Matthius to do "Rowena"? You don't remember how Pamela Stephenson and Terry Sweeney each had the weirdest hair ever truly not ready for prime time?
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE is now an institution; a weekly salve to those bruised or bored by regular television. It will probably never go away. Everybody complains about how unfunny the show is nowadays, but they still watch it every week; if for no other reason than to ogle the musical guests. How SNL launched in way-too-long-ago 1975 and continues to survive within a medium that has exploded with more, better viewing options is something of a mystery, and it's a mystery that isn't addressed in the latest book about the show, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller's oral history LIVE FROM NEW YORK: AN UNCENSORED HISTORY OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (594 pages, $25.95 dollars, ISBN 0 316 78146 0).
If you're trying to place SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE accurately in the history of humor, you have to realize that far from the "alternative" take on comedy that it's always heralded to be, SNL was straight show-biz from the beginning, fostered by people just as driven and drugged-up and rooted in show-biz notions of comedy as their TV, vaudeville, and big-screen predecessors. In this book, which is a sort of "oral history" of SNL, the various cast members even talk like old troupers in their references to "killing" the audience, or to skits that "died."
And look at some of the program's guest hosts, who appeared on the show without falling victim to undermining tactics or distancing "irony": Walter Matthau, O. J. Simpson, Lou Gossett, Sid Caesar , Robert Blake, Jerry Lewis, and Charlton Heston (twice!), and even Milton Berle (who, it must be said, reportedly showed his penis to one of the writers). If you want truly alternative comedy, if you want satire on current events, there are plenty of better places to find it on the tube these days than on a show where Charlton Heston introduces a crappy, of-the-moment rock act anointed by record executives.
One can track the essential emptiness of the SNL "humor aesthetic" by noting how it has translated into other media. Books about the show are inevitably hagiographic celebrations of its numerous cast members. The sitcoms its cast members have moved into are just sitcoms. And the movies they have done speak, or fail to speak, for themselves.
Maybe it's just me being naïve, but I assumed that refugees from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE would embrace hard-hitting satire, sort of the way the Kids in the Hall did with their underrated film BRAIN CANDY. Instead, ex-SNL-ers almost invariably go mainstream; they invariably become the living embodiments of that cliche about every comedian wanting to be loved. As a group, they pursue movies that position them as romantic leads. Frankly, I don't visualize Rob Schneider, David Spade or Dana Carvey as romantic leads. Only Bill Murray survives his transition from TV to the big screen untarnished, hewing consistently to his harsh anarchic persona, and Adam Sandler's recent alliance with Paul Thomas Anderson shows a desire to break out of the constraints of merely profitable frat-boy humor.
The first episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE I saw was the one with Desi Arnaz as the host; the 14th show, to be precise, broadcast in February 1976. I watched it at the apartment of my fellow film-buff friend Jeff Godsil. At the end of the show, just before the credits, Arnaz started a conga line, and the cast and musicians standing around on the stage ostentatiously hugging each other fell in behind him as they snaked through the audience.
I turned to Jeff and said, "That's great. But do you think that the members of the audience would be invited up to join that line? This isn't some hip new show breaking down the fourth wall. The audience is as excluded, as always. It's about stars and star-making, just like everything else on TV."
Godsil turned to me and said, "That's the pettiest thing I've ever heard anyone say."
Still, like everyone else of my generation, I continued to watch the show, if for no other reason than that, unlike everything else on TV except news and sports events, it had the urgency of a live broadcast (at least on the East Coast). And like everyone else, I laughed at jokes that weren't funny and recurring characters who had worn out their welcome and picked favorites among the rotating cast.
I had a terrible crush on Laraine Newman. Had I known that she was miserable and lonely and shunted aside on the show, as she says she was in the Shales book, and that she hated New York City, I would have somehow gotten to Manhattan and tried to become her boyfriend. But that was 30 years ago.
And now the show is commemorated in oral histories. Here's some of the "insider dirt" found in Shales and Miller's “brief-lives” sketches of SNL's numerous casts:
John Belushi: Frequently referred to himself in skits as likely to be dead before 30. Once walked past Al Franken and Tom Davis's office and sucked up all their newly bought, expensive cocaine just laid out on the desk. Felt he always had to be "on," goofing around in public. Often set people's houses on fire. Late and unprepared for rehearsals. Refused to do sketches written by women. Refused to do skits in drag. Was tough on the guest hosts. Never carried ID. His cousin tried to take a picture of his corpse for a tabloid. Dead.
Gilda Radner: Bulimic. Had meals for seven delivered at three in the morning and threw it all up. Desperate need for approval from Lorne Michaels. Slept with Dan Aykroyd, G. E. Smith, Paul Simon and Bill Murray. Writer Alan Zweibel was in love with her but she never went to bed with him (didn't he know that the writer never gets to fuck anybody?). Obsessed with Jane Curtin and her husband, whom she would visit and watch for hours. Dead.
Chris Farley: An alcoholic from his Second City days. Hero-worshiped John Belushi. Had his SNL girlfriend stolen away by Steve Martin. Liked to take off all his clothes. Once took a dump out the 17-floor window of 30 Rock. Was able to stay off booze and drugs for a while, and then ended up hanging out with anyone who had weed, including a bunch of teenage Aspen ski bums. Dead.
Phil Hartman: Possibly the most respected and popular cast member. Shot by wife before she turned the gun on herself. Dead.
Dan Aykroyd: Slept with Lorne Michaels's wife. Slept with Laraine Newman. Slept with Gilda Radner.
Chevy Chase: Vain. Full of himself. Left after one year and made everyone else mad and jealous. Excessive drug use. Mean-spirited. Liked to humiliate people when he returned to host. Got in a fistfight with Bill Murray five minutes before airtime.
Laraine Newman: Liked to snort heroin while Gilda Radner threw up.
Bill Murray: Heavy drinker during his SNL days. Obsessed with Gilda Radner.
Joe Piscopo: Professional friend of Eddie Murphy. Obsessed with imitating Frank Sinatra, which he used to work his way into The Clan. Refused to do skits featuring his Frank Sinatra impression if "Frank wouldn’t do that." "Joe saw his Frank thing not in comedy terms but as a tribute," says one writer. Became an iron-pumping vitamin-supplement shill.
Harry Shearer: Mean-spirited. Widely viewed as "impossible" to get along with; also viewed as one of the smartest guys in comedy. Very depressed during his SNL stint. Used to play bass guitar by himself in his office at three in the morning. Was incredibly contemptuous of Billy Crystal, whom he dubbed a "sell out."
Christopher Guest: A real cold fish. Like Shearer, "impossible" to talk to. Described as "giving new meaning to the word 'dry,'" as "an emotional desert," and as unwilling to break his deadpan demeanor for anything. Hated Larry David's material when David was briefly a writer on the show.
Nora Dunn and Jan Hooks: Without question the most hated cast members in the history of the show; uncooperative, backstabbing, prone to slamming doors on people. Dunn claimed to be having an affair with Michaels, and used her protest over the appearance of Andrew "Dice" Clay to try and further her career. At a "retreat"-style meeting, Victoria Jackson called Dunn a bitch and then turned to Hooks and added, "And you are the devil."
Lorne Michaels: Real name Lorne Lipowitz. Worked on ROWAN AND MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN and Lily Tomlin specials. Avoids confrontation. Dances funny. A long-winded bore on comedy "theory." Loves popcorn. Surrounded by dishy NBC "interns."
Bad Hosts: Broderick Crawford was drunk the whole time. Kris Kristofferson was stoned the whole time. Hugh Hefner couldn’t sing. Frank Zappa re-thought his onscreen "character" between the dress rehearsal and the actual broadcast, but didn’t tell anyone. Robert Mitchum was drunk. Mel Gibson had a 8-year-old's sense of humor.
I think you get the idea by this point: LIVE FROM NEW YORK : AN UNCENSORED HISTORY OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE is packed with gossip and is a fairly breezy read. It's highly informative about the office politics of the place and the still-festering squabbles and resentments among some of the players and executives and about the weird, zen-like power Michaels has over everyone.
But in the end, the book has a problem, and the problem is that it is an oral history.
"Oral histories" are problematic. You get little if any of the connective tissue and contextual information that makes a lot of the stories make sense or take on any actual importance. You can get a larger sense of its procedures and context from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS (now obviously eight years out of date), from Houghton Mifflin, where some of the same, enduring anecdotes are recounted, or from Dennis Perrin's delightfully dirt-filled biography of Michael O'Donoghue (Avon Books, 1998).
NEXT TIME: Nicole Kidman's first kiss!
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