The (Sketch) Show of Shows: Author Susan Morrison on Lorne Michaels and 50 Years of ‘Saturday Night Live’
At the center of all the televised festivities for the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live is Lorne Michaels, the dry-humored Canadian who, when Johnny Carson stopped airing reruns of The Tonight Show on Saturday nights (he wanted to run them during the week, in order to take time off), created a live sketch comedy show to fill that 11:30 spot.
It was 1975. Gerald Ford was president, New York City was bankrupt, and Richard Pryor, a host in that first season, was near the peak of his powers. The show was made on the fly. “I know what the ingredients are, but not the recipe,” Lorne Michaels told NBC executives, who were skeptical as he lined up actors he knew (see: Gilda Radner, star of a Canadian production of Godspell) and actors he didn’t (see: an Albanian American from Chicago named John Belushi).
Michaels started with the writers; he was himself a survivor of the Hollywood joke-writing machine. “Haunted by the Laugh-In assembly line method, in which every writer’s jokes went into the maw,” writes Susan Morrison, in Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, her new biography of the SNL creator, “Michaels envisioned a show in which a sketch’s author would be recognizable from its style.” SNL was immediately recognizable for its vibe, which was frantic and smart, immediate and intimate, with sketches that were wild or thoughtful and occasionally both. Ditto the music, with fewer glitzy AM bands and more bands you’d hear on FM: Taj Mahal, or the late, great Phoebe Snow. Michaels took the old Rockefeller Center radio stage and filled it with a high-voltage and occasionally drug-addled company that in six days whipped up a show from nothing, creating what critic Tom Shales called “a trend setting satirical theater of the air.”
Fifty years later, the cast and crew have changed, but at the center of Morrison’s biography remains the page-turning question: Will they manage to pull off this week’s show? Framed through a week behind the scenes in Studio 8H, the book follows Michaels’s rise from a 12-year-old summer camp impresario to the ruthless editor who takes his seat in a booth under the SNL audience bleachers during dress rehearsals, critiquing and cutting. “May the cast members go to their graves never knowing the things I heard under the bleachers,” says John Mulaney, who wrote for SNL from 2008 to 2015.
Lorne gives us a history of television in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and a high school yearbook portrait of the people who made it happen over the years. We see Candice Bergen posing for a selfie with Leslie Jones, and Keith Richards at a Canadian heroin trial. Maggie Rogers goes on stage, next up after a long list of acts, from Sun Ra to SZA. Herewith, some questions for the author (and New Yorker editor), Susan Morrison:
