Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (52 page)

VICTORIA JACKSON:

Oh, another thing — in my audition, when Lorne said I think you’re weak in characters, I said, oh, well, you know who’s the greatest female character actress in America? Jan Hooks. And I didn’t even know if he knew her, but I had already worked with her on
The Half-Hour Comedy Hour
, which was trying to be like
SNL
, and I was like a baby at the time. It was like my first TV show. Arsenio Hall was the star of it. And I had seen Jan be brilliant — like backstage when the cameras weren’t even on, she would do a lesbian gas station attendant in Atlanta. And she would just go into these people and I thought she was like great. I mean, personally she pretty much hates my guts, but professionally I thought she was like a genius, so I told Lorne. And I told her later, “I told Lorne to hire you.”

KEVIN NEALON:

I was renting a house in the Hollywood Hills and Dana was living in an apartment over the garage, temporarily, and there was another comedian I was living with and a writer, and I was dating Jan Hooks at the time.

JAN HOOKS,
Cast Member:

Kevin was great. We were really, really good friends. And my mom got sick. My mom had cancer. And I just grabbed on to Kevin and he went down to Atlanta where my mom was. And we just started this relationship — it was a relationship out of a kind of trauma. And the only problem was that we both got
Saturday Night Live
in the middle of it.

He was hired as a featured player and Lorne wasn’t quite sure what I was. He thought the year before I was too old, and then I heard through the grapevine that he thought I had a weird mouth and he didn’t want to hire me because of my mouth.

TERRY TURNER:

Dana and Bonnie and I wrote a lot of the Church Ladys together, but it was Dana’s creation. We sort of played support. We were the only people — because we were from the South and there was a cable industry in the South that hadn’t quite reached into New York — we were the first people who really knew, next to Jan, who Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were, and all of the nuances of who they were, which is sort of how we got into the Church Lady, because it became a target of that character. And we were sort of the people who could access it quickly.

JAN HOOKS:

I knew Tammy Faye Bakker from the seventies. She had a show in Atlanta — when I worked in Atlanta. I would just religiously, pardon the pun, watch. It was just unbelievable. And I turned my friends on to Tammy Faye. And I actually went in to Lorne and said that there’s a woman that’s on cable, Tammy Faye Bakker, and I would really love to do her. He said, “I’ve never heard of her.” I said, “Yeah, but she’s such a great character.” And then, lo and behold, the scandal happened.

ROSIE SHUSTER,
Writer:

Dana’s audition tape was the most amazing audition tape I’ve ever seen, because he nailed impressions and pushed them to this surreal place but he also did these amazingly absurd, highly original characters like the chopping broccoli guy. I especially responded to this rudimentary version of the Church Lady. The smug superior attitude was there. And the consummately couchy “Isn’t that special?” I think that character reminded me of a Waspy, repressed side of Toronto that was very big on shaming. So I mentioned that to Lorne and he teamed me up with Dana, who at the time was this sketch-comedy virgin, and together we anchored this character in a “Church Chat” talk-show format. And we added all this titillating talk of engorged naughty bits and all that kind of stuff.

“Church Chat” stole the rehearsal and it got moved up to open the show, the first show of the new season. So it was pretty prominent, pretty scary. But it struck a main vein pretty instantly, instant franchise time, and they were very fun to write. The Church Lady would project her filthy erotomaniac imagination all over the poor hapless guest, whoever they were. She would basically verbally slime them with her own repressed garbage and then she’d go to town shaming them. She had a black belt in shaming. And then she’d coyly suggest their behavior was the work of Satan.

Thinking back, I think the Church Lady was the forerunner of what Kenneth Starr did to Bill Clinton.

DANA CARVEY:

The very first night was a crisis. The Church Lady — which no one knew if it would work — was going to be the last sketch on in the dress rehearsal, right before the good-nights — in other words, the dumping ground. But then it
killed
in dress and they moved it up to be the very first sketch. And then I had this chopping broccoli thing, and then the show was sort of on my shoulders for some reason, and I felt just intense pressure. I would essentially cry in my dressing room. I’m emotional. And then I was swearing at myself in the mirror. There was so much pressure, because there I was, thirty-one, I never thought I would get on
Saturday Night Live
, and here was this first show, I was unknown, I had never done sketch comedy, the red light was going to come on, twenty million people, the pressure was so extreme, at least the way I felt — and then it came off great. So that was a huge moment.

JAN HOOKS:

The show changed my life, obviously. But I have horrible stage fright. And with all these, you know, stand-up comics who I love — you know, Dana and Dennis and Kevin and all these people — you know they wanted their shot, they wanted to get in there and do it, but I was one of the ones that between dress and air was sitting in the corner going, “Please cut everything I’m in!”

VICTORIA JACKSON:

The first live show of my life, my ex-husband had a hemorrhoidectomy performed in the hospital on the day of my show and he’s like, “Why aren’t you here visiting me?” I’m like, “I’m on
Saturday Night Live!
For my first time! Are you kidding?”

JAN HOOKS:

Victoria Jackson? I thought she had a pretty good gig. I just have a particular repulsion to grown women who talk like little girls. It’s like, “You’re a grown woman! Use your lower register!” And she’s a born-again Christian. I don’t know, she was like from Mars to me. I never really got her.

DANA CARVEY:

I’m too passive-aggressive to have ever had a fight with Lorne. But we had little snippets. You’re working under conditions where you’re exhausted. If I’d been assigned an impression that I didn’t get and I just tanked at dress, he’d say, “Dana, are you ever going to get John Travolta?” or whoever. “No, I’m never going to get it, Lorne, you should just cut it.” “Really???” My thing was like, “Church Lady’s not happening tonight.” And I would just say, “Well, maybe we should just cut it.”

“Rrrrrrright. So you’re saying we’re going to cut the thing that’s going to make the show.”

“Well, that’s my suggestion.”

“Dana, no no no no no no, don’t misunderstand me.” Lorne is so brilliant at getting in your head. “No no no no no no, don’t misunderstand me, I think it’s fabulous, if you want to go that route, that burlesque route, um, it’s fine, but I think you’ll find if you keep it smart, it’s where all the good stuff is.”

See, I had to learn all that, because I thought a laugh is a laugh. And then Lorne and those guys were kind of like, well no, there’s different levels, there’s smart laughs and there’s dumb laughs. Being a stand-up comedian to me, it was just, “Get the fucking laugh at all costs.”

VICTORIA JACKSON:

I brought the writers food. They were all very intensely writing. Their goal wasn’t to make me a star; most of them wrote themselves into the show to become stars. If you want to get in the show more, you could always bring the writers some food. Well, I tried that.

I asked Robert Smigel, “Robert, how come I never get to do any impressions? I never get to do any characters.” And he says, “Because you’re nasal.” And I said, “There must be someone nasal I can do an impression of.” He goes, “Roseanne Barr is kind of nasal.” And I said, “Let me do her. She’s hot now. She’s nasal, can I do her?” And he’s like, “Hmm.” And so he wrote a sketch, and I was thrilled.

Jon Lovitz always tried to help me get in the show too. Dana and Kevin and Lovitz — they helped a little. Kevin and Dana wrote me into “Hans and Franz” as Roseanne getting liposuction.

KEVIN NEALON:

I think Hans and Franz made Dana and me laugh more than any other characters when we were writing them. It’s funny how something like that will permeate the culture and become pop culture. It seems audiences are like parrots, they like to repeat phrases that either have some kind of cadence to them or are silly. Whether it’s “Isn’t that con-veeen-ient?” or “We want to pump — you up,” or whatever it is — “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger.” It’s something that everybody can relate to, when they get around at the office on Monday morning and just kind of laugh, because everybody kind of recognizes it. They can all be in on the laugh. And they can use it as their own little personal joke. I mean I do that too, with other people’s stuff. If I hear a lot of Mike Myers stuff, like “Yeah, baby,” I find myself doing that. People need that occasional catchphrase in their life. The coolest thing for Dana and me is that on the space shuttle they were doing Hans and Franz, which was fun.

JON LOVITZ:

You’re always competing. I mean, it’s not like you want the other people to do bad, but it’s just the way it’s set up because, you know, you write all Tuesday night and then they pick like three of the forty sketches at read-through, and then they whittle that down to fourteen of them, then six would get cut. Only about eight or nine make it to air. It was competitive. I mean, it just was the way it worked. And when I was there anyway, it was almost like the writers against the cast, and if you got a lot of stuff on one week, the next week there’d hardly be anything written for you. I also think that the writers would just write for themselves really a lot of times. And just whatever they happened to think of, that’s what they thought of. So certain writers you ended up hooking up with because, you know, your humor was more like theirs. I worked a lot with A.Whitney Brown doing the Liar character the first year. And then Al Franken would write for me a lot.

When I was on the show, like just say from ’86 to ’90, that group stayed the same for four years. You know, the eight of us. And it was very competitive but everybody was working really, really hard and really wanted the sketches to be great. And also I think our group was into saying let’s do this sketch but also try to do great acting, like the best as actors. And play it really, you know, funny, but also trying to make it really real and believable.

My first year, I was doing well, so they pushed me a lot. And I got everything on. And then my second year, I got less. Lorne said, “You’re going to have a lot of competition this year.” And then, I don’t know, I was supposed to do a Liar movie and it didn’t work out. And so that caused problems between Lorne and me. So I would say stuff about him and it would get back to him, because I was angry about it. So it would get tougher for me to get pieces on. And then, you know, he was mad at me. I mean he just was. He was mad at me for the next four years. And then he was mad at me for leaving the show for six or seven years. Because I left. What happened was, he was mad. I mean, everybody would talk about him, but for some reason, everything I said got back to him. I wasn’t saying anything different than anybody else. I would never say it in public and I still won’t, because — because the guy hired me, you know, and he gave me the opportunity of a lifetime. So my beef with him was more about, I thought we were friends and I heard he said stuff about me. So I was hurt by that.

I was supposed to do two movies that summer and then come back to the show. So I was just thrilled, you know. And then one of the movies didn’t happen. And the other movie, I would’ve had to miss two shows to do it, and Lorne said you can’t miss shows. So I had to choose. Personally, I didn’t think it was fair, because my contract was up and I thought, you know, I did a really good job for five years and I just asked him to miss the first two shows. But his opinion was, well, you know, this show is really important. If I let you miss shows, I have to let everybody else miss shows. And, you know, Belushi and Aykroyd do movies and fly back and forth. And so I asked the producer could I do that, and he said we can’t — you can’t do that. It wouldn’t work out. Lorne was getting a lot of pressure too, from NBC executives who didn’t like — especially Ohlmeyer — didn’t like the idea of people running off to make movies, which to me was stupid. I’d say, “Look, I’ll miss the first two shows and then you don’t have to pay me, of course, or I’ll make ’em up.” If he’d said, “You can do the show, but if you get movies, you can do those too,” I would’ve said, “Fine. Sign me up for the next five years.” Because then what you would’ve had, from my point of view, is a cast full of movie stars. Wouldn’t that have been something?

Of course Lorne later admitted it was a mistake and he should’ve done it that way. And then the following year, he let people miss shows. So, you know, for me personally, it’s kind of upsetting, because I really wanted to stay. And then, of course, the movie I did came out for a week. It was a colossal bomb. It was called
Mom and Dad Save the World
. What happened was, they reedited the movie for kids, so if it had any edgy humor, they took it out, you know.

After the fifth year, when my manager said, “Why don’t you just clear the air with him?” he was very angry. I went in there to do that with him, and he was very angry with me. He was shaking. He was furious. Not yelling but just shaking, you know. But after that, we cleared it and I said okay.

I think a lot of the problem that people have with Lorne is that they just know him as the genius from
Saturday Night Live
, right? Oh, he’s picked you to be in his show. So it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. So you’re so grateful to the guy, you know, like here’s this guy giving you the chance of a lifetime. So you’re automatically like, “Thank you,” and he’s the boss and you have strong feelings for him and you want to please your boss. And, you know, he’s not really demonstrative that way. But actors are.