Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (56 page)

I like the day on Friday. Saturday it’s just too nuts. I’m getting to be an older man now, and all the running around and changing you’ve got to do, ugh. I’ve got to be rested and fit for that, so physically it’s a little draining. But on Fridays I just like being there, I feel like I’m at home.

JAN HOOKS:

I loved Dolly Parton. She came in and said, “Look, okay, here’s the deal. I won’t use any cuss words and I won’t make fun of Jesus.” Those were her two demands. And anything else was carte blanche.

GREG DANIELS:

Mel Gibson did the show, and he has a pretty strong sense of humor. But I’m not sure if it’s really the same sense of humor of the show. I remember him trying to pitch us doing a parody of
Brideshead Revisited
that he called “Bird’s Head Regurgitated.” He’s like pitching that really strongly, and we were kind of politely nodding and thinking how do we not do “Bird’s Head Regurgitated.”

DANA CARVEY:

Robert Mitchum hosted once and I did a sketch with him, and he was like out-of-body. I think he had like half a gallon of whiskey in his room. He was of the old school.

TOM HANKS:

The second time you’re back, you think you know how things are going. The second time I was on the show, Randy Travis was the musical guest. It was around the Winter Olympics in 1988. So by that time I had done it already once and the gee-whiz-bang aspect of being in the room was a little bit different. You fancy yourself a seasoned professional now. And you’re just kind of in the middle of the show, middle of a season. Everybody’s exhausted. Always a couple people around with the flu and just kind of like bang through it. I felt honored to be invited back, like I was in some sort of quasi-select club, but I don’t think the show was all that great.

BOB ODENKIRK:

They have a pool of names of potential hosts. They have a few that are anchored down for one reason or another — they have a movie coming out or whatever — and famous enough. But then, outside of that, for a normal show, two weeks ahead of time they’ve got a pool of names, two or three people, and they ask these people to host the show. And these people say yes or no, or maybe these people all want to host the show, and they’re tentatively scheduled for that week. And then, as the week gets closer, Lorne picks one of them. And what happens then is the other two people get burned. Supposedly John Candy was like the most-burned potential host, in that he would never host the show, because he’d been asked to do it so many times and then told “no thanks” at the last minute by the staff — which is all Lorne.

AL FRANKEN:

When there’s a Beatle up in the office, nothing gets done. Because everybody is just following the Beatle around, you know? So here’s my George Harrison story. I think it was the second season Lorne was back, so ’86 or something like that. George went out to dinner with Lorne, and it was on a Tuesday night — Tuesday night as you know by now is writing night, right? So it’s about eleven at night or something and George comes back to the show, comes up to seventeen, and he’s really drunk.

And he hung around until like two o’clock in the morning, and nothing had gotten done. He was just really drunk. He’s at the piano in the read-through room playing and playing, and my office was the office closest to the piano. And he plays the piano for like a real long time, and again he’s really drunk, so I take Phil Hartman aside and I go, “Phil, watch this.” Phil stands outside my office, I go into my office, and I
SLAM
the door as hard as I can. And Harrison jumped about three feet off the bench — and finally left.

So that’s my George Harrison story.

GREG DANIELS:

Judge Reinhold wasn’t one of my favorites. The thing is, you get a lot of these guys right when they’re at their maximumly famous, most fame-going-to-their-head moments. And they come in. They’re in New York City. And they’re hosting the show and they kind of give you like a couple of minutes and they want to run out and just have fun. That was definitely how Judge was that week. But I’m sure he’s a nice guy now.

Even if all other attempts at livening up the show failed, it was almost guaranteed a new burst of energy every four years when election time came around. During the Ebersol years
, SNL
dabbled only lightly and mildly in political humor, but once Michaels returned, the show began to build a stronger and flintier political profile. In time it became an integral if impudent part of the process. The line between observing and participating was sometimes blurred. Politicians who were roasted over a spit on
Saturday Night Live
would nevertheless appear on the program themselves if given the opportunity — everyone, over the years, from Gerald Ford to Janet Reno (Bill Clinton was a notorious bad-sport holdout). George H. W. Bush was so enamored of Dana Carvey’s presidential portrayal that he invited Carvey to the White House and eventually taped a cold open for the show.

Jim Downey was the best political satirist among the writers, though Al Franken wrote some great political sketches too. Among the all-time best was a 1988 primary “debate” by Downey and Franken and Davis which starred Franken as Pat Robertson, who then fancied himself a candidate, Dana Carvey as George Bush (Carvey then in the fetal stage of what would later become a classic Bush impression), and Dan Aykroyd making a gala return to the show as a hilariously petty Bob Dole.

DANA CARVEY:

I was just assigned George Bush, and I couldn’t do him at all. It was just a weird voice and weird rhythm. It’s one of those things where you go, “There’s nothing to do.” Reagan was so easy because you just go, “
Well
, everybody.” But then over time, after Bush won the election, one night I just sort of hooked it, and it was that phrase “that thing out there, that guy out there doin’ that thing,” and that sort of hooked it for me, and from there on I kind of refined it.

He enjoyed it. I give him credit. He was just incredibly friendly. Lorne and I had done a benefit for Pamela Harriman and the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C., where I played George Bush, and he heard about that and invited us to the White House, Lorne and I, so he was just Charm Central. In ’92 after he lost the election, he invited me back — which was really surreal, because I was actually talking to Jon Lovitz on the phone and I got the call waiting thing and the quote is, “This is White House operator number one, hold for the president.” And I go, “Jon, I gotta go,” and he goes, “Why? Is there a bigger name on the other line?” And I go, “Well, it’s the president.”

So he invited me out there to cheer up the troops, as he saw it. His sense of it was that it wasn’t mean, that it was mostly silly. But I don’t think he ever saw the one where we had him on his knees saying, “Please, God, don’t make me a one-termer.” I don’t think they knew or wondered about my politics, whether I was incredibly left or whatever, but I was sort of in the White House and Barbara would bring up politics and George would say, “Let’s not do it.” And for my wife and me, it’s still one of the peak experiences and most mind-blowing experiences of our life, to be in the White House with the president, who had just lost the election, during Christmas. It was just so gorgeous and surreal. And we’re in the Lincoln Bedroom and suddenly he comes in, and he’s six-foot-four and he goes, “How ya doin’, meet ya downstairs,” and he just sort of charmed the pants off us.

I only met him that one time for ten minutes in 1988, and then we just mercilessly made fun of him for four years. Al Franken’s a pretty famous Democrat, Jim Downey’s a real Republican, I refer to myself as a radical moderate. So in the beginning of George Bush’s tenure, he was so damn popular, I think he saw some of those sketches where the angle was how happy he was. It wasn’t until the last eighteen months, where we had the recession and the no-new-taxes thing, where some of the stuff was heavier hitting. I think between Lorne and Al Franken, they wouldn’t have allowed me to make it soft. We make fun of liberals too, you know.

It’s scary to go out there and know you don’t have it. You just say, “I’m George Bush” and cop an attitude. When I was in college I would tape Dan Aykroyd off the television, tape his Jimmy Carter, shamelessly practice it, and then go to the clubs and just steal it, do his Jimmy Carter. Then eight, nine years later Danny’s in the office going, “I really like your George Bush.” It was kind of surreal.

I would actually give Lorne credit in terms of the way he worked with me. He sort of saw my potential before I did and kind of pushed me out there.

MIKE MYERS,
Cast Member:

I wanted to be on the show since I was eleven years old, so I wear having done it as a badge of honor.

I didn’t really audition. Producer Pam Thomas, who is the wife of Dave Thomas of
SCTV
, had seen me at the tenth anniversary of Second City Toronto — as had Martin Short. Pam called up Lorne and said, “Have a look at this kid” — and so did Martin Short. I got called in for an interview and I got hired from the interview, which was very lucky for me. But I wasn’t quite sure I had gotten hired when I came out of the room. Dave Foley from the Kids in the Hall, who’s a really great friend of mine — a great guy from Toronto as well — was there when I came out of Lorne’s office, and he and I started walking downtown. We tried to dissect what Lorne had said. He said, “Would you want a job here?” And I didn’t know if that was an offer, but I said, “Yes.” So I just kept asking Dave, “So, does this mean I’m hired?” Foley and I walked all the way from Midtown down to the Village trying to decipher if I was hired.

CONAN O’BRIEN:

I remember very clearly when Mike Myers showed up. He was wearing a leather jacket with the American flag on the back. It was his first time there and he was very polite and proud to be at
SNL
. He was asking us all about what he should submit in our read-through and we were giving him advice, Robert Smigel and Bob Odenkirk, Greg Daniels, and I. And then he came to us and he described to us this idea, this character he had named Wayne who had a cable show in his basement, and the show was called “Wayne’s World.” We politely told him that we didn’t think it was his best idea. But I remember very clearly sitting at read-through in my little folding chair, and I turned the page of the script and there’s the “Wayne’s World” we had dissuaded him from submitting. And I felt sorry for him. I thought, “This poor kid is going to have to learn the hard way.”

MIKE MYERS:

If Conan’s recounting that, he’s recounting it modestly. My memories of Conan O’Brien are just that he was absolutely supportive, decent, fair, hilarious — the funniest guy in the room. So if he’s saying he was a naysayer at any point, that’s him being extremely modest. He’d always give you great positive encouragement, but he also had a great eye on how to make something better. You always came away with three great jokes that he would give you. He’s a great collaborator and a generous, generous colleague.

As it happens, the first thing I did that went over big with the studio audience was on my fourth show, when I did do “Wayne’s World.” It was what they call the ten-to-one spot, the last sketch of the night. And it went really great. On that next Monday, as I was coming into work, I heard somebody working in the building singing the theme song from “Wayne’s World.” I was like completely blown away, because it had been on at ten to one. But somebody was going, “Wayne’s world, Wayne’s world.” I was like, “Were you in the audience?” The guy goes, “No, no, we saw it on TV.” I go, “Of course.” And that was a really magical moment. The only thing I can describe it as is magic. Just unbelievable.

ROBERT WRIGHT:

Probably my favorite skit was “Da Bears.” It didn’t last that long, but it’s incorrectness was so funny, so crying-out-loud funny. I told Farley and Smigel, who wrote a lot of that material. They’d sit there at the table with heaps of meat, just heaps of meat — it was just so stereotypical — and say, “Da Bears.” It was what made
SNL.
It just brought tears to your eyes how stupid it was but how real it was. That’s the kind of humor you expect the show to produce all the time. You can’t do that all the time, but when you see it, it’s great.

JACK HANDEY:

There are very few shows on television where writers are not forcibly rewritten. When we would sit around the rewrite table, it was up to the writer whether he wanted to take any changes that were suggested, even if Lorne didn’t like it. I remember I wrote this sketch for Jerry Hall when she hosted. It was called “Sore Toe.” And it was just that Randy Quaid had a sore toe, and the gag was basically all these things that were a danger to the sore toe. Anyway, there was a non sequitur ending where Jerry Hall said something like, “Your father has gone and hung himself.” It was just out of the blue. And it made me laugh and Jim Downey laughed really a lot.

But Mick Jagger was there and just hated the ending, or so I heard. And he was trying to get Lorne to make me change it, and I said, “No, I like it the way it is.” And to his credit, he left it on.
Saturday Night Live
is one of the few shows where writers really can control what they get on. Of course, you can fight really hard and produce the piece and then it’s cut after dress. But at least if it does get on, you usually control it.

TERRY TURNER:

I remember at one point we were standing at the elevators on seventeen and we had been there for like thirty minutes pressing the button, going, “What the hell’s going on?” Five or six people walk by, and finally somebody walks by — I think it was Al Franken — and he says, “Those don’t run at night.” So it was like you were on your own to discover anything. There was no handbook to figure out how this worked.