Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (58 page)

ADAM SANDLER:

I was in, I think, sixth grade when
Saturday Night Live
was the biggest thing. I’m sure the other guys who are my age probably said this too, but my big thing was trying to stay up to watch it. In the schoolyard the cooler kids were talking about the Bees and they talked about Belushi a lot, and I wanted to be part of that conversation. So I tried to stay up, and I’d make it to eleven o’clock and I was very excited; all I had to get through was the news. And I’d usually get to about eleven-twenty — and fall asleep. And then my brother would be carrying me to my room and while he was carrying me I’d be like, “Is it on? Is the show on?” He’d say, “Yeah yeah, don’t worry, go to sleep, I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” And so he would tell me what happened on Sunday mornings and then I would bullshit in the playground and pretend I saw the show also.

I loved Aykroyd. I loved Belushi. I loved Bill Murray. I loved Chevy. I think the reason I loved
Caddyshack
so much growing up is that all my favorite guys were in the movie together. No matter who they cut to, I was, “I love that guy. I love him too.” The hosts back then were cool. Like when Reggie Jackson hosted — I was a huge Yankee fan — that was as cool as it got.

The show was a major part of the life of every one of the kids I grew up with. It was not only topical, because it dealt with current events; it was just like instilled in our heads. “These are the funniest guys of our generation, so whatever they say is funny is funny.”

TIM HERLIHY,
Writer:

Adam Sandler was my college roommate at NYU. He decided he wanted to do stand-up his sophomore year, so I just helped him out. We all kind of helped him out with some material. I started doing it more — more and more as his school progressed. I always figured that he would be successful. We both graduated, and then he went out to L.A. after graduation and I stayed in New York and actually went to NYU Law School. When he got the job at
SNL
, I kind of helped him out. And then he got me a tryout in the spring of ’94.

CHRIS ROCK:

I was a featured guy. Adam actually had to write for like a year. He might’ve got on here and there, but he basically was a writer for a year. We’d give each other jokes sometimes on each other’s pieces. Adam actually gave me the best joke I ever had on the show. It was a Nate X sketch. My militant character, Nate X, used to do these Top Five lists, ’cause the Man wouldn’t give him ten. So — “Top Five Reasons Why Black Guys Don’t Play Hockey.” Adam gave me the joke: “Don’t feel the need to dominate another sport.” Adam Sandler! Adam Sandler, man. Good guy.

FRED WOLF:

Rock is so smart. God, he’s so smart, and he has such a unique sense of humor. We would talk sometimes, you know, we shared an office when he was there. We had these connecting offices in the back toward what’s now “Update.” But anyway, we would talk forever. He was so smart about things. And he appreciated Jim Downey as much as anyone else did.

CHRIS ROCK:

I watched it as a kid, sure. Loved it. Dreamed of being on it. It was my dream. I was twenty-one when I joined the cast. I got a duplex apartment in Fort Green. I bought a car, a Corvette. That stuff. My mom started making money doing stand-up too. That was cool. Prices go up. I had a big year. First
SNL
, then the movie
New Jack City
came out, so I was hot shit — at least I thought I was.

Dana Carvey
was
the show. He carried the show on his back. Add to him Mike Myers, Jan Hooks, and the others, and I think it was a great cast. Our cast actually went on to the most success afterwards, probably. Even Rob Schneider is in big movies. History will say we were the best cast ever.

ADAM SANDLER:

That’s why I love Rock, because he’s got the balls to say anything he wants to. I think we had quite a cast, no doubt about it. You can list off our guys, and both on the show and hanging out with them, they are the guys that make me laugh the hardest.

When I got there, a lot of guys who were my age, the younger guys on the show, we respected the older guys. We knew that when Dana and Phil and Nealon and Dennis and Jan Hooks went out there, they crushed. They knew what they were doing. And we watched them when we were at home so that when we got there, we were just psyched about getting to say we worked with these guys. And the fact that a lot of younger guys were writers also, it made sense that we had to pay our dues and write stuff, and try to impress those guys and say, “Hey, we wrote you a good sketch — do you mind if I play the busboy?” It 100 percent made sense.

DAVID SPADE:

I remember there was a period when the cast members were bigger stars than the hosts. That was scary. I was thinking Mike Myers is a bigger star than the host, and Dana Carvey is a bigger star than the host. It was weird. After they left, it got back to normal, where the cast was all evened out and the hosts were bigger names.

When I got there, they were saying that Dennis Miller and Dana and Phil were horrible, that was a horrible cast, and then in a couple of years, when I moved up into the cast, they said
we
were horrible, why can’t we be like Dana and Phil and those guys, back when it was good? And then when we left, they were telling Will Ferrell that when Spade, Farley, and Sandler were there,
that’s
when it was funny.

JULIA SWEENEY,
Cast Member:

I came from the Groundlings. I was performing there for a few years, and I think it seemed like every week an increasingly more important person from
SNL
would come and watch. And then, in the end, it came down between me and Lisa Kudrow. And so Lorne came and we did like a showcase for me and Lisa — we each got to do three sketches, and I ended up getting chosen. And I remember thinking afterward, “I hope Lisa does okay.”

LISA KUDROW,
Host:

Thank God I didn’t get
Saturday Night Live!
I had met Laraine Newman at the Groundlings, and she let me know that she thought I was really funny and really good. So she called Lorne Michaels and said he should really look at me. Then I found out they were also going to look at Julia Sweeney. Julia and I got to be friends over this. I remember us being on the phone and talking about what a crazy, hideous situation this was for us. There was going to be one show that we were going to do, and based on that one show, a big chunk of our career was going to be decided.

So Lorne came out with Marci Klein, the talent coordinator, and there was one night set aside at the Groundlings for them to look at Julia Sweeney and myself. Julia had a lot of people in the audience. I had some friends in the audience. I even had some good friends who were writers on the show. Conan O’Brien was writing on the show, and I asked him if he could be in the audience. He actually thought that wouldn’t look so good. So I just thought, yeah, the classier route is not to stack the audience. I don’t think I did my best, and, rightly so, they picked Julia.

There’ve been a couple things that I didn’t get or got fired from where friends of mine who had a little more experience said, “It’s always a blessing when a door closes, because another door is going to open.” And there’s no such thing as your whole career being decided in one night. I just kept believing that I was being saved by not doing
Saturday Night Live
to do something else.

JULIA SWEENEY:

I felt really accepted and encouraged and appreciated right away. In some ways my trajectory was the opposite of other people’s who probably were more successful there in the end. My first show was Jimmy Smits, and I did a sketch with Jimmy right after the “Update” spot, which is like an important sketch spot. And so I felt like I came in with a bang. I didn’t come in and hang out and only do teeny parts in sketches waiting until I could get a bigger part. So that was really encouraging for me.

Lorne had wisely paired me up in an office with Christine Zander, and we hit it off immediately. She had been there a few years and knew how to navigate herself around politically there. So the beginning was really great.

ADAM SANDLER:

It helped my whole career when I went from a stand-up comedian who would write maybe a couple of jokes a week that I would be excited about to — I think I was twenty-three when I got on the show — all of a sudden writing a few skits a week and helping other guys out with their ideas and trying to do jokes for their skits. All of a sudden, I thought about writing more. I thought about what really makes me laugh.

FRED WOLF:

My little group that came up on that
Saturday Night Live
were Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Dennis Miller. It was a giant cast. The first time I was there, I was writing for the guys who were featured players who weren’t really getting on the air as much as maybe they’d want to. And so I concentrated on writing for Schneider, Spade, Adam Sandler, and, you know, whenever I could, I’d throw some stuff everyone else’s way too. But I mainly wrote with those guys. And then, when Norm Macdonald was at it, he was another friend of mine and so I wrote with him and for him also.

DAVID MANDEL,
Writer:

I was in the
Lampoon
and, between my junior and senior year, we did a project down at Comedy Central which was called “MTV, Give Me Back My Life.” It was a fake ten-year-anniversary documentary for MTV. And Al Franken was an adviser to it. And the following summer, Al and a guy named Billy Kimble and a couple of the executives from Comedy Central who had been on the show that I worked on for the
Lampoon
went on to do the comedy coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions.

And they all remembered me and hired me back. So I went and worked on that. I spent all summer doing the Democratic and Republican stuff with Al and, at the end of the summer, he basically said, “You’re funny. I’m going to talk to Jim and Lorne and get you on
Saturday Night Live.
” Which was perhaps one of the great moments of my life.

TIM MEADOWS,
Cast Member:

A well-written sketch is basically anything by Jack Handey or Robert Smigel. Those guys write sketches that are refreshing to watch and different takes on the subjects or comic premise. It’s original.

BOB ODENKIRK:

I would like to state for the record that Robert Smigel saved sketch comedy in America. I think he was the best sketch writer in America for like that ten-year period, his first ten years there. And as great as Jim Downey is, and as pure as he is, I think Robert was really hitting his stride and, you know, doing amazing things — everything from a
McLaughlin Group
to the James Kirk sketch to a lot of Perot stuff to so much great stuff, like that opening where Steve Martin sings “I’m not going to phone it in tonight”: Smigel. I mean just genius work. Solid, amazing, brilliant, and smart.

CONAN O’BRIEN,
Writer:

I love Robert. We all do. We actually have a word that I invented at
SNL
, because whenever someone tells a Robert story they start by saying, “Look, I love Robert, he’s talented, he’s prolific, I love him, I love him —
but.
” And then they tell the story about something horrible that he did. So about two years ago, I said, “Whenever we talk about Robert, we waste all this time — time is precious here — and we waste all this time doing the first part before you actually say, ‘
But
, you know, he killed my cat,’ or whatever.” And I said, “From now on, instead of that part, we’ll just say ‘chipple.’” I made up this word, and it worked, because now people just go, “chipple,” and that saves a lot of time.

Partly because it really is a live show and not live-on-tape like
The Tonight Show
or
Late Show with David Letterman, SNL
has a history filled with surprises, shocks, major and minor calamities, and, most of all, controversies. But all of the show’s dustups were trifling compared to the brouhaha that erupted in September 1992. In a gesture that had not been rehearsed nor revealed to anyone on the show’s staff in advance, singer Sinead O’Connor ended a haunting a cappella rendition of a modern protest ballad by tearing up a photograph of the Pope on the air, thus indicating the song had really been an attack on him and the Catholic Church. That turned out to be haunting too, but in the worst way.

JOHN ZONARS,
Music Coordinator:

I was in the control booth. I was the one who basically put the whole thing together, unfortunately. Essentially what happened was she was performing on the show with an orchestra on the first song she was doing, and the second song was a selection from a record that she had done a cappella. We rehearsed it that way on Thursday. Everything was all fine and well, and we got through it. She refused to tape a promo, which we all thought was really rude. And that was a difficult thing to handle, actually, at the time. On Thursday afternoons we always taped the promos, and Lorne was actually coming in and producing. These days the writers do it. But she refused to do it and left in a huff, and there was sort of blame cast around for that, which I was involved in.

Anyhow, I didn’t think much of it until Saturday afternoon when they came in to do their audio balance at five-thirty — “they” meaning the band and Sinead and her manager at the time, who I think has passed away. They came in, and the manager cornered me and asked me a very poignant question, which was, “When something goes wrong on the air, do you use the dress rehearsal performance?” I said to him, “It’s been known to happen for the West Coast, but for the live show, obviously it’s live. It goes out live, I think as far as like the central time zone.”