Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (68 page)

Jim liked just doing “Update,” because we figured it wasn’t that important to the show, you know, and we could just do whatever and they’d leave us alone. I didn’t even want to go to dress rehearsal, because I didn’t care about the audience reaction at all. It would have been fine with me if we’d never rehearsed it and I could just do the jokes that
I
thought were funny, because I have more faith in me and Jim than I did in any audience. I just like doing jokes I like, and if the audience doesn’t like them, then they’re wrong, not me.

DON OHLMEYER,
NBC Executive:

That was part of the problem. Not
part
of the problem; that was the whole problem. I think what you have there, in Norm’s statement, is the quintessential issue. When
Saturday Night Live
is really good, they do care what the audience thinks. And when
Saturday Night Live
is not really good, they’re kind of doing it for themselves and their pals. That was what I felt was the weakness of “Weekend Update” at that time, which was that they were doing it for themselves. There were a lot of inside references. There were times when you would go an entire “Update” with nothing more than a titter. You can pull out the tapes. I’ve looked at them — ten times. And looked at them and looked at them and looked at them, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being an asshole in this.

CHEVY CHASE,
Cast Member:

Norm said he didn’t care if the audience laughed? What’s shocking about that? That’s sort of the way I felt — that as long as six guys on a couch behind that camera that I was looking into laughed, and I knew those guys, then I was there.

One has to do that, you know, and one has to figure what’s going to work and what isn’t. Of all the other “Update” guys, the one who was the funniest to me was Norm. Because he just came out and said it. Perhaps that’s the writing — Jim Downey and those guys’ writing. But it’s also Norm’s quality of “I don’t care.” You can take that too far in your life as an entertainer-performer and maybe it would affect — in a negative way — other things that you do. I’m just suggesting that that’s a quality that lends itself to being successful, as an “Update” guy and as an actor on
Saturday Night Live
, which is not caring whether people say you’re good or not, only that you have your integrity, and that you think it’s good.

NORM MACDONALD:

I said “fuck” one time during “Update.” Something got caught in my throat and I went, “What the fuck was that?” If I hadn’t brought attention to it, I don’t think anybody would have even heard it. I pointed it out, because I couldn’t believe I said it — although I’m usually shocked that I didn’t say it, you know what I mean? It takes a lot of discipline not to say “fuck.” In sketches you’ve got to say what’s on the cards, but in “Update” I would do the joke and then say whatever I wanted afterwards. So when you’re just talking like that, you can easily say “fuck.” I like to say it a lot in real life. Anyway, Ohlmeyer said it was cool. He was good about it. He said he knew I didn’t do it on purpose. Ohlmeyer should have fired me then, but he was cool.

As for Lorne, he left us alone for the most part. That’s what I liked about Lorne. Sometimes he would say, “You don’t want to do a joke like that, because you want to avoid a lawsuit,” you know? He’d always say, “You don’t want to be sued.” But he’d let us do the jokes, sometimes even about his friends. He has friends that are super famous and stuff. He was cool about that. I probably wouldn’t let people do jokes about friends of mine.

We wanted “Update” to be good, but we didn’t think that we had to pander. If the rest of the show was pandering, then we thought we wouldn’t have to. So then I started getting the sense that they were unhappy. These people don’t come up and talk to you, you just get it third-hand and stuff like that. Ohlmeyer and his crew thought every joke in “Update” should kill, and the audience should be clapping and cheering and stuff. They thought Jay Leno did that every night with his monologues, so why couldn’t we do it one night for five minutes, where it would just be wall-to-wall laughter and applause?

My response was, I hate applause. I don’t like an audience applauding because to me that’s like a cheap kind of high. They kind of control you. They’re like, “Yeah, we agree.” That’s all they’re doing, saying they agree with your viewpoint. And while you can applaud voluntarily, you can’t laugh voluntarily — you have to laugh involuntarily — so I hate when an audience applauds. I don’t want to say things that an audience will agree with, I don’t want to say anything that an audience already thinks. And so the thing with “Update” was not to do these same jokes where you said that, you know, Pat Buchanan was a Nazi or some ridiculous thing that wasn’t true but that everyone would applaud because they’d already heard it somewhere else. “Update” was never a big pep rally when I was there. It was never a big party. So I think the network started going, “It doesn’t seem like as much fun as it should be.”

DON OHLMEYER:

What you had then was, you had people tuning out during “Update.” And that had never happened before. You never had dropout during “Update.”

WARREN LITTLEFIELD,
NBC Executive:

I think Don wanted to exert control over Lorne in ways that Lorne didn’t want to be controlled. It was a battle of wills and egos. I think Norm Macdonald, ultimately, was a symbol. Don just didn’t get it. He didn’t get Norm Macdonald. Ohlmeyer could be the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. We said, “You know what? You’ve got to ask your kid.” We’d sit in a meeting and go, “Don, we disagree. It was funny. It wasn’t a perfect ninety minutes, but it was funny.” I don’t know; maybe he was watching it alone at eleven-thirty. It was also before Don was in rehab.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I remember one night Don and I were having dinner at Morton’s in L.A. — by the bar, where he can smoke — and he would have his cheeseburger and his glass of milk and his four packs of Marlboros. I sat there playing with my swordfish thinking, “If he outlives me and it turns out to be just about gene pool, I’m going to be furious about it.”

FRED WOLF,
Writer:

Ohlmeyer was completely out of line. Norm Macdonald is one of the funniest guys I ever met, and Jim Downey is the funniest writer I’ve ever met. And so if those two guys get together and they put together “Update,” then I have faith that “Update” is a really funny thing coming from those two guys. I’ve been on a lot of shows that have been sort of faltering or whatever. The network decides to step in and alter the original, creative vision and sort of dabble with it — and it’s never worked. I’ve never seen them improve ratings on any show once they step in.

JAMES DOWNEY:

And the thing that used to drive the network crazy was, why does he just stare into the camera for a minute after the joke? And we did it as often as necessary for the audience to get the joke. And there’d often be a delayed reaction, because some things weren’t right there on the surface.

NORM MACDONALD:

Sometimes I would have to be in something. For a while I had to do Bob Dole, so I’d fucking have to put on some fucking mask and go do it, so that would get in the way. All I really cared about was “Update.” But that fucking Bob Dole, man, I wrote a couple of sketches that I thought were funny for Bob Dole to do, and then all of a sudden he’s the candidate and then I have to appear in people’s fucking sketches every week on some lame premise.

One thing I started hearing toward the end was, “You’ve got to fire Jim.” You know, it was almost as if, “You fire Jim and everything will be cool and you can keep going with ‘Update.’” I had no interest in anything but “Update.”

ANDY BRECKMAN,
Writer:

I was in the studio the week after O.J. was acquitted and there was this tension in the country because the country was divided and it was this weird sort of thing. It was almost something that was hard to think about, especially in mixed company. You didn’t know where people were coming from. And the cold opening that week on
SNL
— you might remember the sketch, I don’t know who wrote it and it wasn’t even, on paper, that funny of a sketch, and in read-through it didn’t kill — but the sketch was this: Tim Meadows as O.J. is back at his old job calling the games at ABC’s
Monday Night Football
. And the first joke of the sketch was O.J. on the field doing commentary about a play, and he’s doing the thing that Madden does where he writes on the screen and he’s joining the marks together — and eventually they spell out “I Did It.”

And that was the first joke of the sketch. When he wrote that out, I was in 8H, and the place exploded like — I’ve never heard a reaction in my life like that, ever. It exploded, but it wasn’t just laughter, it was almost a release — like, of course he did it, you know? And thank God somebody said it out loud. And there was applause and laughter. There is no place else that could have done that. Letterman and Leno danced around it, and they were very coy about it, but there was nothing, nothing that came close. And Downey, bless his heart, he was relentless, even after the acquittal, about O.J.

DON OHLMEYER:

My only concern was what I thought was best for the show. I might be wrong or full of shit, but it wasn’t like I had some political agenda. The O. J. Simpson thing was over by this time. I put everybody at NBC in a very awkward situation, you know. I was brought up that you don’t desert somebody who’s been a friend for twenty-seven years because he’s at the worst point in his life. My decision to be supportive of O.J. as a person caused a tremendous amount of grief to people at NBC, to my family, to my kids. I did it because I wasn’t going to desert somebody who had been my friend for twenty-seven years. But when the whole situation with O.J. started, I called Lorne, I called Jay Leno, and I called Conan. And I said, “Look, this is awkward, but I’m telling you if you in any way lay off this situation out of some concern for what I might think — forget about my feelings, just what I might
think
— you’re crazy. You have a job to do. It’s the biggest story in the country right now. And you have to deal with it the way you think is best.” That was the difficult part of the Norm situation, because it resurrected all the O.J. stuff again. You know, life isn’t fair, but that to me was like, what does
this
have to do with
that?

ROBERT WRIGHT:

Anything about O.J. had an incendiary effect on Don, but Don is a very easy guy to misread. He’s so blunt, but you can’t necessarily read into the bluntness that he’s unfair. I know it sounds contradictory. He can say something that appears to be completely arbitrary, but his actions generally were almost never completely arbitrary.

It would be very easy and consistent to conclude that because Norm said some things about O.J. which were inflammatory to Don that that would be a great reason to get him off the show. But I never found a lot of evidence of that in anything else. He could get very angry about people who were anti-O.J., but doing anything about it from a business standpoint was never part of the agenda. We’ll never know the answer to that one. He didn’t think Norm was funny. And he probably didn’t think the O.J. stuff was. It was like the world against God on O.J. The enemies list was a long list.

WARREN LITTLEFIELD:

Don knew if he ever so much as looked cross-eyed at a television set with anybody from NBC around when Jay was doing an O.J. joke, there would be a problem. Don would stay far away from any comment ever about O.J. He never took it out on Jay, and nobody got more out of O. J. Simpson than Jay Leno did. Don separated himself from saying anything to Jay but, “You’re wonderful, you’re great.”

NORM MACDONALD:

I was in L.A. over Christmas. It was the Christmas that Chris Farley died. I think it was right after Christmas. And they told me that Chris had died and then like three hours later, they told me about “Update,” but by that point who cared about “Update”? Because Chris had just died.

Somebody told me Ohlmeyer had said, “I want two things: I want Macdonald fired and I want a ‘Best of Chris Farley’ ready to go.” So then we went to the funeral in Wisconsin. That was really sad. They said, “Ohlmeyer wants you out.” I still didn’t think it would happen in the middle of the season. And no one would come right out and say it. The first week back from Christmas, no one would come right out and tell me what was going on. Lorne has a hard time telling you bad stuff. I had to do “Update” that Saturday, so I’m like, “Am I doing it or not?” And they’re like, “Uh, we don’t think you are.” So I said, “Somebody’s got to tell me I’m fired,” but nobody wanted to do it, so they said, “You can phone Ohlmeyer.” So I had to phone Ohlmeyer myself. And Ohlmeyer was kind of surprised that I was calling him. He just thought it would be taken care of.

It was kind of weird, you know. I just said, “Well, ha ha ha.” He was just kind of good cheer, you know. He said, “Oh, change has got to be made, you understand.” And I go, “Well, what’s the problem?” And he goes, “It’s just not as funny as it should be,” and so then I’m like, “You don’t think I’m funny?” I said, “People around here are saying it’s all you, that they all want me and it’s just you that doesn’t want me.” And then he was kind of surprised. He goes, “Is that what they’re saying? They want me to be the bad guy.”

DON OHLMEYER:

Lorne’s point at the time was, just let it go for the rest of the season and we’ll make a change in the summer. And he probably was right. Sometimes I get too wrapped up in something — something that needs to be fixed and it won’t be fixed unless we address it. But the Norm thing had been an issue for me for over a year.