Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (79 page)

And I think it made a lot of people feel worried or threatened that things were being shaken up here. That didn’t happen — but I was not well received by all.

It was like going to school and everyone already knew where to sit in the cafeteria. There were only three shows left. It was such a hard thing to adapt to, because everyone knew their place and knew what to do and the rhythm of the show and how it works, and I didn’t really know anyone here. I was terrified. It was really horrible.

ANA GASTEYER:

I can’t speak for other women entirely, but I think that for me the distinct disadvantage of being a woman in any situation — particularly one as competitive as this one — is that I have a really hard time turning off the social-political filter. I don’t think that the men in our cast sit around concerning themselves with who likes them and who doesn’t as much as I think women do — and as much as I do as a woman. I think that’s a feminine quality that I have, that I’m intuitive about interpersonal relationships and I worry about interpersonal relationships and interoffice politics, and I spent a lot of energy concerning myself with that as opposed to like my work getting on the air, and I think that men are just more comfortable with the competition.

I speak to college groups and stuff about being a woman. This era has been clearly less scathed — if that’s a word — and if anything, I think we were exalted, for reasons that weren’t always clear to me early on, Molly Shannon and Cheri Oteri and I. We got press for it. We got press for being this trifecta of women that turned the show around. I mean, that’s what they talked about. I don’t think there’s such a thing as actual exaltation every day in this place, because there’s just too many creative people that need exaltation at any given time. But, you know, we were written up and we were photographed together. That sort of signifies that you’ve changed a tune, and certainly we heard it anecdotally all the time — that the women are the best thing on the show.

JANEANE GAROFALO:

Life is a boys club. So
SNL
is a reflection of that. But Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer and Cheri Oteri and Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey kicked ass. They came in and would not be denied. I’ll admit that I was not prepared to deal with the wall of resistance. Molly was. Molly is a much stronger person than me. And she is easily more talented than me.

I’m not being self-deprecating. I think Molly came in and her attitude was right on the money. And it was, “I’ll kill you with kindness.” But she’s fucking very tough. And she is writing and writing and writing and she will not take no for an answer. And she also would not get involved in the bullshit. No gossiping, no nothing. The males were worse gossips than the females. And Molly did not play that game. She didn’t get involved with drugs and alcohol. She was there to work.

MAYA RUDOLPH:

I think there’s nothing sexier than a funny lady. Funny ladies are pretty damn sexy. There’s so much wit and confidence in that, and I love that. I like being a funny lady. I feel I’ve definitely become more of a woman because of my job — that and turning thirty.

AMY POEHLER,
Cast Member:

I’m of the school that loves crazy makeup and wigs and teeth. I always want my characters to look uglier than I’m allowed or than I have time for. I think as I’ve learned through meeting many people that come through here, Vanity is the Death of Comedy. The minute you start feeling you’re hot stuff, you’re in trouble. I’d much rather have people laugh than go, “Whoo!” I don’t want any of that. I think it’s pretty hard to be sexy and funny at the same time. Some people can do it, but few can pull it off.

MIKE SHOEMAKER,
Coproducer:

Lorne always says that producers are supposed to be invisible. So our jobs are really ill defined. To put it simply, Kenny Aymong is studio, Marci Klein is talent, and I kind of cover the connection between the cast and the writers and the producers. But truthfully we overlap, because if there’s something that you’re good at, you wind up doing it. There’s things that Marci does, the way she deals with certain talent, that’s genius, but if I were to tell you what it was, it would probably diminish its effectiveness. It’s in the way she talks to a host or a cast member. I have to deal with the well-being of a lot of the cast and writers, because they’re mine in some ways. When somebody has like a complaint or a problem I’m usually the first stop — for certain people. For other people the first stop is Marci or Steve Higgins. Whenever someone’s cut from a sketch, I deliver the bad news. When someone’s freaking out, I provide emotional support.

When you’re a producer your job is talking to people and getting them to do things you want them to do and yet having them feel that it’s their choice and that they’re not being forced. The plan of the show is that everyone — cast, writers, performers — they’re all doing what they want to do and it’s theirs and they own it, and at the same time it’s also what we want to do, but we have in some ways to make them feel that it’s theirs.

We don’t dictate things. The show’s like a stampede, and I feel that my job is kind of to keep it going. When someone falls and is about to be trampled, you pick them up and dust them off and kind of send them on their way. You can’t really effect change but you can try to avert catastrophes.

JIMMY FALLON:

Mike Shoemaker is a producer, a writer, a therapist. He’s the guy people complain to about not being in the show, or “Hey, can you get someone to write something for me?” They’ll go to Shoemaker, because they’re afraid to embarrass themselves and ask the writers. When you first get the show, he’s the orientation guy. He helps all the new people get acquainted with the place.

Sometimes he forces new writers to sit with a cast member and write something. He does it a lot. That’s how I came up with “Jarret’s Room,” actually, the Internet talk show. I had this idea, he goes, “I’ll put you with this new writer, Matt Murray; you sit in the room until you write it.” We sat there for four hours and we wrote it.

The show needs Mike. Definitely. I don’t know who else I would talk to. He’s also a ghost writer, definitely, for “Update.” He writes jokes, he punches stuff up. He’s been there since Dennis Miller, I think. It’s like going to school. His comedy mind is great. I always go to him to bounce stuff off of him. He says, “Oh that’s funny” or blah, blah, blah. Saturday mornings, he’s always up there with me and Tina writing the jokes, picking what’s funny and how to punch it up.

Lorne will come out and say, “You milked it a little bit too long.” Like I asked him about the Ian McKellen thing, my reaction after he kissed me. I thought I milked it one beat too long. Lorne goes, “Yes, you did.” Ian was more aggressive on the air than at dress, by the way. If you watch it in slow motion, you’ll see a little tongue action. He really went for it, man. Anyway, I knew Lorne would tell me the truth, but Shoemaker said, “That was fine. It really worked.” He’s just always very positive.

All previous mishaps and calamities that had befallen
Saturday Night Live
since it was founded were rendered insignificant when, on September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists flew passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center — jolting New York, shocking the world. For the producers, writers, and cast of the show, there was a subtext to the tragedy: The twenty-seventh season premiere was eighteen days away. Or was it? Should the fall season be delayed under the circumstances? How much news of the day could decently be satirized by a comedy troupe? Was any attempt to wring laughs out of current events automatically in poor taste?

On the major decision — whether to air the season premiere in its scheduled time slot — Michaels had to do little deliberation. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, soon to be named
Time
magazine’s Man of the Year, asked Michaels to go ahead with the show as a signal that life in New York was going ahead as well. Since first taking office, Giuliani had been a semifrequent visitor to the show, dropping by occasionally during the live telecast as he made his rounds on a Saturday night and having hosted on November 22, 1997. This time, on September 29, he would deliver the first punch line to the first joke to air after the attack.

First, Michaels’s longtime close friend Paul Simon sang his song “The Boxer,” a number that Michaels himself requested (though others on the staff found it dubiously appropriate). Onstage, a crowd of New York firemen and policemen listened silently, grim faces panned by the studio cameras. The song over, Michaels stepped up and asked Giuliani if it was all right for
Saturday Night Live
to be “funny.” Giuliani responded, smiling slightly, “Why start now?” Then, when the laughter subsided, Giuliani exultantly shouted the show’s famous opening line.

Live from New York, New York was alive.

AMY POEHLER:

I was home in the East Village on 9/11. I could see the towers out of my window. All of us who were working on the show at the time called each other to see if everybody was okay, and then after all that died down the next question was, What are we going to do? Do we even have a job? I was thinking they might postpone the show. There was talk about everything coming to a halt. Even thinking about your work, your work in comedy, seemed so kind of frivolous at the time you couldn’t even indulge in thinking about it. And then a couple weeks went by and it was like, “Oh yeah, we gotta put on a show.” I just remember it being incredibly emotional and Rudy Giuliani being there. It was very tense and very weird.

RUDOLPH GIULIANI:

Lorne asked me if I would appear on the first show they did after September 11. They had visualized what they wanted before they talked to me. In other words, they wanted me and the police commissioner and the fire commissioner, and they wanted a group of firefighters and police officers in order to do something that would honor them. But they also wanted to see if I would appear and in essence make it easier for people to laugh again, basically say to them, “It’s okay to laugh.”

I don’t remember if it was Lorne or Brad Grey who called me and actually wanted to know if I thought it was okay to go ahead with the show, which Letterman had also asked through his producers — whether it was okay to go ahead with that show. Several people had called me to ask me that. I think at
Saturday Night Live
, they were debating whether to do it that week or the next week. And I said not only did I think it was okay to go ahead with the show, I said sooner rather than later. People have to get back into learning how to laugh and cry on the same day, because they’re going to be doing it for a long time.

It was a period of time in which I knew I couldn’t move people back to normal, but maybe we could at least get them to start doing the things they normally did, to be able to deal with some of the pain they were going through. One of the ways you get through a horrible catastrophic event — like if you lose your mother or your father or a loved one — is you grieve, you mourn, and then you try to get back into your normal way of life. So I pushed them to go ahead with the show.

I thought the show made a tremendous contribution, and I thought the way they handled it — I’ve seen that tape maybe two or three times since then — was absolutely magnificent. It’s hard to watch it and not have a tear in your eye.

I’ll tell you what happened the night of the show. I was operating at that point on like two or three hours’ sleep per night, and I was going to go home immediately after the opening. I was going to leave after the beginning and not stay for the whole show. And Fire Commissioner Von Essen and I went upstairs to Lorne’s office to get our stuff — and we couldn’t leave.

And I don’t know if that was the funniest
Saturday Night
ever, but to me it was, because it was like I literally hadn’t laughed from September 11th up to that point. So it was a little bit like when you go to a restaurant and you’re very hungry and the food tastes terrific; you’re not sure if the food really is terrific or you’re just very hungry.

But we just spent the next hour and a half in Lorne’s office just laughing. We couldn’t leave. And it was like a release. There were a number of the police officers and firefighters who remained as guests; I could see it was like a release for them too. It was like, “I can laugh now. This is terrific.” And I thought they really rose to the occasion. It was a very funny show and a very sensitively done show, because you could easily have made a terrible mistake with a show like that.

WILL FERRELL:

I have a hard time figuring out what the viewpoint of the 9/11 show was. I guess in the final analysis you can’t critique it the way you would any other show. Some people said to me, “Great job, it was wonderful,” and other people said, “That was lame,” because we didn’t do really tough sketches. It was a benign show, and maybe that was the best thing to do under the circumstances. The biggest thing I’ll take away from it was after the show — talking to firemen and policemen. They just kept thanking us and saying, “Thanks for the break, we really needed it,” and we were going, “What?! We should be thanking you.” I did get a little bit emotional toward the end, but I still had my hard hat on.

RUDOLPH GIULIANI:

I think they’ve been unerring in their sensitivity and the way in which they’ve handled September 11. I was at the show when they did the open with Will Ferrell playing President Bush offering the Bush-Cheney plan for dealing with the suicide bombers, in which they would offer telephone sex as opposed to the seventy-two virgins, and I thought it was hilarious. And I think the night of that show they did the whole thing with Jesse Jackson calling up the Taliban and wanting to go over there and be the one to be called upon to settle it, which was very, very funny.