Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
Dear Neal,
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StumbleUponAs you know, I've been worried sick about Tom Shales. When was he going to quit putzing around winning Pulitzers for the Washington Post and write that big book? I pegged him as the TV-critic equivalent of Duke Ellington—a genius of the short piece whose true symphony eludes him. But I want to hear you admit that now he and James Andrew Miller have composed the most artfully wrought oral pop-history opus since Edie—Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live.
I admit it's self-censored: Everyone but Eddie Murphy seems to have talked to Miller and the Fat Master, but you can tell they're all calculating what to expose, and how SNL's original Dr. Evil, Lorne Michaels, will react. But it's astounding when anyone gets past the infinitely more malevolent publicists and handlers to get a particle of candid comment out of any star, and S & M do a marvelously smooth job of assembling what could have been sprawling anecdotes into a single, swiftly flowing saga. The authors' own setups and transitional essays are a tart treat, too.
Often, the kind of blandiose mendacity that most stars expect you to swallow gets stopped short by another SNL insider's sarcastic retort. Chevy Chase—the real Dr. Evil of the book, the motivelessly malignant meanie everybody loves to loathe—actually floats the notion that he would have stayed loyal as a tick hound if only Lorne had "put his arms around me and given me a hug and asked me to stay." "Bullshit," observes his then-agent Bernie Brillstein. "The real reason was he got a fucking car and more money." Until I read this book, I bought Janeane Garofalo's self-servingly self-lacerating tale of her travails as a feminist artist in an SNL world of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. Yes, Farley was a guy who actually crapped out a window of Rockefeller Center, and Sandler represented a mutant kind of comedy with a weird new disregard for women beyond the sexist ken of Belushi and O'Donoghue. But Live From New York gives a gritty backstage sense of precisely how she blew it.
It's all about the arguments—the psychologically fraught fistfight showdown of Chevy and his replacement Bill Murray, the Harry Shearer insurgency, the quiet yet incendiary internal exile of Jane Curtin. They're not trivial arguments, because for 27 years SNL has been decreeing what funny means. In a culture of satire, what's funny defines who we are as a society. In horrid fact, when a real political crisis occurs, we look to SNL to sort out how we should feel about it. "Weekend Update" can be more influential than Tom Brokaw. Our official political culture has become empty farce; the only really serious consideration Clarence Thomas, Monica Lewinsky, and the prospect of a Gore-Bush co-presidency ever got was on SNL.
So, it's not a frivolous impulse but deeply principled curiosity that makes me cherish all the delectable dirt S & M collect. You remember Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute? That character grew out of Aykroyd's precoital routine with brilliant writer Rosie Shuster (Lorne's wife), whom Danny slept with when he wasn't sleeping with Laraine Newman or proposing to Carrie Fisher, who stole Lorne's best friend Paul Simon from Danny's old flame Gilda Radner, which tormented her to the end. ("We were young," says one writer. "You do the biology.") The butt-crack repairman was a bit Aykroyd invented to cheer up a young SNL writer on a bad trip (an event that probably also gave the world Aykroyd's Jimmy Carter talking a voter down from an LSD freakout). Murray's rollercoaster affair with Radner was transmuted to art in their affectionately squabblesome "Nerd" sketches. Read a few pages of this book, and you grasp that the uneven entertainment onscreen signifies a more lurid psychodrama offstage, with real artistic consequences.
By letting us in on the metadrama, inducting us into the cult of what writer Alan Zweibel terms "Guyana on the 17th Floor," the raucous chorus of Live From New York lets us in on the experience of SNL. Beloved host Alec Baldwin says it's "like getting high, it's like being stoned out of your mind, it's like being shot out of a cannon."
And it determines what's in the canon of comedy. There's a bitter debate running through the book about revolutionary purity. Chevy says he quit because "it was going to become ... showcases for characters as opposed to what it should be, which is a vehicle to take apart television." Laraine probably did more harm to her career by refusing to do repeating characters than by repeatedly doing heroin. When Buck Henry made a suggestion for an ending to a sketch, one of the writers behind him sniffed, "Hmm, 1945." Says Henry, "I nodded inwardly, 'I see. I get it.' It was considered really corny to go for a joke."
This strikes me as central. Aykroyd confesses that his crew always had a devil of a time inventing any ending at all for a sketch. The problem of the sagging ending has become more unsightly than Aykroyd's ass crack, as performers and audiences influenced by SNL gradually forgot what an ending is. Neal, you are unique among comedy pundits of the Great Comedy Divide, because you actually know what you're talking about: You've written books requiring protracted hangouts both in the Friar's Club and in Bill Murray's world. As the co-author of his autobiography, you are not exactly the ghost of Henny Youngman, but possessed by his old-school comedy soul. When SNL in effect declared war on the Friar's Club style, what was gained and what was lost? Who will posterity consider a kick in the pants? The old school, or one or another generation of SNL's jokey Jacobins?
Also, would it have been better—livelier, less like a Frozen Caveman Lawyer—if it wasn't live?
Yours,
Tim
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Remarks From The Fray (Day 2):
This is a fabulous Book Club. I just wanted to echo the sentiment that SNL would have been better on tape--but barring that, it would have been better if the cast (especially the writing cast) had more freedom to be spontaneous. Early on cast members with a yen for improvising are told (not so politely) that it's verboten to go outside the script or the established blocking. Musn't screw up the pre-planned camera angles! Musn't run into the commercials! The irony is that the very "live-ness" of the show is what deadens it. The possibility of retakes would actually free the cast to go for it instead of standing there reading the cue-cards.
-- David Edelstein
(To reply, click here.)
There is nothing at all humorous about a Land Shark, or Operaman, or some rube making copies, or a samurai in a deli, or Gumby, or Polish playboys. Even if there was something funny in any of these skits none of the SNL crew, past or present, has found it.
So many great talents came from that cesspool, it has to be the writing. It speaks volumes that one of SNL's long-time hacks, Al Franken, is so revered. If ANYTHING SNL has done in it's history is his work, I can see why he still toils there.
-- Aegis
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Aykroyd, Radner, Murray and many of the early SNL staff were alumni of Chicago's Second City (the Chicago and Toronto annex), considered one of, and perhaps most important, original centers of the art form known as Improvisational Theater. Along with Second City, Chicago's Improv Olympic was the hatchery for the likes of Mike Meyers and Tina Fey.
If you know anything about what is taught there, and notably the teachings of the late, great Del Close, you would understand why all the "scandal" and scandalous behavior discussed in these tell alls found its way into the sketches. The basis of the Chicago school of improv is REALITY. Their cardinal rule is to find the funny that permeates real life, in the day to day interactions between people.
Consequently, Bill and Gildna create the Nerds. Akroyd creates the Coneheads, who were far more reality-based than you would think. And Chris Farley creates the stumbling celebrity interviewer. It would be hard to imagine creating any enduring comedy based on anything other than reality, and a reality that is heavily based on complex and deep personal relationships and internal conflicts.
And that's why, IMHO, SNL is generally a pathetically immature and unfunny show. Apart from good political parody (as apart from true political satire, which does not exist anymore on television), SNL is just a bunch of silly, non-sequitor, fish-out-of-water horseshit-- the comic equivalent of a five dollar cocaine rock. One of their gags is too much, and a million of them is never enough.
Fortunately, the legacy of Del Close and the other improv pioneers is in the skills and education of several generations of comics and performers, including Bonnie Hunt, and is being practiced, today, throughout Chicago and other places where the Second City and Improv Olympic school of theater is taught and performed. The minute that performers forget that true comedy is based on both surprise AND recognition, and that recognition requires that comedy arise from reality, they become the hack crap artists that have stunk up SNL for decades.
-- doodahman
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Comedy is a funny thing; we forget that we were different people when we saw these episodes. The things that made us laugh 20 years ago had as much to do with our own state of mind at the time as with the subject matter, the writing or the skill/talent of the preformers. SNL is as much a social record as a social commentary. Sure, we can see the immensity of the talent and lack there of in equal proporitons when we look at the show's running history, but the essence of the comic is of the moment. Comedy slips in between our conciousness and the actual event. It explodes our expectations and examines our prejudices and fears. A funny thing, comedy.-- Breathe
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Remarks From The Fray (Day 1):
Appelo writes "... for 27 years SNL has been decreeing what funny means" and claims that "...we look to SNL to sort out how we should feel about [a real political crisis]".
SNL has enjoyed its highs and lows. In the seventies, it was ground-breaking and funny. Nearly on par with the great Monty Python. In the long period since, it has never equaled its initial incarnation but has occassionally obtained parity with other near greats like "The Kids in the Hall" or "SCTV".
Mostly, though, its been an irrelevant, insufferably long, painfully unfunny reminder of what was.
Aside from the original cast, Bill Murray, and Eddie Murphy, does anyone really care to hear anything more about these incompetents who've already used far too much federally awarded broadcast bandwidth? (Excuse any of the folks who were lucky or wise enough to get out with just a one-year sentence)
The average 30 minute situation comedy is funnier and more enjoyable than the 90-minute high-school talent show that is "SNL". Hell, Tom Brokaw is *funnier* than SNL---whether or not he's less influential...
The writer's are so void of ideas that they roll the same programme out week after week. A fake news conference with the president, washing-up celebrity delivers a (too long) monologue about his week with the show, a fake television commercial, a fake talk show, the celebrity host (softly) parodying his or her public image, an overly long fake news segment... blah blah blah. There's no edge, no perceived danger, nothing flows from these pathetic excuses for writers. And nobody---except drunk/stoned middle school boys---laughs.
The writers have very little to work with. The cast lacks a single player with timing, expressiveness, or animation. The guy that mimics Dick Cheney is bearable.Chris Kattan spends most of his on-screen time trying desperately to read his lines. Jimmy Fallon fumbles through "Weekend Update" without a clue. Compared to anyone on the current programme, Tim Kazurinsky is a supernova of comic brilliance.
SNL is a perfect example of the pathetic state of mass entertainment---particularly humor. I can't believe anyone watches SNL except as a comedown from a short night of drinking. If it's "decreeing what funny means", it's only by counter example.
-- Belushi's Ghost
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Before ripping away, you should read the LIVE FROM NEW YORK book--one of the big highlights is Tim Kazurinsky, who has amazing things to say about Belushi and the Ebersol years. It was one of the revelations of the book.
As for whether the show is still funny, the ratings are still excellent and I think the 1996-2000 stretch had some amazing political humor, anchored by Darrell Hammond's amazing impressions and the as-always brilliant Jim Downey's writing. Plus, for the first time since the original cast, there was a whole batch of really funny women--Ana Gasteyer, Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, and Rachel Dratch.
And when was the last time you saw an original cast (or post-Chevy original cast) episode in the full? They were wildly uneven, sometimes terrible. Yes, there were highs that have never been surpassed, but don't make the mistake of thinking everything was funny. It wasn't.
-- radio c
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It's not so much that Saturday Night Live is uneven. If that were the case, you could tune in every night with a 50/50 chance of being entertained. Most of us, though, will tune out SNL for months, or even years, when we know it's awful.
The show actually has its biggest impact over sustained periods of greatness, typified by cast and writer stability. The first, naturally, was from 1975 to 1979. Reruns from that period have not aged well -- too many cast music numbers and "variety" that just looks embarrassing today -- but individual bits like "A.M.I.S.H." and the Coneheads stay timeless. And the cast members have enough verve, and the writing enough daring, that attitude almost makes up for the deficiencies.
The second great era, from about 1986 to 1992, I think, was better than the first. The cast stayed the same from 1986 to 1990, the writing had a daring offensiveness to it ("I normally wear protection. But then I thought, 'When am I going to get back to Haiti?'") and in Dennis Miller, the show boasted the best Weekend Update host ever. I will not argue this last point.
So what brings the show downhill? When people pay attention. SNL made the fateful leap from groundbreaking trend to revered institution almost overnight in the late 70s, and the 1979-80 season passes that reverence onto its hosts. No more Rob Reiner being insulted by the cast; no more Michael Palin stuffing cats into his pants. Instead, you got Gilda Radner introducing her aunt to Kirk Douglas. After everyone suddenly realized SNL was "back" in the late 80s, the show calcified into safe, established characters, routines and impressions, going waaaaayyyy too hard for the character with the memorable catch phrase.
In both instances, the audience started drifting away, the show lost its street cred, and the cast began shifting, making crap. Thanks to Comedy Central, we can get the 1981-86 and 1993 to 1998 seasons nonstop, and realize just how awful Tim Kazurinsky and Brad Hall really were.
Unfortunately, that's the curse of SNL. It has to turn into garbage before new writers sift the refuse and turn it into gold.
-- BML
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(10/17)