Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (21 page)

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:

You know the legendary story of Gilda going over to Jane’s house to look at Jane and Patrick being married? And just watch them? That’s what it was like. Gilda would just watch them and say, “Oh, now you’re going to turn the TV on together, how will you decide what to watch?”

Gilda projected the most extreme vulnerability, and it translated into whatever she did. And when she did physical comedy, you could feel her fall.

JANE CURTIN:

I’d invite her over for dinner. She’d come and sort of sit there while I was cooking. My husband would be there. And she wouldn’t participate, wouldn’t carry on a conversation; she just wanted to watch us live. It was off-putting in the beginning, but after a while it got to be very funny. You know — it was Gilda, so it was okay.

RICHARD DREYFUSS:

I thought Gilda was fantastic. She was like a combination of Judy Garland and Martha Raye. She was an extraordinary creature. Of course no one could see the future, and I certainly didn’t. She wasn’t walking around with a cloud of doom over her head. She was just a hysterically funny and sweet person.

DAN AYKROYD:

The Coneheads started out as the Pinhead Lawyers of France. I had been looking at TV — I guess I’d smoked a “J” or something — and I thought, “Everybody’s heads don’t really reach the top of the screen. Wouldn’t it be great if you added four inches to everybody?” So I drew up this design. And we would be the Pinhead Lawyers of France. But then people were afraid that we’d be disparaging encephalitic people or retarded people with that, so we changed it to the Coneheads. And Lorne said, “Why don’t you put it in an alien setting, aliens coming to work?” So we tried it out in a comedy workshop downtown, and that’s where that came out of. It evolved in the writing.

ROBIN SHLIEN:

The production assistants used to play a game. We’d get the sketches and then it would be like, “Hmm, what drug were they on when they wrote this one?” The pot sketches were all a certain way. That was one of the funny things about getting all those handwritten pages that we had to type up.

A lot of the pot smoking went on when people were writing. Like the Coneheads, that was a total pothead sketch — the quintessential pot sketch. Here they are, these really weird people with things on their heads, and they say they’re from France — you know.

BUCK HENRY:

Uncle Roy was an idea written by Rosie Shuster and Anne Beatts that I like to think was inspired by my own tawdry life. The thing I wanted to do, which we did the second time, was to have the setup be something about the uniqueness of Uncle Roy — Jane and Danny as Mom and Dad, after coming home and almost catching us doing something really disgusting, would say, “Oh Roy, you’re so wonderful. You are unique. There’s only one like you.” And I look into the camera and say, “Oh, no, no. There are hundreds of thousands of Uncle Roys.” Or something like that. My assumption being, of course, that in a huge number of families across North America, children would be casting a sidelong glance at their uncles or their mother’s boyfriends or their stepfathers or whatever. In other words, I talked myself into the fact that we were performing — or that
I
was performing — a public service.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

Uncle Roy came from — I had a baby-sitter that I just adored, though he was
not
touchy-feely. However, I did used to ask him all the time, “And what else did you do that was bad?” And he would just fill me full of lurid tales, and then I sort of put that together with Buck’s natural salaciousness. I think Dan was sort of pissed that I didn’t do Uncle Roy for him. Because I used to call him Uncle Roy sometimes, and then that kind of got grafted onto Buck because Buck had that special thing.

The way we excused doing it was that Gilda and Laraine as the little girls had so much fun and loved Uncle Roy so much that, even though he got his jollies, they were sort of unscathed and had the best time of their lives. I don’t think you could ever do it now; it would just be considered like disastrously politically incorrect. But like I said, the saving grace to me was they just had so much fun. If they were on a glass-topped coffee table, they pretended they were in a dinghy and they were having a wonderful time deep-sea fishing.

BUCK HENRY:

I did a lot of material that no one else would do. They would save the stuff that other hosts wouldn’t do for me, because they knew I would do it. Except for one. Once I didn’t do it. It was a takeoff on
First, You Cry
, the TV movie about breast cancer. I didn’t do it — one, because the girl who wrote
First, You Cry
was a friend of mine, but also because I had a very close friend who was dying of it. And I just couldn’t quite see my way clear to do a sketch about it.

I don’t think anyone but me would do “Stunt Baby.” That was very notorious — a sketch about doing a movie on child abuse, and whenever it was time for a violent scene, they called in the stunt baby and it got batted around. Both “babies” were dolls, of course; Laraine did the babies’ voices. I liked the sketch so much, I asked them to do “Stunt Puppy,” which was equally rude. I heard they got more mail protesting “Stunt Baby” than anything else they’d done up to that time. “Stunt Baby” really offended people — and it was one of my favorites.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I loved Bill Clotworthy, one of the censors. I used to always talk to him like Eddie Haskell and go, “That’s a really attractive tie you’ve got on, Mr. Clotworthy.” To me, comedy writing was all about flirting with taboos and seeing how far you could push it. Not just gratuitously, though; it had to be funny. It had to make you laugh. Beatts and I wrote a “nerd nativity” sketch and it all came down to that screaming thing. There was a meeting, I’m trying to remember — this happened twice, because it also happened with a sketch about “What if Jesus had gotten five to ten instead of a death sentence?” — where the censors were pulled out of bed and came running down to 8H right between dress and air. The question was, were they going to put it on or not. And the censors sort of defanged it, declawed it, took the balls out, and removed the spine and then sent it out there, kind of mushy.

ROBIN SHLIEN:

Audrey Dickman was the associate producer. She was English to the core and she loved to laugh. Audrey really was like a mother hen. I think she was very protective, certainly of the production department, and she really loved the cast and the writers — and Lorne. She didn’t ever want to say no to people. Someone would ask her a request sometimes and she would turn around and roll her eyeballs, but she would never say no.

So one time Danny sent me to the censor to try to get the word “muff diver” approved. We had a substitute censor that week, so he thought he’d try his luck. They were always merciless to the substitute censors. I considered not doing it, but Audrey taught us it wasn’t our job to say no, especially to the writers. So I waited until the censor was eating lunch in the control room. I opened my script in front of her and said, “These are the new lines,” trying to be nonchalant. She scanned the pages and pointed to “muff diver”: “What’s that?” Since the scene took place on a window ledge, I said the first thing that popped into my head: “I think it’s someone jumping out a window.” She nodded okay. But when the scene played in dress, as soon as Danny yelled it to Laraine — “So long, muff diver” — like four phone lines in the control room all lit up at once. Somebody knew what it meant. It was like instantaneous, as soon as he said the word. During dress the advertisers and other executives were watching from other rooms.

So “muff diver” never made it onto the air. Audrey never asked what had happened; there were some things she knew even she couldn’t control.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

There used to be a Japanese restaurant downstairs in the Woodward Hotel on Fifty-fourth Street that was open ’til like four in the morning; so we used to go there all the time. I remember a Friday night I was there with Gilda. It must’ve been about one-thirty in the morning. There was a newsstand in the hotel lobby. When I went to the men’s room, I saw the latest edition of the
Daily News;
it said that Mr. Ed had died. I went back into the restaurant and I said to Gilda, “Mr. Ed just died.” She said, “Wouldn’t it be great if tomorrow night on ‘Update’” — and I completed what I knew she was going to say — “we interview the grieving widow, Mrs. Ed.”

So I’m mulling this over and I can’t stop thinking about it; somehow we have to do this. I go to a phone and call Lorne at home and tell him, “Listen, Mr. Ed just died, can I interview Mrs. Ed?” He said, “You get a horse, you can do whatever the fuck you want.” So it’s two o’clock in the morning; how do I find a white horse? I wouldn’t know how to find a white horse at noon. So I call a prop guy at home, and tell him Mr. Ed just died and I want a white horse for this “Update” thing.

Now in those days I used to come in at seven on Saturday morning to get a start on “Update.” There was a restaurant downstairs; I’d get all the newspapers and sit there and write jokes. So I start writing this Mrs. Ed interview. Bill Murray was going to interview her and Gilda was going to do the voice. Now Audrey in the production department finds me at the restaurant and she says, “Who’s getting the white horse?” I said, “I called a prop guy, he’ll take care of it.” She threw her hands in the air. She says, “You don’t ask them about white horses.” I said, “Who do I ask?” She says, “I’ll take care of it.”

I swear to God, an hour and a half later there’s a white horse in the studio. I went up to Audrey and said, “Where did you get the horse?” She wouldn’t tell me. But she was the person who could make anything happen.

TOM DAVIS:

We were going to do a Franken and Davis sketch — I think it was in the fourth year — and we’re dressed as sumo wrestlers. And I suddenly stop and just announce that we’re gay.

AL FRANKEN:

Tom says he can’t stand it anymore, we’re gay lovers, and I go, “My wife and kid are here.” “They don’t know?” “No, they don’t know!” And the kid is in the audience going, “I hate you, Daddy! I hate you, hate you, hate you, Daddy!” Then I go back behind the curtain, you hear a gunshot go off, and my legs sort of flop out from under the curtain. Then our music plays and I come out and we go, “Good night, everybody!” And that was it; that was a “Franken and Davis Show.” And for a while we would say, “Brought to you by the International Communist Party — working for you, in Africa!”

TOM DAVIS:

And where the censor got involved is, we’re dressed in these sumo outfits, basically naked. Our genitals are covered in the front, but our asses are hanging out. Just being naked. And the Standards and Practices people hadn’t seen the costumes. So Al and I put on the sumo outfits and went down to the fourth floor, and we’re just walking around NBC naked, and we walked into the office of the head censor, Herminio Traviesas, and he just started laughing, and he said, “All right, I give up!”

DAN AYKROYD:

Naturally the censors didn’t like the refrigerator repairman sketch, where I kneeled down and the audience could see the crack of my ass. And the censor said, “Don’t put that pencil in there.” I was checking this fridge and I had to put the pencil
somewhere
. “Don’t put the pencil there!” And of course I said I wouldn’t, but then on the air, I did. And you know —
massive
laugh.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

Gilda was doing Emily Litella, who would get some topic rolling because she was so hard of hearing, and so she would try to defend violins on television and Chevy would correct her and tell her, “No, it’s not violins, it’s violence.” “Oh, that’s very different. Never mind.” So that worked and it was cute for about a year, and now Jane Curtin is on “Update” and we wanted to give more life to Gilda’s character — we already had done endangered feces and presidential erections and so on, and now the laugh at “never mind” was obligatory and we wanted to get rid of it. So I wrote this Jane thing where she says to Gilda, “You know, every week you come on and you get it wrong, and you’re disgusting, you’re an insult to the integrity of journalism and to human beings worldwide. Am I making myself clear? I don’t want to see you anymore.” And I had Gilda say back to her, crystal clear, she took a beat and she went, “Bitch.”

Now this is 1977, okay? We do it in the dress rehearsal and the place goes nuts because “bitch” on television was groundbreaking. But Jane Crowley, who was this five-hundred-pound censor and an ex-nun or would-be nun or something, she comes around and says, “You can’t do that.” “Can’t do what?” “You can’t say ‘bitch’ on television.” And I said, “Jane, listen to me. What Gilda is calling Jane Curtin, when she’s saying ‘bitch,’ she is effectively using the adverb form of the word. In effect she is saying, ‘You are acting bitchy toward me,’ which I have heard on television before. She’s not saying, ‘Jane, you are a bitch,’ which is a noun, which I agree should never be in television nor even in streets. She’s using the adverb form.” And would you believe it, she bought this crock of shit. She goes, “All right, all right, the adverb then,” and went on.

BUCK HENRY:

I remember there was a really odd argument between me and Lorne and the Standards and Practices woman in a bit where I played a censor. There’s a moment when, in trying to describe something, I poke my forefinger through a hole made by my other forefinger and thumb, if you see what I mean. And the argument was, how many times I could do that and whether, having once poked the finger into the hole, could I move it around, or must I withdraw it immediately? It got pretty silly. It’s easy to be dirty, but hard to be incisive.

TOM DAVIS: