Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (71 page)

They made equal fun of Gore and Bush, so I think politically it ends up a wash. They never did anything about me that I objected to. They did a great skit of my first inaugural, where my son disrupted the ceremony. I always saw it as humor.

Since the night I hosted the show, I’ve probably dropped by it half a dozen times. Four to six times. I enjoy watching it. I enjoy watching it live as well as watching it on television. I’ve enjoyed it from the very beginning. I remember Chevy Chase playing President Ford. Now, I worked for President Ford, and loved him, and I still thought the humor was great. It was just great.

DARRELL HAMMOND:

I got to meet Clinton in the White House, and it was like seeing the largest, strongest, smartest dog in a compound. He was so sure of himself and he so loved being the president, and he seduced everybody in that room. I mean, this guy would walk down the rope line and remember the shit about your sister or your brother that’s most crucial to you. That instinct for creating a moment is just gigantic. I’ve studied Bill Clinton for years, and I haven’t once ever caught him posturing or being phony. He just can’t. And yet when you see a guy who’s that gifted, you think, “Well, he’s got to be staging this.”

I guess I went about three months before I ever got a handle on him. He was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and then my instinct told me: He’s doing John Kennedy. He’s doing John Kennedy! So I learned Clinton by practicing JFK’s inaugural address in a southern accent. At one of those correspondents dinners in Washington, I opened with this joke about Clinton’s charisma: “He’s the kind of guy that would say to a woman, and get away with it, ‘If you would only take your clothes off and let me see you naked, there would be no more white racism, I swear to God.’ And in that split second I looked out the corner of my eye, and it was almost as if I could see that machinery clicking and whirring, and he reached over to the African American woman sitting next to him and gives her a big kiss on the cheek. It was beautiful and the place went nuts and I thought, “How does he do it?” Clinton said something at another correspondents dinner like, “Poor Darrell, what is he going to do when I leave office?”

I spent about twenty minutes alone with Clinton once — him and the shooters; I guess there were a couple of gunmen there from the Secret Service. And man, he was nice as hell to me. Just so complimentary, knew everything I had ever said. He asked me to do him, sure. And I did. One time I did a correspondents dinner where I played his clone. He faked a leg injury and I had to come up and finish the speech, oh yeah, and he was like, “And how would you say this line? How would you say that line?”

With Gore, on the other hand, you could see the puppet and the puppeteer. You know,
The Wizard of Oz
— “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”? That was Gore to me. He had no ability to mask what he was feeling or thinking. We could see him trying really hard, and in a way that’s kind of endearing.

On
SNL
, we’re looking for the jugular. If it comes up on the Republican side, we’ll hit it. You can’t educate an audience and get them to laugh at the same time; you have to find out what it is that they are feeling at that moment and hit it. They basically should be somewhat in agreement with you in their laughter.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

Lorne defers to Downey to this degree: If Downey says, “I have an idea for a political piece, I don’t know what it is, I haven’t written it yet, but I will write it,” Lorne will block out the six minutes and build the set without having seen or heard the premise. If a Downey sketch is coming in, that’s our cold opening, build the set. We’ll get the pages maybe the night before, if we’re lucky.

DON OHLMEYER:

Downey and Franken are great political satirists. And they always have been. Election years are always very strong years for the show. And they have an ability to get right to the heart of the matter. They don’t necessarily stop at the superficial.

I think they’ve done a fabulous job with — it’s a terrible thing to say, but I mean this whole situation with terrorism is such fertile ground for what
SNL
does. It’s kind of like playing to their strength. It gives them characters that are in the forefront of the public mind to spoof.

JAMES DOWNEY:

Nowadays, since I came back again after being fired as “Update” guy, I sort of have a mandate to write topical political stuff, although I do other kinds of things too. I’m not always happy — not only with choices made about my own stuff but choices in general. I’d like to see more of the sort of pieces where it’s about the premise or the conceit and not about a popular returning character. But at least these days I never have to be in the position of being the guy who’s the reason someone else’s piece didn’t get on, or rewriting someone else, so that’s nice. I get to just write.

DARRELL HAMMOND:

I was glad to hear that Ted Koppel likes my impression of him, because I admire him and I don’t want him to think I’m a schmuck, you know? I mean some of those guys you just admire. Plus, we didn’t really take shots at Koppel. And you can’t. How do you take a shot at an esteemed journalist who, by every indication, is a pretty good guy and trying to contribute, you know? You don’t take shots at him, what you do is to take him and put him somewhere he would not normally be. In a bathtub, having a bubble bath. You know what I mean.

I actually performed for Koppel at a tribute for him at the Museum of Broadcasting. It’s very strange. Because I went there in full Koppel drag. I had the hair and the nose and I had a bit prepared, and they told me that I was to wait until Sam Donaldson got up to give his appreciation of Ted and then I should walk in and interrupt him. And I thought, okay. And so Donaldson is up there, and I walk in and I’m like, “Excuse me?” And when I look into Koppel’s eyes, right, I got so scared. And I got so scared I could only say to him, this is what was embarrassing, I could only say it in his voice, I said, “Are you mad at me?” I couldn’t help it. And he goes, “No, I’m not mad at you, give me the microphone.” And then he takes the mike and he like grabs the wig I’m wearing and he goes, “Roone, you cheap bastard, if you paid me a living wage I could afford a decent rug like this one.” And the place went nuts.

The first cast of
Saturday Night Live
had lacked one thing that all subsequent groups would enjoy: access to the work of predecessors. When the show was new, it had no models and barely a template. They made it up as they went along, and many improvisations born of desperation became traditions and tenets. Members of succeeding casts were always haunted by the first — its taped work recycled perpetually in reruns — and put to the challenge of trying to equal its impact. In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the show that had been designed for the TV generation was passed along to the
SNL
generation — talented kids whose earliest memories of watching the show were among their earliest memories of watching, or maybe even doing, anything. Now the
Saturday Night Live
creative team, before the cameras and behind them, included people younger than the show itself, video age babies who’d never known a TV universe without it.

JIMMY FALLON:

I’m the same age as the show. When I first saw it, I was like seven or eight years old. My parents used to tape it and show me and my sister only the “clean” sketches. The others were too risqué for us, so we couldn’t watch the whole thing. They were good censors, because we thought it was a treat just to see anything funny, especially Mr. Bill. I don’t know why, but “Wild and Crazy Guys” was our favorite. It was risqué, but we didn’t realize as kids what things like birth control devices or tight bulges meant. We were just little kids. We used to perform the sketches at parties, and relatives would be like, “You let your kids say this?” But I had no idea what it meant.

RACHEL DRATCH,
Cast Member:

I’ve watched the show since its beginning. I was really young. I’d watch it every Saturday and have friends over and make them stay up to watch the show. It was like a ritual of mine. Gilda Radner was my favorite. Looking back, the thing I loved about her was just — I don’t know, you never saw a “woman comedian.” There was no separation, no gender thing. Being in Chicago and hearing “women aren’t funny” and all that stuff, I liked her the most.

CHERI OTERI,
Cast Member:

I grew up on the old shows. I remember my mom would let us stay up, because it became such a treat. It was a time when you should have gone to bed but we were up, and I remember to this day my favorites are Bill Murray and Gilda Radner, because I laughed and I related to their characters. I loved their characters. I would recognize when someone else was funny even if they weren’t necessarily my type of humor.

When Bill Murray hosted here that time, it was amazing. This writer that I write with, we got into a huge fight. It was a brawl. I mean, screaming and everything. We were screaming so hard at each other. And when you walk out after a fight like that, you’re shaking, because you can’t believe it got that heated and violent. So I walk out after it’s over and there’s Bill Murray standing there. He heard the whole thing! And he’s like my idol. And this was the first time something like that ever happened. He just looked at me. I felt so ashamed. And the next day I had to sit next to him at rehearsal and I go, “I’m really sorry you had to hear that yesterday.” And he said, “Cheri, I felt like I was home.”

MOLLY SHANNON,
Cast Member:

I didn’t watch the show as much as other people. I loved Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, but I didn’t think about being on
Saturday Night Live
until I was in college. That wasn’t always my dream from my whole childhood. It just started in college that I knew I wanted to be on that show.

At NYU, I was a drama major, and I did all of these serious acting classes doing “sense memory,” and my God, soooo serious, with all these drama students and
ugh!
And musical thea-tuh. But then we did this revue show, and Adam Sandler was in it, this little comedy sketch show — and it was the best. We made fun of the teachers with little comedy sketches. And I remember it was the most fun. And I thought, “Oh, I like this.” We improvised and made stuff up. It felt so free. I loved the improvisation, just using your instincts. And I was like, “Hey, I like this comedy thing.” And then I met some guy in L.A. named Rob Muir who I did a show with, who told me, “Comedy is king.” And I said, “Is comedy king? Comedy’s
king?
Okay.” And he said I should think about comedy, and then I really got into it.

The first time I did my Mary Katherine Gallagher character was a long time ago at NYU, in a revue show there. I didn’t really base her on anyone. It’s just bits and pieces, parts of myself but an exaggerated version of myself, but then there’s a lot just made up. I did Mary Katherine Gallagher in that show.

Mary Katherine took a lot of falls. I would bruise myself and cut myself, but I never injured my back or anything. I started to get afraid. At first I didn’t think anything of it, it was like punk rock, I actually liked getting bruised. It felt wild and committed and I enjoyed it. But being on TV, so many people would come up to me and go, “Do you get hurt? Do you get hurt? You must get hurt.” And after thousands of people asked me, I started to get scared. So then I started to wear padding.

STEVE HIGGINS:

One of the nice things about Tom Davis coming back is that he’s such a breath of fresh air. He says, “Oh, you guys are doing a great job.” But any of the other writers who leave and come back, it always seems like they’re saying, “My high school drama department was better. When I was here it was way better. Now look; they’re doing
Ten Little Indians.
Ugh, that’s a horrible play.” Because most of the people here, this was their first TV job, so they form so many opinions off it, and it’s always that high school thing: “My football team was better.”

CHRIS KATTAN,
Cast Member:

When I first saw
SNL
as a kid, I didn’t think it was funny. When I first saw the Belushi stuff, I didn’t think it was funny. I was watching
Fawlty Towers
and
Monty Python
at that age, and I was hooked on old movies like
Road to Rio
and Abbott and Costello. I was addicted to that stuff. I really got into
Saturday Night Live
when Eddie Murphy came on. He was so relaxed and had so much control and power over the audience and everything that was going on. If there were no laughs he was still so powerful, so relaxed and comfortable. He didn’t get nervous, he didn’t act like, “Oh my God, this isn’t working,” and rush through the lines. One time, I don’t know what sketch it was, he made some mistake and the audience laughed, and he went, “Shut up!” I was like, “Wow, that was great.” It’s so great if you can be that relaxed and that confident. Then by the time I got to high school, I wanted to be on
Saturday Night Live
. I didn’t know if I was good enough, but I thought, “I actually feel like I might be able to make it on that show, at least I might be able to audition.” I just had a gut feeling that I could do it.

Right before I got here, when they had Quentin Tarantino and Tom Arnold as hosts, it wasn’t that funny, and I was like, “Oh God, what’s happening?” and I was like, “I’m glad I didn’t get the show.” I actually auditioned with Will and everybody else and I didn’t get it, and then months later they asked me to come on out next week all of a sudden. The first couple of years, at least for me, you can’t help but take stuff so seriously about getting your sketches in and “is this going to work?” and you stress out so much. I would get so stressed out and so worried about sketches it was just a big waste of energy. But you don’t learn that until you kind of let it all go, and then you just relax and you’re a better performer.