SNL turns 50! How Lorne Michaels made comedy cool again | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on February 19, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: 50 years ago, a Canadian comedian named Lorne Michaels kicked off the first season of what would rapidly become a cultural institution. That show is SNL, aka Saturday Night Live, a mainstay of late-night entertainment. It’s also the longest-running, most Emmy-nominated, and highest-rated weekly late-night show in television history. How has Michaels done it? Ten years ago, Susan Morrison, articles editor at The New Yorker, rolled up her sleeves to find out. Susan is the author of the newly released title “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,” the definitive biography of SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels, and joins The Excerpt to share her insights.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Chevy Chase:
Live from New York, it's Saturday Night.
Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, February 19th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. 50 years ago, a Canadian comedian named Lorne Michaels kicked off the first season of what would rapidly become a cultural institution. That show, of course, is SNL or Saturday Night Live, a mainstay of late-night entertainment. The show's well-earned reputation for poking fun at politicians and celebrities while pushing cultural boundaries has allowed it to stay relevant to varying degrees to multiple generations of Americans.
Eddie Murphy:
I just want to live in a house like yours, my friend.
Maybe when there's nobody home, I'll break in.
Dana Taylor:
It's also the longest-running most Emmy-nominated and highest-rated weekly late-night show in television history. How has Michaels done it? 10 years ago, Susan Morrison, articles editor at The New Yorker, rolled up her sleeves to find out. Susan is the author of the newly released title, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, the definitive biography of SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels and joins us now to share her insights. Thanks for joining me on The Excerpt, Susan.
Susan Morrison:
Thank you for having me. It's fun to talk about Lorne.
Dana Taylor:
Lorne Michaels is famous for keeping to himself. When you first decided to write this biography, you resolved to do it even if he didn't give you direct access, which was likely, and then suddenly he opened his doors to you. Were you surprised and what do you think convinced him to let you in?
Susan Morrison:
Well, when I was thinking about writing this book, it was just after the 40th anniversary of the show and I realized that no one has had a bigger effect on what Americans think is funny than Lorne Michaels. It's an enormous influence on the culture. I knew Lorne a bit because I had worked for him briefly in the '80s when he was doing his one spectacular public flop, which was a comedy hour in prime time called The New Show. And then I went to see him in his office, and as I said, we knew each other. We had seen each other every few years since the '80s. So when I showed up there and I said, "Listen, I'm going to write this book about you. I don't need anything from you because you know I'm conversant in your world, but if you wanted to participate and talk to me, it would be a richer, better book and your legacy deserves this kind of a thing."
And he looked stricken at first because, as you say, he's a very private man and for 40 years he had pretty much stayed behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz. And he said he'd think about it. And then within a couple of days we were sitting having a drink and he was just unspooling his many, many stories. He's a great talker, which is the best thing that you can have as a journalist. And I have a couple of theories as to why he decided to throw in with me. One is that after the 40th, he was really starting to be aware of his legacy. There were a lot of important people from the show's early days who had died, who were not there. There was no Gilda Radner, no Phil Hartman, no Chris Farley, and I think he sensed that the situation could even be worse by the time of the 50th. He was realizing the time was marching on.
He also knew me a bit. He respected me as a journalist for The New Yorker, which is a magazine he reads and likes, and I think he thought if a biography was going to be inflicted upon him, better it be written by me than some entertainment biz hustler who was going to turn it around in a year. I don't think either one of us realized that it would take me 10 years, but it did because I have a rather absorbing day job.
Dana Taylor:
You wrote that when Lorne Michaels originally envisioned the show, he told NBC executives that he wanted to do a show that looked as if quote "a bunch of kids sneaked into a studio after all the adults went home" unquote. What did he share with you about his initial vision for the show?
Susan Morrison:
Well, Lorne had been working in Hollywood for almost 10 years, bouncing around between very bland, middle-of-the-road, almost plasticky variety shows. So Lorne realized that when he was working for shows hosted by people like Perry Como and Phyllis Diller, that television at that time was stuck in a real backwater. He was always the youngest guy on the writing staff. Most of the people there were in their 50s and 60s. They had begun in radio, which was close to vaudeville, and he noticed that the rest of the culture, the movies, there were huge groundbreaking movies being put out by everyone from Scorsese to Robert Altman to Terrence Malick and music. It was rock and roll. It was David Bowie and The Stones, but somehow television was stuck a generation behind. It was stuck in the '50s.
So his rather groundbreaking idea was to take this old format and bring it up to date by letting it be written and performed by people of his generation, what he called the TV generation. They were the first generation to have grown up with television all around them. Aside from it being programmed and acted by the kids after the grownups went home, the content would be different. TV would be a big target of their satire. They made fun of game shows and news shows and sitcoms and soap operas. And also the thing that distinguished what Lorne wanted to do is he wanted to put the stuff of his people's real lives on television. He wanted there to be sketches about your pot dealer and complicated sex and drugs, rock and rolls relationships, and the fact that everyone got mugged in New York City every other day in the '70s. It was a really a far cry from what you were seeing on the Donnie and Marie show.
Dana Taylor:
The original cast of SNL was full of comedic actors who went on to become huge stars, including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Jane Curtin. Later on, there was Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, and Maya Rudolph among many, many others. The list of superstars who made their names on the show is huge. How did and how does Michaels' adjust to the ongoing defection of talent?
Susan Morrison:
Well, Lorne likes to say that he's the world expert in what happens to people when they get famous. It's happened to him so many times. But what's interesting about the fact that he has turned out to be such a star maker and the show has produced so many stars is that in the beginning, that was the farthest thing from his intention. He hired people who were complete unknowns. They had never been on television. He didn't want anybody who had been on television. He was more interested in hiring people who had a little bit of theater experience. He always said that he had one foot in the theater. And he envisioned this troupe of the not ready for prime time players as always being background characters.
So toward the middle of the first season of the show, Chevy Chase became a breakout star. He was on the cover of New York Magazine, and I think the headline was, "I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not. Chevy Chase is the heir apparent to Johnny Carson." This really threw Lorne. He had no idea that a star would emerge from his show. And in fact, it threatened his show. Once Chevy was getting movie offers and on the phone with the coast all the time, it really disrupted the ecology of the show. Everybody was like, "Wait a minute. He's the star. What am I? Chopped liver?" And it introduced an element of competition into the family feeling of the show. A couple of years later, Belushi left after Animal House. Then Dan Aykroyd left because he wanted to make the Blues Brothers movie.
And he started to recognize that that was going to be the permanent state of this show, that over all the decades people would come, they would be green and grateful, and then they would develop and the phrase he uses a lot is, "They would build a bridge strong enough that they could walk across it and move on to the next thing." He realized that like New York City, which is the show's home, SNL exists to be in a permanent state of flux. Buildings will come down, new buildings will go up in the same way the cast has to remake itself again and again like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Dana Taylor:
I'm picturing the SNL studio surrounded by scaffolding, which is what I think of when I think of New York City.
Susan Morrison:
Exactly.
Dana Taylor:
In the book, you chronicle how each week's show comes together beginning with Monday and ending with a 90-minute, somewhat magic window of time between the dress rehearsal and the live show when it all comes together. Tell me about that.
Susan Morrison:
It's so fascinating to be actually at the show every day of the week because each day has its own particular set of tasks and imperatives. And Monday starts, it's very mellow. Everyone is just getting to know the host, trying to make the host feel, "It's going to be fine. This is going to be scary. Everybody has your back." But day by day, the tension ratchets up. It's almost like The Hunger Games, if you think about it. On Wednesday, they read four hours worth of comedy sketches, but everybody in the room knows that by Saturday Night, they're only going to be seven or eight left. And what's interesting about watching Lorne is that he is very attentive to everybody else's opinion all during the week. He listens to what everybody says, what everyone's opinion is. In fact, I've seen him have a little sheet of paper at a meeting and gently tick off people's names as they've spoken because he wants to hear from everybody.
And what happens on Saturday, it's almost like Superman coming out of a phone booth, that all changes after dress rehearsal. Lorne is the decider. He is in charge. He has sat through the dress rehearsal in a little foxhole, a dim space under the audience bleachers where he watches the dress rehearsal on a monitor, and he takes it all in. It's like he has 10 eyes and 15 ears and barks changes and commands and orders, and "That lighting cue is off. You cut to the door. That wig is starring in the sketch. The sweater is too dowdy. She's too loud here." And assistants are writing it all down. And all of that is then brought in front of the whole cast and everybody, it's the most intense... You feel like you're at a NASA liftoff. It's an emergency room. And that is his secret sauce. That's his superpower that he can stand there between 10:30 and 11:30 and really remake the show. I think it's that adrenaline and the fact that it's live that makes it different from anything else that you see on television. There are no second chances.
Dana Taylor:
The show is known for what you've called its blistering political satire, and both Republicans and Democrats have seen themselves lampooned on a regular basis. How does Michaels think about the show's impact on how Americans see politics?
Susan Morrison:
Well, he's always felt that what the show's obligation was was to speak truth to power and to needle whoever it is who's in office. The first season, Dan Aykroyd did a hilarious Jimmy Carter impersonation, and probably the most well-known sketch featuring him was Carter in his call-in radio show talking a caller down from a bad acid trip, which is so incredibly funny. Of course, they did Bill Clinton, they did Obama. Sometimes I think he feels pressure from outsiders and sometimes even from his young cast members for the show to really function as an arm of the Democratic party. But that's not what he's doing. He's going for where the laughs are. If Bill Clinton is funny, I'm thinking of Daryl Hammond as Clinton making a secret service jog past and into a McDonald's, then that's where he is going to go.
It's a challenge now that we're living in a time when I think almost all of his young staff feel like we're in a cataclysmic moment where our system of government could turn into a monarchy. And there's a real pressure from within the show to really hammer on Donald Trump, and they certainly have hammered on him. A lot of different performers have played him ably. He will always tell whoever's playing Trump to give him a spark of charm. And that's not because he wants to rehabilitate Trump in anyone's eyes. He doesn't want people to see Trump as a better leader because God knows, we all know that is not what he is, but it's about show business, which is what the show is at the core.
Lorne knows that, and every person who's ever written a James Bond movie knows that you want to make the villain engaging in some way. You want to give him a little bit of oily charm. Think of Blofeld in Goldfinger or think of Alan Rickman in the Die Hard movies. If you just make them purely repellent. I mean, we see Donald Trump on the news enough. If you make them just purely repellent, people are going to want to turn off the television. You have to make it entertainment, and one of the things he likes to say is that "idiots play, assholes don't." And what he means is that they play to the crowd. They engage the audience.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but he never forgets the fact that what he's doing is an entertainment show. It's comedy. He distinguishes what he does from what he thinks, I think, the Daily Show does, or say Samantha Bee, when she had her show. And those people were funny and they certainly put funny stuff on the air, but you get the sense as a viewer that the main mover was politics.
Dana Taylor:
Susan's book, Lorne is on bookshelves now. Susan, thanks for being on The Excerpt.
Susan Morrison:
Thank you very much. This was fun.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.