Back in nasty, metallic, cocaine-powered ’90s London, where everyone was standing around talking loudly and competitively in overlit rooms, I would find myself from time to time in the company of comedians. Stand-ups, mainly. They were brilliant of course, and miserable of course (because stand-ups have to live with accelerated brains and grotesquely magnified associative powers), and when they got going, the laughs would stack up, bitter, dazzling, progressively more stimulated and rarefied. Until, that is, something truly and originally comedic was said. At which point silence fell, faces straightened, and somebody would gravely observe: “That’s good material.”
For a biography of a man whose business is comedy, Susan Morrison’s Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live is weirdly barren of laughs. Across 600 extremely interesting pages, I LOLed exactly once, and it was at a joke (or what the critic Jesse David Fox calls “a joke-joke”) that the future SNL staffer Alan Zweibel wrote and sold—for $7—to Rodney Dangerfield. Here it is: “Even as an infant I didn’t get any respect. My mother wouldn’t breastfeed me. She said she liked me as a friend.”
Then again, maybe the laughlessness is not so weird: Lorne Michaels, in the words of his collaborator-nemesis Chevy Chase (in show business, everybody you collaborate with eventually becomes your nemesis), is not “an initiator of humor as much as a believer in humor.” As the creator and impresario of Saturday Night Live and its spin-offs, he has made a career—an epoch, an oligarchy—out of coolly appraising, classifying, curating, and to some degree determining the funny. Out of knowing the funny and creating the conditions for it. The bloodier and more dangerous business of being the funny, he has wisely left to others.
And the others, as they go tumbling in furious vulnerability across Morrison’s viewfinder, are fascinating. The rage-filled writers (Michael O’Donoghue) and the exploding clowns (John Belushi, Chris Farley). The alpha entertainers, desperate to please (Conan O’Brien), and the autarkic geniuses who’d be doing it even if no one was watching (Andy Kaufman). I got an education in the groundbreakingness of Lily Tomlin.
But somehow no one is quite as fascinating as Michaels himself, easing in his faintly reptilian way through showbiz vicissitudes and blinding storms of ego, nurturing brittle artists and disarming corporate thugs, “impervious to refusals,” sending mixed signals, making strange noises of approval or demurral, getting richer and richer, living better and better, quietly arrogating to himself enormous cultural power without ever appearing to break a sweat. Even tripping on psychedelics in Joshua Tree, pre-SNL, ranting to the writer Tom Schiller about the coming revolution in broadcasting—“Now is the time to enter television. We now have the airwaves”—he keeps his cool. “He never becomes noticeably different under any circumstances,” Schiller tells Morrison. “You can’t get through the glaze of brown eyes.”
He was raised Lorne Lipowitz in Forest Hill, an affluent suburb of Toronto that had the distinction (under the alias “Crestwood Heights”) of being the subject of a government-funded social-science study, the findings of which were published in 1956. “Many features of this middle class culture,” noted one contemporary reviewer of Crestwood Heights: A North American Suburb, “reveal the compulsive, ruminative preoccupation with knowledge especially about human behavior.” He added: “One would assume that neurotic and psychosomatic conditions are quite prevalent in this population.” Out of this hothouse of manners and pathology comes the young Lorne, ever watchful, whose first recorded laugh occurs in second grade when he makes a joke at the expense of an overweight girl. Ah, cruel roots of comedy. Later, at the University of Toronto, Lorne takes note of what happens when a political-science professor intentionally mispronounces the name of the Canadian prime minister: “I’d hear the laugh, and I’d think ‘But he didn’t do anything funny.’ It was just that he’d made the students proud that they understood that he’d referred to our prime minister in an unflattering way.” The mainstreaming of that privileged, nostrilly, insider-y laughter might be Michaels’s chief legacy.
The first episode of Saturday Night (the Live would come later) aired on NBC on October 11, 1975, and one way to read Michaels is as a quintessential ’70s guy: a post-counterculture guy, druggily expanded and still trailing wisps of the Age of Aquarius but buzzing now at a lower, thicker frequency. A wised-up materialist, on the same track as fellow plutocrats-to-be David Geffen and Jann Wenner. Commitment to the artist did not preclude commitment to making piles of money: If you do it right, they are the same thing.
And commitment to the artist means managing the artist, handling the artist: Lorne at his Lorne-iest. “He often compares doling out praise to feeding a stray cat,” Morrison writes. What Morrison calls his “emotional-energy efficiency” has protected Michaels from overinvolvement, overinvestment. As the former SNL writer Mark McKinney puts it: “He can’t get into the agonies of generation after generation of broken little toys who show up to write comedy for him.”
Almost nothing in that first episode worked, by the way. Not the sub-Python intro with its repeated only-funny-if-you’re-high use of the word wolverines; not the sweaty, jabbing monologue from a coked-out George Carlin; not Jim Henson’s Muppets trying to be dark and scabrous. (Henson was a great artist, but there was no way his puppets could survive in that environment: Michaels was running his own Muppet Show, with humans.) Awkwardness comes off the screen in waves. Even from 50 years away, you can still hear SNL’s debut softly bombing in dens and dorms and living rooms from coast to coast. You can hear it, in the words of Michaels’s friend Joe Boyd, “laying an egg.”
And yet it did work. With the laughs-that-weren’t-laughs and the frozen druggy vibes, the wizard Michaels had cast his spell. Stealthily tapping into the American public’s violent and bottomless inferiority complex, he had succeeded in giving viewers the feeling that perhaps they weren’t quite hip enough or clever enough—or high enough—for this new brand of humor. The corollary to this, the lighter side as it were, is the invitation to become hip, to initiate yourself, by laughing your head off.
Which is more or less the sensation of a great SNL sketch. Take the sole comedic triumph, the one truly gorgeous bit of business, from that first episode: Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse sketch. Standing next to a record player in a sports jacket and turtleneck, Kaufman, with a kind of bulging meekness, a glisteningly gleeful timidity, puts the needle on the record. Crackle of vinyl; the Mighty Mouse theme song begins to play. Kaufman stands there. He stares, fidgets. He is waiting—on live TV. The jolly music pumps along; Kaufman twitches; now he is horribly exposed. His psyche, if you could see it, would look like a Francis Bacon painting.
But then, with the song’s refrain—“HERE I come to save the DAAAAAAY!”—he is transformed: Gazing grandly, arm raised to hail a grateful population, he mouths the words and wags his hips in time. He radiates triumph. And then just as quickly—when the line ends—reverts.
Watching this, watching Kaufman shift on a dime from SOS-blinking hesitancy to suavely billowing superconfidence and back again, you can feel yourself being lifted on the wafts and buffets of your own incredulous mirth to a new aesthetic, a new plane of absurdity, a new something. Michaels, when he talks about Kaufman, sounds atypically wonderstruck: “It was as beautiful a thing as you could witness,” he recalls in Lorne. “He wasn’t enmeshed in the show business of it … There seemed to be some other commitment, something very pure and personal.”
Can you draw a line from that to Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue on January 18 of this year, to all the Dave Chappelle feelings—anxiety, more anxiety, even more anxiety, gurgling gratified release—that he so exquisitely manages? I think you can. Comedy is tension and deliverance from tension, and to maintain a space in the culture where this can happen at the same time every week, where even on an off night, there’ll be a moment that allows the static around your brain to crackle off into the ether: That’s no small thing. Kaufman’s nakedness, Chappelle’s command … they both rely on, feed off, feed into this space—the space that Lorne Michaels created, and has held inviolate or as close to inviolate as he could almost superhumanly manage, for 50 years.
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