Saturday Night's Alright For Laughing

A man once called to the front door of legendary Chilean film director Alesandro Jodorowsky and said that he was searching for enlightenment.

Jodorowsky, whose English was not the best, professed himself delighted with the man’s request. “You’ve come to purify yourself, to find the essence of your being,” replied Jodorowsky. “Yes…I need illumination”, continued the spiritually depleted gentleman.
Jodorowsky led his new protégé to a shrine in the back of his house. “This is where your journey shall begin,” he beamed proudly. Alarmed, his visitor exclaimed, “No, no. Illumination – I need some lights for a theatre workshop up the road!”
The search for illumination can lead a person to the strangest places. For the cast and crew of Saturday Night Live, the road of excess led, if not directly to the palace of wisdom, then at least to Studio 8H of NBC New York, where some of the finest American TV comedy of the seventies was played out on a weekly basis by an astonishingly talented cast of performers.
Many of those same actors and writers have had their reminiscences on the show collated for a superb new book on the history of the programme, Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live. The authors, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, wisely opted to let the people of the show tell the story in their own words, with only the odd editorial interlude to provide narrative drive and background information.
And talk about star-studded line-ups – with the sole exception of Eddie Murphy (who still has some beef with certain members of the cast), virtually all of the major players involved in the show agreed to participate, which means the reader is treated to fantastic anecdotes and fascinating analysis from, among others, Robin Williams, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, Chevy Chase and Harry Shearer. Guest hosts such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Tom Hanks also make contributions, whilst, tellingly, Shales and Miller have persuaded Bill Murray and Seinfeld mastermind, Larry David – normally two of the most media-shy men in US show-business – to volunteer their time.
Saturday Night Live was the brainchild of producer Lorne Michaels, a canny operator from a privileged Canadian upbringing, who used his business cunning and good eye for up-and-coming talent to take himself and his gifted (though hugely temperamental) young cast right to the top of New York high society (the later stages of Live From New York feature a tribute to Michaels from one-time guest host Rudolph Giuliani).
Saturday Night Live struck such a chord with the baby-boomer generation that the reverberations of its initial impact are still being felt twenty years later. In the early seventies, with a conservative ethos still in place at the TV networks, younger audiences flocked to the one place they were guaranteed not to be denied sensationalism and boundary-pushing entertainment – the cinema.
Hugely controversial, iconoclastic works like A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs and The Devils became substantial hits, proving that there was a demographic just waiting for a TV show that spoke to them directly. Saturday Night Live, with its potent mix of surrealist sketches, outrageous parody, blaring rock music and cutting political satire, was the programme they’d been waiting for.
Truly, the beatnik contingent had now infiltrated the mainstream cultural arena. It was if The Residents had made it onto Top Of The Pops. Certain sketches – such as Richard Pryor and John Belushi’s ‘Samurai Hotel’, Chevy Chase’s news spoof ‘Weekend Update’ and Bill Murray and Gildna Radner’s nerdy couple Todd and Lisa – penetrated popular culture so deeply as to become lore.
As was perhaps to be expected from such a hyper-creative group of performers, backstage hedonism and internal rivalry were rife. Indeed Chase – who departed from the show after the first season to pursue a film career, much to the chagrin of his SNL colleagues – had a scrap with Bill Murray when he came back to host for the second season. A heroin overdose claimed the life of John Belushi, while Gildna Radner, Phil Hartman and Chris Farley were all casualties of the punishing regime of drink, drugs and recklessness that seemed de rigeur for all SNL graduates.
Gradually, the first, and by far the most talented (collectively, at any rate), generation of SNL performers drifted off to pursue big-time careers in the movies or in sitcoms. By the mid-eighties, with the show under the stewardship of Dick Ebersol (Michaels was on sabbatical) the political satire had been toned down and more subtle sketches had fallen out of favour.
Emblematic of the new regime was the failure of Larry David – a comedic genius if ever there was one – to make any sort of impact on the show as a scriptwriter. A bonus for David, however, was his introduction to future Seinfeld star Julia Louis Dreyfus, and the raw material he was provided with for projects. Indeed, one of the funniest anecdotes in the books is David relating how, fed-up with his failure to get any material broadcast, he confronted Ebersol and informed him that he was quitting the show.
Realising that this course of action was unlikely to result in anything other than chronic penury, David promptly reconsidered his decision and simply turned up for work the following Monday as if his quitting had never happened. This particular incident may sound more than a little familiar to Seinfeld fans – since it formed the basis of an episode involving George Kostanza some fourteen years later.
Live From New York, much like the programme it documents, is colourful, outrageous and enormously entertaining. Unlike Mr. Jodorowsky’s friend, those looking for enlightenment on the origins of American alternative comedy have definitely come to the right place.

Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller is available in all good bookstores, published by Back Bay Books.