From: Tim Appelo
To: Neal Karlen
Subject: An S & M View of SNLUpdated Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 11:00 AM PT
Dear Neal,
As you know, I've been worried sick about Tom Shales. When was he going to quit putzing around winning Pulitzers for the Washington Post and write that big book? I pegged him as the TV-critic equivalent of Duke Ellington—a genius of the short piece whose true symphony eludes him. But I want to hear you admit that now he and James Andrew Miller have composed the most artfully wrought oral pop-history opus since Edie—Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live.
I admit it's self-censored: Everyone but Eddie Murphy seems to have talked to Miller and the Fat Master, but you can tell they're all calculating what to expose, and how SNL's original Dr. Evil, Lorne Michaels, will react. But it's astounding when anyone gets past the infinitely more malevolent publicists and handlers to get a particle of candid comment out of any star, and S & M do a marvelously smooth job of assembling what could have been sprawling anecdotes into a single, swiftly flowing saga. The authors' own setups and transitional essays are a tart treat, too.
Often, the kind of blandiose mendacity that most stars expect you to swallow gets stopped short by another SNL insider's sarcastic retort. Chevy Chase—the real Dr. Evil of the book, the motivelessly malignant meanie everybody loves to loathe—actually floats the notion that he would have stayed loyal as a tick hound if only Lorne had "put his arms around me and given me a hug and asked me to stay." "Bullshit," observes his then-agent Bernie Brillstein. "The real reason was he got a fucking car and more money." Until I read this book, I bought Janeane Garofalo's self-servingly self-lacerating tale of her travails as a feminist artist in an SNL world of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. Yes, Farley was a guy who actually crapped out a window of Rockefeller Center, and Sandler represented a mutant kind of comedy with a weird new disregard for women beyond the sexist ken of Belushi and O'Donoghue. But Live From New York gives a gritty backstage sense of precisely how she blew it.
It's all about the arguments—the psychologically fraught fistfight showdown of Chevy and his replacement Bill Murray, the Harry Shearer insurgency, the quiet yet incendiary internal exile of Jane Curtin. They're not trivial arguments, because for 27 years SNL has been decreeing what funny means. In a culture of satire, what's funny defines who we are as a society. In horrid fact, when a real political crisis occurs, we look to SNL to sort out how we should feel about it. "Weekend Update" can be more influential than Tom Brokaw. Our official political culture has become empty farce; the only really serious consideration Clarence Thomas, Monica Lewinsky, and the prospect of a Gore-Bush co-presidency ever got was on SNL.
So, it's not a frivolous impulse but deeply principled curiosity that makes me cherish all the delectable dirt S & M collect. You remember Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute? That character grew out of Aykroyd's precoital routine with brilliant writer Rosie Shuster (Lorne's wife), whom Danny slept with when he wasn't sleeping with Laraine Newman or proposing to Carrie Fisher, who stole Lorne's best friend Paul Simon from Danny's old flame Gilda Radner, which tormented her to the end. ("We were young," says one writer. "You do the biology.") The butt-crack repairman was a bit Aykroyd invented to cheer up a young SNL writer on a bad trip (an event that probably also gave the world Aykroyd's Jimmy Carter talking a voter down from an LSD freakout). Murray's rollercoaster affair with Radner was transmuted to art in their affectionately squabblesome "Nerd" sketches. Read a few pages of this book, and you grasp that the uneven entertainment onscreen signifies a more lurid psychodrama offstage, with real artistic consequences.
By letting us in on the metadrama, inducting us into the cult of what writer Alan Zweibel terms "Guyana on the 17th Floor," the raucous chorus of Live From New York lets us in on the experience of SNL. Beloved host Alec Baldwin says it's "like getting high, it's like being stoned out of your mind, it's like being shot out of a cannon."
And it determines what's in the canon of comedy. There's a bitter debate running through the book about revolutionary purity. Chevy says he quit because "it was going to become ... showcases for characters as opposed to what it should be, which is a vehicle to take apart television." Laraine probably did more harm to her career by refusing to do repeating characters than by repeatedly doing heroin. When Buck Henry made a suggestion for an ending to a sketch, one of the writers behind him sniffed, "Hmm, 1945." Says Henry, "I nodded inwardly, 'I see. I get it.' It was considered really corny to go for a joke."
This strikes me as central. Aykroyd confesses that his crew always had a devil of a time inventing any ending at all for a sketch. The problem of the sagging ending has become more unsightly than Aykroyd's ass crack, as performers and audiences influenced by SNL gradually forgot what an ending is. Neal, you are unique among comedy pundits of the Great Comedy Divide, because you actually know what you're talking about: You've written books requiring protracted hangouts both in the Friar's Club and in Bill Murray's world. As the co-author of his autobiography, you are not exactly the ghost of Henny Youngman, but possessed by his old-school comedy soul. When SNL in effect declared war on the Friar's Club style, what was gained and what was lost? Who will posterity consider a kick in the pants? The old school, or one or another generation of SNL's jokey Jacobins?
Also, would it have been better—livelier, less like a Frozen Caveman Lawyer—if it wasn't live?
Yours,
Tim
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From: Neal Karlen
To: Tim Appelo
Subject: Interesting, Dirty, and Populated With TalentPosted Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 3:48 PM PT
Dear Tim,
The approaching Minnesota winter whistled through my open bedroom window last night, so when I awoke I decided that I wasn't going to agree with whatever you wrote about Tom Shales' and James Andrew Miller's Live From New York, newly published to much hoo-ha. We're like that here in passive aggressive Minnesota: You're cold because you left the window open, so you slag the Pulitzer-Prize-winning television critic of the Washington Post and his co-writer.
That said, I completely agree with you that Shales has both painted his masterpiece and presented, at last, a definitive work on Saturday Night Live. Compared even to Edie, that other great oral history, Live From New York is more interesting, dirtier, and populated with people far more talented than the dimwits who surrounded Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgewick in their glory days.
Shales' canvas is worthy. Despite SNL's unevenness over the last quarter-century, it's not exactly cutting-edge social commentary to remember how special Saturday Night Live was when it debuted in 1975 because it seemed the first show made for "us." More important than "us," however, was that Saturday Night Live was the first television show made for Tom Shales—he hailed its debut more than 25 years ago as "the freshest satire on commercial TV" that deserved added hosannas for occurring "nakedly, brazenly, and perilously live."
The old generation of pre-Shales TV critics had been a mostly fuss-budgety lot, always demanding more Edward R. Murrow Harvest of Shame pain-and-misery documentaries, even when Edward R. Murrow had moved on to grinding out propaganda for the U.S. government. A generally status-free job in the newsroom slightly above the obituary department, the old-guard TV critics were the men who hounded Jack Paar off the air for saying "water closet," who helped pull the plug on The Smothers Brothers Show for booking well-known Stalinist Pete Seeger.
Shales was the brightest of the baby boom TV critics, weaned via television on Vietnam's living-room war and Sen. Sam Ervin as Watergate's Moses. Still, even those in the media who liked Saturday Night Live didn't seem to know what the hell it was its first season. New York magazine made Saturday Night Live sound like a Chevy Chase vehicle, and put the preppie with the Harold Lloyd pratfalls on its cover. (This enraged John Belushi into a paroxysm of jealousy; he was redeemed when Chase quit the show after a year, tying McLean Stevenson's decision to leave M*A*S*H for worst career move in TV history.) Meantime, the New York Times thought Saturday Night Live was a music show, though the critic admitted he'd missed 40 minutes of the program.
Whatever Saturday Night Live was—and one shudders to think of the number of Ph.Ds Shales' and Miller's exemplary effort will provide primary material for in the future—Saturday Night Live's meaning has seemed as impossible to decrypt as the gibberish that Eddie Murphy was singing in his brilliant "James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub" skits.
Not that vast forests haven't been felled in the trying. In fact, the best book review I ever heard concerned the biography of a Saturday Night Live hero. The book was Bob Woodard's Wired, the Watergate-buster's pathography of the putatively grimy life and death of John Belushi. The review: "Somebody should a drop a safe on Bob Woodward's head," from SNL stalwart Bill Murray. "Woodward had an agenda in getting everything so wrong. He's jealous. He knows that no matter how many Pulitzers he wins he's still going to rank behind John and then Red Grange as the most famous person to come out of Wheaton, Illinois."
Like all truly good definite works, Shales and Miller dish the dirt, or at least allow everybody else to kick dirt upon each other like Pete Rose and some woebegone umpire. Live From New York is already notorious among those in it: At the recent Friar's Club roast of Chevy Chase for Comedy Central, Paul Shaffer, the former musical director for Saturday Night Live, made an in-joke from the dais about the massive scatological sludge tossed between its covers.
If I have any small quibble, it's that I wanted more of Shales, briefly, even with a few words, interjecting himself in the narratives. Nothing blowzy, just something like ed .note from Shales: bull**** when he catches someone spinning a yarn. As someone said about Lucky Luciano or Roy Cohn, Shales has been so wired into the show for so long that "he knows where the bodies aren't buried."
In the meantime, we and scholars of the future are left to ponder: Was the show really Albert Brooks' idea? Was Robert Klein originally going to be the permanent host?
In the meantime, we can thank Shales for hooking on to a show that surprisingly still matters. This morning, I interviewed Jonathan Alter, the Newsweek columnist and political commentator who watched SNL as a teenager in Chicago. Last night, Alter attended the party at the Rainbow Room for the book and ran into Sen. John McCain, who's hosting the show this week.
"McCain was telling a story and referred to someone as a 'prick,' " remembered Alter, "and I thought it boded well for his campaign that here was someone willing not afraid to say that word to a reporter in public. I thought it also boded well for a show, that it still had the kind of cutting edge where it was still willing to have someone on as host willing to say 'prick.' "
That utmost critical point is made in Shales' and Miller's book, and it is a point that has somehow escaped each of the SNL tomes that preceded it. Ya think?
Best wishes,
Neal
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From: Tim Appelo
To: Neal Karlen
Subject: PrickismPosted Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 10:53 AM PT
Dear Neal,
Yeah, that's the ticket—SNL was the show that was unafraid to call a prick a prick. It was tough yuks—made by the pricks, of the pricks, for the pricks. It was also a prick-up-your-ears for complacent society—remember those Michael O'Donoghue skits about getting blinded by needles? SNL was a revolutionary prickocracy—survival of the prickiest. So many of the stars came up fast by sneering down from some imaginary moral promontory: then-nobodies Murray and David Spade with searing putdowns of movie stars; uppity Chevy, Norm MacDonald, and Dennis Miller on "Weekend Update."
Actually, though, SNL's fangs have gradually retracted, like a gory troglodyte gone vegan. "Update" has never been better, but Tina Fey's wit is fairminded, morally in earnest. If Professor Backwards—the guy whose shtick was talking backward—were to die on her watch, would she have done Chevy's cold joke about his last words being, "PLEH! PLEH!"?
Jimmy Fallon, the most radiantly huggable cast member since Gilda Radner, seems incapable of hate. He's the anti-Chevy, not a prickocrat; inclusive, not exclusive: He's Jimmy Fallon, and so are you. He's unlikely to repeat the prank that paleoliberal-prickocrat Al Franken pulled back when Kissinger tried to get seats to see the show, and Al said no, as payback for the immoral Christmas bombing of Hanoi. (The anecdote's in the once-definitive 1986 book Saturday Night, which doesn't hold up: It reads like homework compared with the breezy new book. As for Woodward's Belushi bio Wired, it got stomped for good by a New Republic parody exposé of Dean Martin titled, I think, "Sozzled," which sent up Woodward's stuporous, humorless accumulation of lifeless detail.)
Before SNL, showbiz pawed and pandered; as Lorne Michaels tells Shales and Miller, SNL "required removing neediness, the need to please. It was like, we're only going to please those people who are like us." No boomer narcissism there! SNL needed to show you disenchantment, pedophile baby sitters, and an amazing profusion of skits about death. When I wrote O'Donoghue's obituary, my editor almost refused to run it because O'Donoghue had faked his death so many times. How did we know he wasn't staging another skit?
He famously spray painted the word "DANGER" on the SNL office wall to encourage risk-taking on the show, but S & M reveal that the spray can died halfway through, at "DAN." Only desperate can-shaking enabled him to complete the word and retrieve his dignity. The danger of such public humiliation is another aspect of SNL's appeal. You can destroy your career with one word on live television, as that f--- Charles Rocket did. The audience savors the danger. Part of the fun of SNL is watching careers skyrocket in front of your face. The other part is watching them go down in flames. The show is an even more violent example of what critic Kenneth Tynan called the Johnny Carson show: a salto mortale, a death-defying acrobatic feat. S & M capture this spirit.
But I still think SNL would have been better if it weren't live. Martin Short, whose SCTV character Ed Grimley was squandered for one season on SNL, says he flopped because he was used to writing for six weeks, then shooting for six weeks, then editing while writing. On SNL, you needed to dream up, produce, and politically ram through a new idea every 48 hours or so. SCTV kept the repeating character of Grimley fresh by making him an actor who appeared in different roles, like Oliver [Twist] Grimley. The skits were polished and incorporated into a satisfying ongoing storyline. I guess what I'm asking is—immortal as SNL is, wouldn't it be more immortal if it were SCTV instead? Did the stars of Conan, Seinfeld, and Friends get their start on SNL, or survive despite Lorne's best effort to crush them dead? And who's funnier, Lorne or Henny Youngman?
All best,
Tim
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From: Neal Karlen
To: Tim Appelo
Subject: The Best Lines Come From LifePosted Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 3:56 PM PT
Dear Tim,
I agree, but I disagree about your exegesis on the word "prick" as it relates to Live From New York. On one hand, I'm with you that SNL gave us humor cooked up by pricks for the enjoyment of too-cool-for-school same.
But I disagree that's anything new in comedy. On an assignment a decade ago, I had to sit at lunch for an hour every day for a year at the New York Friars Club, among nonagenarian comedians who often couldn't remember their grandchildren's names. Yet like the people chronicled in Live From New York, virtually all these comics—born around the time McKinley was considered a promising presidential candidate—never forgot one single grudge of their showbiz lives.
So, what's the difference between Milton Berle berating the never-was yukster who'd said hello at his table because "that sonuvabitch stole my act at the Passaic Theatre in November 1937"—and Billy Crystal, 27 years later, still blaming his manager for getting him bumped off SNL's first show, not to return for a long, long time?
Nothing. Well, there's talent. Or, as they say in professional wrestling (hey, Jesse Ventura is still my governor for a month), the ability to "get over"—win the crowd and make them tune in for more, even if it's pure shtick. Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin had the Coneheads. Billy Crystal had Fernando's Hideaway. Bill Murray had Nick the Lounge Singer scatting lyrics to the music from Star Wars.
Plus, it takes timing in front of the right people. Bill Murray had it—and still does, unlike so many of the SNL stars who flamed over the years. All ears were always turned to the SNL laff-o-meter, whether the camera was on or off. When Chevy Chase came back to host, he got into a fistfight backstage with Murray, his replacement. In the middle of the brawl, Murray—"foaming with anger," as director John Landis recalls in the book—calls Chase a "medium talent." Landis says, "And I thought 'Ooh boy, that's funny. In anger he says 'medium talent.' So Bill Murray—who is that guy?"
Similarly, back in vaudeville, lasting talents like Henny came up with their best lines by themselves, from life, sans writers. In 1939, while emceeing The Kate Smith Show, the SNL of its day, Youngman tried to shoo his spouse and her friends out from backstage before the show, just as NBC pages would have to do with hangers-on in Studio 8H 40 years later. "Take my wife," he implored a guard, "please."
The joke was real then, and lasted 50 years, just as what was real about SNL will also be funny in 2052. (Sorry to be repetitive from yesterday, but since nobody picks these skits, I still choose among my favorites Eddie Murphy's James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub. And because no one says anything nice about him in the book or in life, Joe Piscopo's sportscast, where he'd use a dozen teams' bobble-head dolls to dramatize the day's action.)
No one remembers the lousy sketches on Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca's equally epochal Your Show of Shows—but you wish someone back in the 1950s had put together a book like Live From New York. If that biographer had Shales' and Miller's skills, we'd at last glean an idea from the paranoid, megalomaniacal, and brilliant Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon about who really had to take out the trash on that show—and who had to eat it.Tim Appelo writes about the arts for Seattle Weekly, the New York Times, and People. Neal Karlen is a free-lance writer in Minneapolis
(on line book club with Tim Appelo, oral history of "Saturday Night Live," Slate 2002)