Comedy's boot camp

LIVE FROM NEW YORK

By Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller

638 pages, available at National Book Store

Perhaps the oddest success story to come out of Saturday Night Live — Lorne Michaels’ late-night launching pad for dozens of Hollywood superstars and even more crappy straight-to-video flops over the decades — is Al Franken. The bushy-haired, bespectacled writer and performer — he played self-help guru Stuart Smalley on the show — just got himself a US Senate seat, after a protracted, eight-month battle to recount last November’s ballots in Minnesota. He won by 312 votes over his Republican rival and will soon take his place as that state’s second senator. We can only hope his term as senator is more successful than his 1995 movie, Stuart Smalley Saves His Family.

I’m one of those Saturday Night Live fans who thinks the show slid downhill right after the first cast packed it up in 1979. Franken was among that cast, writing sketches and appearing on the show with his comedy partner, Tom Davis. Their bits on SNL — doing a fake variety program called The Franken and Davis Show — were often unexpected, a little scary, not necessarily easy to laugh at. Saturday Night used to be that way, in the days of Andy Kaufman and Michael O’Donoghue. It was dark and surreal at times, and since it was live you didn’t know where the joke ended and reality began.

Now it’s pleasant and occasionally surreal and naughty, with people like Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey (are they still on? I haven’t watched in a while).

There’s no more casual drug-taking in the NBC offices, and no more casual sex. These people have families now, or else they’ve got their eye on the future, after their SNL days are over.

Mostly what it’s like, if you read James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ “Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” titled Live From New York, is a battlefield. Yup, comedy and military strategy are a lot alike.

Most of the writers, performers and hosts interviewed for the book (which begins with the Chevy Chase/John Belushi days of 1975 and takes us to the Fallon/Fey debut in 2002) reach for the trusty war analogy. “It does feel like we went to war together,” recalls Adam Sandler. “It’s more military, like a drill,” notes Michaels, who has produced the show most of its years. “I think there’s a real toughness with people who are funny in that they’ve developed their armor.”

Another cast member, after hearing the week’s guest host use the same war analogy, retorted, “But no one dies on SNL.” Then the cast member thought better of it: “Oh, but wait. They do.”

Lots of SNL soldiers have died. The roll call is staggering: John Belushi (overdose), Gilda Radner (cancer), Andy Kaufman (cancer), Phil Hartman (shot by wife), Chris Farley (overdose). Others have died the slow death of showbiz fade: Joe Piscopo, Jon Lovitz, David Spade. Others have done spectacularly, like Eddie Murphy (who refused to appear on the show’s 25th anniversary show and harbors some ill-defined grudge against SNL and Michaels), Adam Sandler, Billy Crystal, Will Ferrell, and Mike Myers (whose Dr. Evil is a spot-on, hilarious impression of Ontario-born Michaels, a resemblance Myers has categorically denied “for the record”).

Perhaps the best way to view Saturday Night Live is not as a war, but as a boot camp. The original 1975 cast — Belushi, Chase, Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Larraine Newman, Garret Morris, Jane Curtin — had no idea what they were signing on for, but it was something untested: trying to fill the Saturday 11:30 p.m. slot that was traditionally used to screen Johnny Carson Tonight Show reruns with something new, young, hip — and live.

That live aspect was there by design, something Lorne Michaels — a Canadian comedy writer and producer who had done Lily Tomlin and Smothers Brothers specials — wanted to bring back to TV.

It’s hard to imagine, for those born after 1990, what it was like watching those first 1975 shows. You didn’t know what would happen, come 11:30 p.m. There was no YouTube to catch up on funny clips, so you had to blink and rub your eyes after a sketch and ask yourself, “Did they actually say that? Did they do that?” You have to remember: there was no Internet, no cable, no other comedy alternatives out there (well, besides Monty Python’s Flying Circus). And it’s not like the taboos SNL shattered were particularly revolutionary; it’s just that they had this new freedom to do and say stuff because NBC felt there was nothing to lose; no one was watching anyway.

That soon changed. The edginess soon got filed away by massive popularity. Even Bill Murray’s years — as gifted as he was, filling the shoes of Chase, Aykroyd and Belushi — were marked by repeating characters, a kind of formulaic outrageousness.

Along the way, each new cast has gone through the boot camp experience: meeting with a host on Monday, presenting writers’ ideas for sketches, then hammering out the material Tuesday evening, usually till early Wednesday, when sketches are picked, costumes and sets designed. Thursday is rehearsal time, Friday is more fine-tuning, Saturday afternoon is a full dress rehearsal taped before an audience… then the shit hits the fan at 11:30 when it’s all live.

Some hosts are so good they get asked back; others are enshrined in the “worst host” club that includes, according to cast members, Steven Segal, Chevy Chase, Milton Berle, Tom Arnold and others.

There have been on-air f-ups, of course. Host Buck Henry getting sliced by Belushi’s samurai sword during a sketch in ’75 (Henry stayed in character despite the bloodshed). Andrew Dice Clay’s controversial appearance in the ‘80s led one cast member (Nora Dunn) to quit the show in a huff. Sinead O’Connor famously tore up a photo of Pope John Paul during her live appearance, to protest something or other. And poor old Ashlee Simpson revealed to the world that she lip-syncs as badly as she sings when her audio track failed during a live number.

That’s the nice part about live. It’s real. With casts that have spanned Eddie Murphy’s incendiary brilliance (the only thing watchable during his years), Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest and Martin Short’s professional polish (more Las Vegas than edgy New York), stoned or unstable guests and musical performers (Louise Lasser and The Rolling Stones, to cite two), career-launching boy’s club casts that included Sandler, Farley, Myers and Dana Carvey, and a brave return to work weeks after 9/11 with guest Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the show has soldiered on.

So, along with Franken’s weird emergence as a Democratic star, who else has graduated from SNL’s boot camp?

• Conan O’Brien was an all-but-invisible writer in the SNL trenches during the early ‘90s. Michaels actually pulled him from obscurity and made him Letterman’s successor on NBC’s Late Show. You know what happened after that. The Late Show job is now Jimmy Fallon’s.

• Larry David wrote a bunch of “observational” sketches that never saw air during his one-year writing stint on SNL back in the early ‘90s. He had his eye on cast member Julia Louis-Dreyfus, though, and later put her in a little NBC show called Seinfeld. He also recycled most of his unused Saturday Night Live material for the show, smart man that he is.

• Robert Smigel was a veteran writer for SNL before creating “Triumph the Insult Comic Dog” as a recurring bit on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. The insult-laced interviews with the cigar-chomping puppet — set in locations as far-flung as American Idol tryouts and the Bonnaroo music festival — recall some of the live-wire craziness of the original SNL days.

• Chris Rock had very little to do in his two years on SNL, but that’s okay. Since leaving, he’s become a standup comedy sensation, and a sociological barometer of the times (even if he can’t act to save his ass).

• Tina Fey got a production deal with NBC that allowed her to create 30 Rock. More importantly, she’s known worldwide as a consummate Sarah Palin impersonator.

• Will Ferrell sticks to his strengths, doing movies that show off his large, dorky personality and occasionally some smarter roles (Stranger Than Fiction) as well as playing “Dubya” on Broadway.

• Albert Brooks still holds a grudge against Lorne Michaels for cutting his short films and ignoring their contribution to SNL’s first season; Brooks still makes funny movies on occasion and does cartoon voices (Finding Nemo) when the mood strikes.

• Harry Shearer, who came to despise working with the SNL cast and Michaels, went on to doing Simpsons voices and Spinal Tap fame.

• Kevin Nealon, never one of the show’s brightest stars, now has a plum recurring role on the cable show Weeds.

• Rob Schneider, half-Filipino, is still searching for that elusive follow-up to Deuce Bigalow 2: European Gigalo.

• Ben Stiller, a “featured performer” in 1988, went on to major Hollywood success and backed out of a host appearance shortly after 9/11, reportedly because the demands of his rider (a personal groomer, among other things) had not been fulfilled.

• Joe Piscopo now does Sinatra impressions for food. (I kid, I kid…)