The Totally True, Not Made-Up Conspiracy That Made ‘SNL’ Win

I am here to speak truth to comedy power.

I’m not saying there’s a dark conspiracy to keep us from seeing the obvious, but I’m not not saying that either. Also, I might be wrong. But I’m leaning toward the conspiracy thing.

Here is what people who are smarter and know more than me always say. Jason Reitman, the director and co-writer and director of the new biopic “Saturday Night, told me this:

“‘SNL’ does not have a specific style. It is a fluid vehicle built to carry the writers, comedians and musicians of the moment. 

The meeting of Lorne Michaels and the original writers and cast was not unlike the Continental Congress. The goal was to create a show that could evolve and reflect the times.

This is why the opening theme has never been recorded and continues to change from year to year. This is why Lonely Island and Please Don’t Destroy feel as much a part of the ‘SNL’ DNA as ‘Show Us Your Guns’ from Episode 1. 

‘SNL’ can be tender, absurdist, profane, cringe, dangerous, political or even non-comedic (think the Will Ferrell/Molly Shannon “Blind Date” sketch). The moment you attempt to identify the style of “SNL,” you are simply reflecting what you like about SNL. The show itself is a mirror of the nation at large down to the individual viewer.“

I mean, has anything ever sounded as much like a conspiracy theory as “a mirror of the nation at large down to the individual viewer”?

For 50 straight years, Lorne Michaels has influenced American humor more than anyone else. More than anyone has influenced any cultural sphere in the U.S. It’s as if the Top 40 was still dominated by Berry Gordy’s Motown, art galleries were filled by Andy Warhol’s Factory and you were reading this in another important new magazine put out by Henry Luce’s Time Inc.

To say that Michaels has no taste is absurd. Even crazier is that the guy who spends all week running his factory cares solely about the quality of the product and not what the product is. That’s why people build Amazon, not go into show business.   

Michaels has a very specific idea of what comedy should be. And while I enjoy his taste very much, it’s not mine.

It’s also hard to notice its style because the 90-minute show is so many different things: a political parody, a monologue, impressions, short films, concerts, news, sketches. Oh, some accounting-school student mailed in a short of a clay man that he likes to run over? Put that on, too. Besides, how can “Saturday Night Live” have a comedic point of view if it has a different star host every week? And a rotating cast of young talent with their own generation’s attitude? Yeah, sure, Reitman argues, “Saturday Night Live” has a specific taste. The way a goat does.  

I ran a simple experiment to prove that “SNL” has a stable comedic point of view. Michaels has said many times, as he did on the podcast “Fly on the Wall” with Dana Carvey and David Spade, that the best “SNL” cast ever was the one on the air when you were in early high school. “You don’t have any money. You don’t have a car. So staying up to one o’clock in the morning is a really exciting thing,” he said.

My son Laszlo is in 10th grade, with no money and no car. And he loves “Saturday Night Live.” For his Halloween costume this year, he planned on wearing a Five-Timers Club jacket. He thinks Colin Jost and Michael Che are the best Weekend Update anchors imaginable. So I forced him to watch the 1980s “SNL” sketches that my friend Mike Gorker and I recorded on his VCR and quoted incessantly. Would the sensibility of the show be so rooted that the old sketches would fit in with what he’d seen? Or would it be like bringing him to a Punch and Judy show? He had, after all, been unwilling to finish YouTube videos of Jack Benny and George Burns. 

Watching Laszlo watch what I watched when I was his age was bizarre. Because he laughed at the exact same places Mike and I had: When Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson said “Nut… rit…ion.” When the narrator in the short film about video game addiction said about a tween prostitute hooked on Dig Dug, “Tonight Phyllis will earn $6.75. The hard way. A quarter at a time.” And even when Murphy’s Stevie Wonder sings “I am dark and you are light,” and Joe Piscopo’s blustering Frank Sinatra belts back “You are blind as a bat, and I have sight/ Side by side, you are my amigo, negro/ let’s not fight.”

Sure, Laszlo found the pacing slow and jokes atavistic. (About Murphy’s Mr. Robinson sketch, he said, “That was just pure racism for four-and-a-half minutes.”) But “SNL” was more than recognizable. It was, fundamentally, the same.

So what is the comedic taste of “SNL”? 

Here’s what it’s not. 

In 1975, Michaels could have made a proto-“Daily Show” about politics like the Smothers Brothers had. He could have made a cultural parody show in the style of Mad Magazine. He could have made the darker version of the show pushed by original head writer Michael O’Donoghue, who played a celebrity impressionist who sticks needles in his eyes. He could have made the stoner comedy of Tim and Eric, the exuberant comedy of Mel Brooks, the anti-comedy of Andy Kaufman. He did a little of all of that. But mostly, he combined physical comedy, broad characters and hard jokes. He went vaudeville. 

But upscale vaudeville. Michaels insisted on calling his pieces “sketches” to differentiate them from the broad “skits” he denigrated Carol Burnett and, worse, “Hee Haw”, for doing. A skit is a long joke — the football team dressed as cheerleaders. A sketch is a first draft that, in success, could be expanded into art. It’s a mini play that could grow into a “Wayne’s World” or MacGruber movie. Everyone in a sketch believes the world they’re in is real. It’s a character study. “SNL” would be Nichols and May as reinterpreted through cocaine.

“SNL” talks up to its audience, assuming we are smart and informed. We have to know who Sean Spicer is, why a white suburban guy played by Matt Damon would have such strong feelings about Weezer and why the guy in the Bad Idea jeans ad decided not to wear a condom because “When am I going to make it back to Haiti?” The show is not merely aware of the cutting edge but already thinks it is stupid. We noticed your fiber cereal and raise you a commercial for Colon Blow. We heard about that Amazon store where you can pay just by walking out the door and we know that Black people won’t feel safe with that. 

The show is aloof, refusing to explain its weirdness. If you need to ask why Dooneese has tiny hands, why Gumby talks like an old Jewish guy or why David S. Pumpkins is, then you don’t get it. Any questions? Don’t bother, because we’re not answering them.

More than anything else, “SNL” is cold. If the law of “Seinfeld” was “no lessons, no hugging,” “SNL”‘s rule is that lessons and hugs need to be mocked. Each sketch feels like a child on the spectrum looking for approval from a stern, slow-talking Canadian with his hands folded in front of his chest.

I like that kind of comedy almost as much as Laszlo does. Having written for network sitcoms, I admire how hard it must be to create a dozen of them every week, no less perform them live. But even in the 1980s, when I memorized so much of it, “SNL”‘s coldness doesn’t feel as vital to me as the gutsy rebellion of David Letterman, SPY magazine and Howard Stern. It didn’t feel as achingly human as James L. Brooks’ shows and movies. It didn’t feel. 

But it won. Unlike music or art, comedy rarely endures. I went to a Billy Joel concert with Laszlo this weekend, and the front rows were improbably packed with dancing teenage girls singing all the lyrics. Yet today, the Marx Brothers’ cockiness feels a little forced. Monty Python’s absurdism has lost its thrill. Mel Brooks irreverence has over-ripened into puerility. Even Letterman abandoned irony, now earnestly fawning over guests on Netflix.

Michaels’ comedic style is brutalist. It’s weirdly angular, but built out of solid materials, everything extraneous omitted, function over form. I like watching it every week. I’m jealous of it. But I wish it hadn’t won. 

Joel Stein is a journalist and screenwriter whose work has appeared in Time, the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly. His book “Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity” was published in 2012. 

This story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries/International issue of TheWrap awards magazine. Read more from the SAG Preview/Documentaries/International issue here.

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