This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. It was quite a groundbreaking concept back in nineteen seventy five. Celebrity impersonations, satirical news segments, musical performances, and sharp sketches by the not ready for primetime players, all of it live and late at nights. No television show has made its mark on comedy, pop culture, and politics more than Saturday Night Live, and for generations, the show continues to be as culturally relevant as it
was on its premiere five decades ago. Later on, I'll speak with SNL writer and producer Steve Higgins ahead of the show's historic fiftieth season. But first I'm talking with Susan Morrison. She's the article's editor at The New Yorker and author of the new book Lorne The Man who invented Saturday Night Live. Before The New Yorker, Morrison was the editor in chief of The New York Observer, the features editor at Vogue, and one of the founders of
Spy Magazine. But her first job was a writer's assistant for Laurene Michael's series The New Show. There she met writer and new Yorker legend. Lillian Ross Morrison would eventually continue on an editing career path, but she recalls an early passion for writing and journalism.
My English teacher kind of turned the lights on. And my high school friend Adam Liptak, who now covers the Supreme Court for The Times, and his intellectual family of Hungarian emigres, they really they just you know, they gave him my first espresso.
And got me reading the Village Voice, you know, the whole thing.
But when you're there, this ignites this writing passion definitely.
Well, you know, I never was one of those editors who secretly had a hankering to write.
I loved my editor job.
But ten years ago I had this preposterous notion my kids had gone to college. I was suddenly an empty nester, and I thought, I guess I'm gonna have a lot of free time, you know, which didn't turn out to be true, of course, and just sort of jumped into
this book project. It had just been the SNL fortieth anniversary, and I realized that I had a lot of thoughts and a lot of perspective on the show and Lauren and just decided to do this and I'll tell you it was hard because a lot of biography is really not an easy one to start with. It's kind of
like writing an encyclopedia. It's so many facts, really right, you to really take the measure of a person like that, And you know, and I did it while keeping my not on demanding day job as an editor at The New Yorker. So and there were many times during these years when I thought I was out of my mind. But I'm so happy with it now. I'm so happy that I did it.
How much of Lillian Ross's profile piece Laurenne informed her biography of him was did a foundation for well.
Lillian was a close friend of mine and I was her editor for twenty years, and we would talk about Lauren because I worked for him briefly in nineteen eighty three. But you know, when Lillian died and I'm her literary executor, so I'm in charge of all of her papers, I kind of have expected to find MASSI file cabinets full of notes about Lauren, but I didn't. But we talked
about Lauren. She did not ever write her profile for The New Yorker because of Sean's firing, but what she did do because she I think she felt she owed it to Lauren to do something. She wrote a fairly short piece that ran an interview magazine. You know, it had some interesting bits in it, it didn't have a
lot of groundbreaking stuff. And Lauren always told me that when Lillian was talking with him working on the profile, she was chiefly fascinated with She loved to talk about his mother, who she met, Florence Slippowitz, who I never had a chance to meet, and the scene around her, her kitchen table. I guess Florence was a kind of a cantankerous woman, but I don't think it was that easy to be her son. She I think he was sparing with the compliments in Lauren's presence, but if he
wasn't around, she'd be bragging about him. But I think she was the kind of person that people in the neighborhood came to.
And you're not around, I've seen your paces. When you're in front of me, I'm so diffident you're you're crying.
But that was she was really interested in all of that. He used to say, that's all she would talk to me about is my mother's table. So there was a little bit of that in that profile. But in any case, it's not as if I got any kind of tranch of material from Lilian, but you know, it was certainly something that we had in common. And I think that when I showed up in Lauren's office ten years ago and said, I've just signed a contract to write a
book about you, I don't need anything from you. You know, you know, I know your world and your people, but if you'd like to let me interview you and give me access to the you know, I think it'll be a better book and they'll be more accurate and richer. And after kind of sitting down and taking a couple of gulps, he agreed because he knew me a little bit, and I think that he did feel as sort of
an ongoing threat. You know, I'm sort of picking up where Lillian left off, and there's something nice about that. And as you know, lineage and connections and history, these things interest learned.
They mean something to him.
Yeah, he's no, he's when you talk to me about when you have when you have his attention, I mean, his mind is always. I mean I'm not saying the show runs on autopilot. It gets his full attention, but he's very good at it, and he can do it queen rather defintely, but he's so wide raging in his appetite. How did you get into SNL when you were sixteen years old?
I know that was against the rules, wasn't it.
Yes?
Yes, So I lived in Stanford, Connecticut. One of my best friends, Robin Guerrino. She was cool, and she had an aunt who was a secretary at NBC. We had watched some of the early shows. You know, when you're sixteen, that's what you did. You would stay home and watch SNL and get out your bong. Right, So robins Anne got us four tickets and we grabbed a couple of guys that we thought were cute from our high school and took the train.
In security was rather lax back than in the seventies. Was.
We sat right there, right next to home base, and it was completely thrilling. I am sure a lot of the references in the show went right over my head, but just the deconstructed aspect of it, sitting in the middle of a working television studio with all of this stuff happening around me, that's what made the biggest impression on me. Found it enormously exciting and also then later when I was telling Lauren about this, he didn't know
that I was there when I was sixteen. But that particular show I think was close to his heart because it was a Ellie Gould hosted that show. It was one of the classics of the first season where the great Michael O'donah Hugh star Trek sketch was on that show where Gould plays an NBC executive walking onto the Starship Enterprise telling them that the show is canceled, and you know, Captain Kirk played by John Belushi just treats him like some alien life form, and it's a brilliant
breaking the fourth wall. It was brilliant, and Leon Redbone was the musical guest.
In a way, it's easy to talk about Lauren, but impossible to talk about You can suggest things, you can make observations about him, but to analyze him and make any conclusions about him as the most impossible. He has a small cadre, a very small cadre. Everything is always the richest and the most full and the most warm in your heart has a special pleasure that's in the early days. So everybody that accompanies him from the early day Steve Martin, Paul Simon McCartney, all these legends of
music and comedy and so forth. What I realized was, you're never really a part of that group unless you're in the cast. I hosted seven teen times. I used to joke and say, God, I'd love to be a member of the cast. Then I became one for four years. I did the trump thing overwhelmingly for two years, and a bit less in the third and fourth year. But I never have the same connection with those people that
the ones who are in the cast. The bond between them, the bomb between those people on that show is one of the most profound things I've ever seen in this business.
Well, it is interesting so many of them, when they're talking about the experience of being in the cast, they use they use military metaphors. They say it's like being in the Marine Corps, or it's like jumping out of an airplane holding hands all together. It's this kind of peak experience. And I think that it's a combination of the cutthroat competitive nature of the show. And I don't
mean that in a negative way. The point is, as you know, because you've done read through, they're four hours worth of material generated at least every week, but only you know, sixty some minutes of it with commercials are going to make it by Saturday, so inevita. Things are cut. People's hopes are dashed, you know, people don't get on the air or some But there's that, and then also
the adrenaline of it being live. I think a lot of viewers don't have any idea what that actually means, because there isn't anything like it that's live on television.
The only other thing is sports.
The way if every viewer at home could sit in studio eight h once and get that experience of having the cranes flying over your head and seeing the scenery hauled in and out and the cue cards rewritten, the experience of not knowing until eleven fifteen whether you're in the show or not. I think those are enormously bonding experiences.
One time, we were doing thirty Rock and Zucker was the head of NBC at the time, and he came out to the studio at Silver Cup and Queens. He turned to a small group of people and he said, this is the most expensive half hour of television I have on my network. And you look at SNL and you're thinking of what does this cost? Yeah, the show
costs an enormous amount of my per week. And what I always say is I always suggest that mourn among his you know, thrilling gifts and so forth, is that he makes each owner of the company coming and go and says to them, go ahead and replace me and see what happens.
Yeah, but anything you're.
Going to bring in is bound to lose money. How many people have tried to take down Laurn? How many people have said I'm going to cancel that, I'm going to be the one that finally euthanizes SNL.
Nobody's taken down Lauren and he makes money.
Yeah.
He often talks about the show is it's sort of like a David Lean epic on television, just in terms of the vastness and the production values. And I think there have been times. I mean, in the book, I talk about how in the nineties when there was a much more activist kind of management, in particular Don Olmeyer in la Really, you know, they were feeling successful because of Steinfeld and some other things, and they just said, Okay, we're just going to go into SNL and fix it.
And they you know, they made him fire Chris Farley. They made him fire out of Sandler, they made him fire Jim Downey, and then they went for him. Warren Littlefield said things in the press suggesting that, you know, even Lauren Michael's job wasn't safe, and they really tried to, you know, get under the hood and meddle with it.
And again part of Lauren's genius, you know, people Conan O'Brien says, you know that after a nuclear apocalypse, you know, it's just going to be a lot of cockroaches walking around, but Lauren will be in his office for being the fish casting the cockroaches is the next cast. Ideas, it's always a long game with him. He's he knows how to just kind of keep his head down and sail through it all.
You know. He turned eighty this year. This is the fiftieth anniversary of the show. Obviously, people have been talking about it quite regularly for the last year or so. When I came and did the show for the first time in nineteen ninety, I think it was I did the show the first time and that was obviously their fifteenth or sixteenth season, And to think I was doing that show and thinking, who on earth would have thought this thing would go fifty years.
Well, Dana Carvey told me a funny story. You know, he came in in I guess it was maybe eighty six. You know, Lauren took a hiatus of five years after the first five years, and then he came back and he had a terrible first season back nineteen eighty five when he had hired all these young actors from John Hughes movies, Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Downey Junior. Very good people, but just people who didn't really cohere as an SNL cast. So the next cast, which really jelled it was Dana
Carvey and Kevin Neilaan and John Hooks. But Carvey said that he came in and he thought, God, I'm going to be in the last cast. This is going to be the last gen. This thing is going down the tubes, and nobody had any idea that it would just go on like that. And anyway, you talked about your first hosting gig, and I remember Lauren telling me, you know, when he would see Carvey, I mean, Carvey just really
blew everyone away. He would just watch him doing his George Bush or his George Michael Church lady and he would just say he's a fucking show pony. And apparently the next person that he would say that about was you.
Oh my god.
And I remember him.
Saying watching you do the Canteen Voice with Adam Sandler and where you're a Scout leader and kind.
Of like, I'm very aggressive groves on this.
Poor boy, and we're just going marveling from under the bleachers.
Alec will do anything.
I've heard that, and that was me. I said, I'm going to just be like them.
I'll do anything silly, put the pie in my face, pull my pants down, I don't care. I remember once I decided to do that, they just kept asking me to come back. And just because they asked, it doesn't mean you need to go. And I said, I never had more fun in my life making films. Says I always tell people can be challenging, but it's rarely fun.
It's rarely fun.
Well, what you've described it's been, it was really fun. Kind of picking up all the SNL LINGO. I mean, I should have just put a glossary on the back of the book. But what you're describing just coming and being, you know, doing your job and sketches. They call that playing parts, and they love it when a host will come in and be good in service parts, in sketches. The hardest thing for that writing staff, and the writing staff in Lauren's mind, is in some way really the
heart of the show. The hardest thing for the writing staff and for the performers is when a host comes in and just wants to be the funny guy in every sketch. They feel that that kind of tanks the show, tanks the cast.
I came to New York in nineteen seventy nine to finish school. I'd gone three years full time somewhere else to GW but I came to NYU to finish and get a degree in theater. You know, you had Bill Hurt and Sir Gurney and Raoul Julia and Glenn Close and of course Marilyn Cazal. If you didn't make your bones in the theater in some way, you were somewhat illegitimate.
Right And I think that Steve Martin sometimes says, you know, in New York, you get successful. In Hollywood, you get hot, you know, a different thing. But I you know, Lauren is kind of a theater kid nerd. You know, he grew up going to the theater, putting on plays in his camp, and he always likes to say that he is one foot in the theater. And I think it's really interesting how many of the S and L people
are the same. I'm sure plenty of them are movie buffs, but there are also people who want to sing the score to Oliver, you know. And you see this in like whenever John Mullaney hosts Now, there is always a really elaborate production number that is kind of a send up of some Broadway musical like Diner Lobster. And they're all really comfortable in that milieu, you know, the black body.
It's in their blood.
Yeah.
One thing I love about Lauren is that, you know, we've known people who are honored, who are feted, and who are exalted in this business, who seem all too ready to accept those honors. There's a little slight swift to them. A lot of the comedy people. I find it interesting because they're the more insecure group, the comedy star. But Lauren, in my mind, times it out beautifully. He waits till the very last six seven, eight years to take a bow. He was not prone to take a bow.
I mean, I was one of the people that helped to facilitate his getting the Kennedy Center Honor. Lauren waited to accept those awards when it was like you just couldn't stop it anymore. There was just this avalanche of laudatory feelings toward him.
Yeah.
Well, I think for one thing, the big fortith anniversary show ten years ago, which was a sensational show and an emotional time for a lot of people, really had an effect on him. And I think it was Bill Murray who said to me, you know, yeah, we were all there, but it was impossible for us not to all realize that we probably won't all be there for
the fiftieth. I mean time March is on. And I think he's also acutely aware of that, you know he Aside from the show, one of Lauren's huge achievements was in creating this culture, creating a world, a big sandbox that everybody can play and people cross from different generations act in each other's shows, and they all know each
other and they're part of a big family. And I think he's starting to realize that, you know, anything that will bring the tribe together is a good thing, and that was it was very moving at the Kennedy Center to see all those people together. There is something about getting a Lifetime Achievement award that for a lot of people makes them worry that that means they're getting shuffled off the stage. You know, there's a sort of a
down heel from here exactly. But I also think that, you know, Lauren is smart enough to know that a lot of galas that want to honor you, you know, they just want to sell a lot of tables just one of your names. They know that people are going to come and salute you, and it's just, you know, life's too short. Perhaps I was at the Kennedy Center,
which was really fun. One of the things that I thought was so interesting about it is, you know, early in his life, Lauren was trying to escape the cheesy variety television gulch, you know, the way TV shows like Sonny and Cher were always shot on these huge, wide stages with cyclorama walls and big velvet curtains and a lot of Medley's and and you know, he wanted something much more raw and cool, which is what SNL was. But sitting there in the Kennedy Center honors the show
that they put on from yes, it was fun. It was all of his friends and everything, but it was that kind of old style variety show and a lot of Medley's And he told me a story about Paul Simon, his friend Paul Simon who got an honored at the Kennedy Center some years earlier, and having his co honor Rey Elizabeth Taylor, lean over to him during you know, some performance of Bridge over Troubled Water, and Liz Taylor says, how does it feel when they fuck up your song?
Kennedy author and editor Susan Morrison.
If you're enjoying all the SNL talk, check out my episode with paula Pell.
I used to write a sketch called six Degrees Celsius and it was like a boy group and Will Ferrell was their manager. He had tinted glasses of course, you know. It was Jimmy Fallon and Chris Catan and Chris Parnell and they were a boy group. And then we'd have the host in it while that week and Sync was there.
We asked in Sync to be another boy group in this competition on the show, playing a fake boy group, and so I wrote a song called hold the Pickle, and they were like McDonald's employees and so and sinc came out with like McDonald's outfits on and saying hold the pickle, and they're so they were so crazy talented, Like they got there and looked at it for ten minutes and had full harmonies, in full choreography. I mean, they threw that shit together.
I was just amazed.
For the rest of my interview with Paula pelle Head to Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break, Susan Morrison shares Lorne Michael's rules for sketch comedy and why cast members love being called into the principal's office, and later I catch up with Steve Higgins to discuss Saturday Night Live's fiftieth season. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Susan Morrison and I have both had the privilege of working alongside Lorne Michaels and benefiting from
his wisdom and experience. I was curious about what Susan thought about Lauren showing no signs of slowing down in his eighties.
Well, I think he's extremely good at delegating and extremely good at finding talent, and yet even his top ye deputies, I think recognize that they need him.
He is the center.
Make sure that.
Yeah, Coonor O'Brien told me that everyone thinks that Lauren has the secret. I don't know what it is, but they think he has it. And Bill Hater likes to say everyone who has ever worked there spends the rest of their life trying to figure him out. It's a combination of I mean, he's a great talker, as you know, words kind of flow out of him like jazz, and yet he can also keep things close to the vest and be a little bit a little and be a little bit aloof and a little bit mysterious, and it's
a very interesting management technique. People want his approval, they want his time. There's a story about how Chris Farley used to love being called into Lauren's office, even though it was usually to be lectured about his drinking or drug problem or something. You know, there was an air of being called into the principal's office. But even that people like because they just want that proximity to his
power and his mystery and another thing he has. And I think it's been accentuated as the years have passed. You know, in the beginning, he was the same age as everybody. They were all peers, and that made management a little bit complicated. Now he's, you know what, forty to fifty and sixty years older than some of these people, and many of them regard him as a father figure. And he had a lot of father figures in his own life because he lost his father suddenly when he
was fourteen. But he has developed this. You know, he's a guy with a lot of axioms, a lot of rules, a lot of rules of thumb. He loves to give people tips on how to live and how to find an apartment, how to get their kid into bribo. Yes by now exactly. But in the same way that he has all of his rules of sketch comedy, you know, do it in sunshine. You know, don't overload the premise, don't put a hat on a hat. The sets have
to be hard wall reality. Early on he realized that in comedy, you don't want the character to have a funny name like Walter Crankcase or wear a silly hat, because that overwhelms the comedy writing and the comedy performing. You know, you want that to be the the main event.
Now you're two girls.
I have two girls.
Are they in the biz at all.
They have both been in the biz.
Nancy worked for Adam Scott on severance for this whole last second season and was really she was utterly indispensable to Adam and Ben and Helen has She's been making short films and she recently moved to Asheville, North Carolina, just to kind of get out of the city and try a different place. But yeah, they were both theater kids who are interested in television and movies and doing very interesting things.
I think one of the ultimate stories about Lauren is we're at the gala at the Museum of Natural History of Lauren's is the big mocker there. So I go there one year and of course, any relationship that's important to you, any relationship that you really feel it's such a great opportunity for you as a person out in terms of business. That person is someone who's important to you, and you're so grateful that you know them that you think,
how can this relationship deepen and go even further? And I wasn't thinking that when I said this slam, but I turned him in front of a group of people, and there were other people there, and I turned him. I go, you know, Lauren, You're the only man I know who I feel this close to, who I've never kissed, And he literally just had the greatest Lauren face, and he goes, let's keep it that way.
He's very good at the quick, deadpan comeback, the right comeback.
He nearly always I've never seen him wrong. He's almost always right.
There's a funny bit in the book where his talent people are describing a Steve Carrell movie, I think it was called Marwin that was about to come out because Correl was an upcoming host, and they said, yeah, Steve Carell plays a guy who gets bullied by neo Nazis because he collects little dolls, and Lauren just kind of takes a beat and he goes, how can I invest?
It's just.
Author and editor Susan Morrison. I've had the honor of host SNL more than a few times, and while there, I've gotten to know Saturday Night Live writer and producer Steve Higgins. Steve Higgins is a very busy man, juggling his role as announcer of the Tonight show with Jimmy Fallon while overseeing the SNL writer's room and making casting decisions alongside Lorne Michaels. Higgins is a returning guest on Here Is the Thing. I first spoke with him live
at Guildhall in East Hampton in twenty eighteen. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Steve Higgins again, right before the launch of Saturday Night Live's fiftieth season. I wanted the writer and comedian to reflect on his start at SNL back in the nineties.
Nineteen ninety five, nineteen ninety five, Wow, wow, what is that is my twenty ninth Clinton was present, Yeah, Daryl was Clinton, Alec Baldwin and Alec Baldwin.
Now that leads me to you must be struck every now and then if you have time to think about what we couldn't do anymore that we used to do years ago.
I kind of think of it as like, would this make someone sad if they saw it? And then you go, well, then that's easy to not do. And I'm sure there's ways to do stuff. Still, I think it's not as hand tying as people say. And I think it's loosening up now too, because I think people are getting more like, oh, come on, they used to say intent doesn't matter and you go, well, yeah, it kind of does. So I think it's coming around to again. Mean spirited stuff is not you know, that's always just mean.
But do you read at their bead through on Wednesdays? Do you do their bead through? And everyone's howling laughing? Right, this is a tough crowd to make laugh They realized there's no point in laughing if it isn't funny, because that's not going to help us get where we want to go. When you do something that they think is funny and they're all cracking up, do you turn around and throwsta and people go, we can't do.
That it's funny? Well, usually that's because it was like a radio piece where you go like, oh wow, that's super funny. But what are you going to see? Yeah, what are you going to play with? That just going to be a shot of somebody said talking and then describing this thing that Usually it'll be like, you know, lines like and let me see your note and you wrote that in crayon, you know what I mean? You go like, oh, well that's okay, somebody to show it.
Then you know, you're more describing it than stuff. And also we're trying to It's like people love as you know, put table lefts in like, you know, we go like, we're not HBO people. We can't do I would say, make it an innuendo, not an up your assa. So they go like, well it's it's a blowjob. No, that's not that's not no. No, well just not saying yeah, yeah, we're a network show. Please. Yeah.
Now, when they started doing the show, and I've forgotten this, and I don't think. I didn't think I would, but when they started doing the show live on the West Coast, that's been how many years now, oh gosh, ten, yeah, something like that, Yeah, a few few, and they started doing that, they had to kind of dial it down.
If it's a network a little bit prime time. Yeah, so when you were the show now is not as it's not. It's not as ripe because it's prime time. Because there we really could say whatever we wanted to. After what is it eleven thirty? The FCC rule ends at whatever, you know, sometime that you're free. But it's like now that we're eight. I think it's kind of like Howard Stern. You know, once he could do whatever
he wanted to. He went to, IY, might as well just be good and have fun without whatever, you know what I mean, It became a different thing, and I think that's run. Yeah, that's more fun than you know, like my generation of people never tried to fool the sensors.
Well mean, obviously I always refer to when we did thirty Rock and Tina taught me. They all taught me the difficulty of doing it in prime time on a network show and having a you know, makes you more clever, it makes you smarter. But for you guys, obviously it was a ratings boondoggle for the show.
Correct.
Yeah, once you're on the West Coast live and you bring that audience that might not see a tape show, right, people who might not stay up till eleven thirty, they might record it in the old days people recording with tapes and it like that.
But this was a huge boost for the show, correct. Yeah. I think also it just made sense that they didn't have anything on you know what I mean, and we're doing it anyway, so why not And yeah they're not showing anything. It was, you know, murder, she wrote, maybe I think at one time or something like that.
Now, fiftieth anniversary, you start thirty years ago, so you're season twenty Yeah, twenty one. You're thirty years ago, in ninety five or twenty nine years ago. Did you ever imagine the show would go on? I mean, I know that's a silly question, but I myself when I did, you did.
Well because it's like the Tonight Show, right, They're not going to lose the IP or whatever they call it, you know what I mean, it's too valuable. It might change, you know, like whenever Lauren leaves would won't be probably for another ten years or something like that. But then they're going to have to redo it. It's like Johnny Carson leaving. You know, it's like they'll go to whatever. Yeah, exactly, whatever it is, they'll do whatever they have to do.
Cut slash the budget, and you know, make a new less Castle show, less pre tapes, less money, spend less grandeur.
Lauren is someone who one of the because I'm obviously a great admirer of his as well as he's my friend. Lauren taught me that when you're at a certain point in the ratings, like with thirty Rock, we were not a ratings juggernaut, but we were at a point where were at a level in which they knew that they got rid of us. Anything they replaced us with, it was going to make less money. And the same is true I assume with SNL, which is that they Lauren has always been to convince them that it is in
their interest to keep the show on the air. Do you think that's true that the thing is stayed on the air largely because of Lauren.
In the form it is, yes, right, because he's a master. He is an empresario. You'd need like ten people to replace him, right, because he does all the he talks, you know what I mean, everything he goes, everywhere he goes. It's about SNL, every party he goes to, every premier he goes, everything he goes to, and his rolodexes or whatever they call it now contacts are deep.
Switching to the cast for a moment. I mean, in my mind, when you look at it with the right lens, it's pretty much the same. Who you're going after what you want. It may change somewhat, you may have a little more of this and a little less of this or what have you. But the casting of the show is I mean, obviously the faces and the dynamics are very very different, but the cast of the show is pretty much some age wise, Yeah, their roots where they come from.
Well, it's also just change looking. No, it's always just who's the funniest person out there and we'll figure out what to do with them then, you know, just put the funniest people you can find in auditions and things like that and just get them in the building and we'll see what happens. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
But without naming names, when someone is not invited back when they when they were there for a year or such show, and then they're gone, they're typically gone. Why they just this that doesn't know alchemy there or.
Usually it's like sometimes it's something happened or or that they can't replicate live, you know what I mean, Because it's a very specific skill set to perform live at the time at the thing and be better than dress then you you know, be better in there than you were dressed, but be just a good enough at dress to get it on and to be able to function in the high stress you know world of You know, it's like fighter pilots. Not everybody's cut out to be
a fighter pilot. That doesn't mean they're not good, you know what I mean. There's there's people who didn't do well on the show with the specific skills, yeah, who did great other places, and it's like you go it just whatever. For whatever reason, they couldn't master that format.
I feel like what I understood back them was that the cast had to find a way, whether they were writing themselves or people were writing for them. That was really the anvil, the crucible there of their career going on was could they either do the writing.
Or muster the force.
They don't, then they had to exactly someone had to fall in love with them and become their writing partner.
It's really like.
No other show, right, It's like all of show business. And I was like, if you you know what I mean, because then it's like you're hot one day or not one day. You're then one day, and you've got to figure out how to make peace people want to work with you and want to be with you and want to watch you, and figure out who is the best people to work with, who's the wrong people to work with, what kind of material you should use on other shows. It's really like hear casts take the script go. Writers
don't meet the people on the show. They're in the separate building and nessa ells more like old studio system where writers and performers on seventeen are the same, you know, and it's like it's just figuring out how to navigate the skill set. You need to get your stuff on the air and work. You know, a lot of people too like things at the table too, like screaming at the table, kills at the table. Humans don't like it.
They get scared. Like Molly as Mary Catherine Gallagher, she would always have to get up and say superstar because ross people thought she was really hurt, and she probably did really hurt. She's Bruce's But the brilliance of Molly to go like superstar, you know, and would That's one example I'd say to newcast members Tuesday, you can't play a loser. You can't somebody who thinks they're a loser. They could be a loser, but they can't think that.
We don't want to think your characters shaken, Yes, and there will. Damon Roberts, he's a winner, he's a winner. He doesn't you know, he doesn't want here. Don't wait on my parade.
Molly Shannon was the Chuck Bednarik of the Evil Canevil of comedy I mean she do this, you know, was like, Wow, you're you're worse than Farley. You're stronger than You're tougher than Farley. But I see that people who they combined with people and they have this relationship with a writer, and you see them just fly, you know. I mean whoever Paul Lapel was fixated on, whoever she liked a lot. And I was always a beneficial because the Tony Bennett stuff and she'd write that stuff and I thought I
was gonna cry. I would sit in her room and just cry. And you say, just like a roll of barbecue Frido's. You know, no clippers could tame those poka chips. I mean, where does this come from from?
This girl? The mom where you're cressing her feet and the doctor came and said she's gone.
That once made love to a woman's feet for nine hours. Then the doctor came in and said, mister Bennett, she's gone.
God.
But let me just say this about you, which is you're so funny and smart in that managerial way.
Like to work for you.
There's never a thought when you're working for somebody who's management of any kind where even if they are funny, they're im muted, they're not charming at all. But with you, I feel like people are more inclined to listen to you and follow you because you are very charming and funny in your banter and you're not just writing stuff that's funny and handing in when you're talking to somebody, you're funny.
And I'm wondering you could.
Have worked a lot of other places.
I think once I started there, it instantly made all other TVs seem boring, right, and movies seem boring. Like I don't even like to go on pre tapes anymore because there's something about the live that you go like, this is using every part of your brain. You felt like every and also that we do stuff you use every part of you know, we write pieces that take place in the sixteenth century, eater World War two, you know what I mean. Also, there's never a it's never yeah,
it's never dull exactly. Think about all the Godfather Part four and you're you're looking at the stuff, you go, oh my god, these these wigs are better than movie wigs. These costumes are the sets. When we switch to HDT crew, only thing we had to do was trim the lace on the wigs more. That's the only change we had to do because Eugene and those you know, they and the sets were so beautiful that because they were from theater, so they had to look real up close. So we
were our sets are over. You know, we've never used the two dimensional rule of television or movies. Everything was gorgeous. So and also you're doing a show like you're reading those books when your kid, Wow, I want to be a writer in New York and work on your show of shows. Well, they don't make that anymore, so you can't. And then apparently they do, and this show shouldn't exist. It's it's like taking a time machine and everything about
it is blessed. And every time you get in the mood, you gotta go, oh, I got to remember I get to do this. I don't got to do this. I get to do this thing that you still enjoy it like him, Yeah, I enjoy it. And somebody you know, somebodys you go like, I can't you know it. But for the most part you're going like, where else are you going to go to do that?
You know what I mean?
There's no other place on earth that's like this place, And so it'd be like once I did that. The first five years, I was just scared to death, you know, when I'd smoked so much. I was come to realize self medicating through coffee and cigarettes.
As you recall, Lawn said that about the sets when it went HD. He said you could really see more vividly how stained the sets were from Marcie's smoking.
With the problem with.
HD, it all became really clear how much smoking Marcy had done. It all kind of grade everything. So Keenan has been on there for I don't even want to guess, like twenty years or something like that, right, And you wonder why does he stay?
I mean, probably it's a question for him. But whence he stays the same thing he loves it's he loves it and he's so good at it and he can do other things. When you're cast, you work like twenty weeks a year. Yeah, you know what I mean. You work. You're there like we have a way of a fo n Yeah, your four week run coming up, and it's just like you don't it's like working on the pipeline
or whatever, you know what I mean. It's like you're an oil people crying in their office yes, exactly, and you don't you really, you don't pretend like you have a life, right.
Saturday Night Live writer and producer Steve Higgins. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Steve Higgins shares the rules at SNL to keep the show at the top of its game. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the iconic sketch comedy show, NBC will air
a three hours Saturday Night Live primetime special. Steve Higgins reflects on the irony of the date of this upcoming anniversary.
Saturday Night Lives fiftieth anniversaries on Sunday, February sixty exactly. It was on Sunday last time too. Remember that was a Sunday, Yeah, because with Jimmy the next day.
It's like, oh Jesus Priest, remember we did thirty Rock Live from eight h I love that.
Yeah. I still find scripts in my office on nine, like under the front desks and stuff like that. Yeah, under the couch. Yeah.
Jack mcbair did the show a couple of months ago, and he was so great, and I just remember him sitting there. We did the live show, and he's like, somebody says they want to kill live television. It's useless, and Jack says, oh, no, remember the old Joey Montero show. He was like you, mister Jordan. He didn't like to rehearse and he wanted the unitior as fast as he could. And I thought they were pretty spot on there about
Tracy Morgan. Yeah, Tracy Morgan, Tracy Jordan, the overlap. But then we did that thing where I did that little sketch about where I played like a Dean Martin man Quay, and it was so much fun. That's what I love was playing people who were just like no one else would ever ask you to do that. No, like me with Tony Bennett and this and that and then Trump, which I mean I always say to people, I don't think my Trump was anything special, but I gave him
what I thought he deserved. It was his spirit, well but exactly. And plus, as people don't understand, you're doing the cold opening of a live TV show in a studio we have to split the difference between the camera and the audience. Sometimes you're too loud because you're playing to the crowd, and sometimes you're you play a little softer and it's not as funny, you know, and you've just got that script. Yeah, ten minutes. But he's a little brassy because we're like, what do you want me
to do? Come out and do with like a really deep impersonation of Trump. That'll be like a nineteen minute cold opening, and ain't gonna be cold. It's gonna be half baked.
What I think is funny tell me is that you were one of the best mimics in the world. I don't know if people know this. And the thing you're most famous for it is an impression that you don't even do you know what I mean. I would never do that. No, It's like it's like your brando. Your brando is perfect.
You and I are like two dogs sniffing each other and I'm sniffing you and you're sniffing me, and my god, my god, I hate that.
I just I just hate it.
And you say whatever you want to say to me, and I'll say whatever I want to say to you.
In his moomoo in his momo and then is that all right with you? I was like, you got it, man, you got it. I'm gonna say what everyone, I'm gonna let you have it. Now here comes. Oh you won't be like that. Huh. Here we go and the four stages a Pacino so he's.
Young, Butchina young Cerpaco. He's up here really high. He's grinding his teeth. Who knows why, I can guess, and he's and he says, you are going to go for a walk with out coups, you'll fuck me. I put one in your back. That's it from Cirproco. Then then Pacino is like, you know, uh, you're out of order. You're out of order. No, you are out of order. You gotta get that order. You gotta get the New York just right, I think. And then you get into the third phase where he's like.
Way down, he's so down here. Let me tell you something you you don't understand. And then you get into the Southern version. Then he would for a period where he's sound like Fogo and Leghorn. He was like, I realize you don't know.
Oh my god.
I saw her going down the street and I was like, whoa to get back to the show just for a moment. I mean, obviously during the season you have little time. But I wonder do you still make it a point to watch other comedy on shows and see what other people are doing.
Does that feed you? Does it inform you at all?
Now?
Do you need to know that to do your show? Well? You watch talk shows for I watched them for like, oh my god, I look at how that person would be a good host, you know what I mean? Like you see them on the being lively or whatever, and you go, hey, you guys, yeah, it's well it's not I don't decide it, but I go, hey, that person was really fun on Jimmy, you know what I mean? Or this person was that or whatever. And then it feels sadly, it all feels like a bustman's holiday watching comedy,
do you know what I mean? So you're like, I usually watch like documentaries or go home listen to a book on tape, or listen to a pot What.
Do you do?
You like films? You're like, what's your programming? I have been a lot of reading and books on tape.
You have internet out there in the country. You have internet there we.
Have Intra, which is just connects my building to the next. Yeah, exactly, it's like Interstate Highway, right, but it's all feels like but no film, no, you know, binge TV shows. I try to, you know what I mean, Like, but what's about the comedies? What's the fast one I watched?
Was?
I watched The Bear because my niece is in that. What happens too is I get into shows and then this is why I'm old, because I don't like this six years and then you forgot that. You watch the first two seasons and then it comes out again and you're going like, there's no even water cooler talk anymore. So you don't even know because people go, oh, don't, I can't, don't no spoilers, So now we can't even
talk about that. I binge the Sopranos like every two years. Yeah, that's a binge the last year and I kind of now, I'm just going back to things that I know happened before the world got so dark. So oh, you'll watch things I've seen before.
Well, I want to watch things because people will tell me and I don't really care. But I watch things where there's something I feel like I've got I don't want to miss.
Like Jennifer Coolidge in White Lotus. Yeah, I saw that.
I wasn't big on White Load, nothing wrong with it, but I thought, oh, I don't know if I want to watch this. And then somebody said, but you've got to see this woman in this role, and she was just amazing.
I love.
What's also that thing where people tell you stuff and then when you've heard enough about it, you go like, and then all you do is watch it for well, it can't be that good, you know what I mean. You can put up with a lot of stuff and you can't explain why it's so fascinating to watch these people, you know what I mean. And so rarely do you see something that transforms everything and you go like, oh that is something else. Oh my god, because how rare is that.
I'll never forget him. At the Emmys, I go to the other side to say hi to a couple of people doing some you know, wopping break there of like ten minutes or something, and I go over and I see everybody from Westworld seated together. There's Ed with Amy. Now I worship Amy. I did Streetcar on Broadway with Amy in ninety and your mom loved ed and my mom loved that exactly.
Well, a lot of women love that.
But anyway, he's there and I lean into him. He smiles, he gets up, he gives me a handshake, and I lean into him and I whisper.
I go, what is your show about?
And he goes, I was hoping you'd tell me. Last couple questions, why do audiences? Do you think? Why have audiences? Because this is the critical thing of the numbers weren't there, and there's times that the numbers weren't there, but they fought back and made some changes.
We are now the number one entertainment show on television, all of television. Right. No, I, it's just sad, right because you know what I mean, because the the TV watching has gone down so much that a show at nothing to do with our show. But that shouldn't be the way. It shouldn't be a show that's on at eleven thirty at night.
And obviously the show wouldn't have stayed for this inconceivable amount of time, fifty years. It's just unbelievable to me and Lauren there for all but that slug of time where he left briefly for a couple of years or few years. But you can't survive if you don't have an audience. What is the thing that audiences keep returning to. I think it's that he's Lauren set up. He's like the James Madison of comedy.
He's set up these rules so that the show isn't run by a seventy year old man. Clean hits, fair, hits, everything is right, you give change all those rules that he's set up for doing sketch comedy that weren't skits. There were sketches and played to the top of your game, be as smart as you can. Those are the rules
that haven't changed at all. The jokes might change, But the thing about people, yeah, the references change and things like that, but the but the way you treat the references hasn't changed, and the way you perform it hasn't changed. So I think people go there because they you know, it's like and the sets are the same.
The sets as.
Exactly if you look at Wayne's world, I've seen that set many times every living room. The people there, the writers have a responsibility to be accurate and to be well informed and to be you know, every once in a while we make a mistake. But you know, it's
like Sarah Paleler they're wearing. The costumes are exactly what they were the you know what I mean, if there was a debate, everything is the way it's a and the stuff you hear, you trust that it's not going to be made up from whole cloth, that you can learn something. You know. It's like watching Monty Python when you're a kid and you'd go like, oh, there you go. I know there's a reference about the Spanish Inquisition. I know that they're telling the truth about that because I
trust them, and I think that's what it is. People go there because they know it's a safe space to see stuff that isn't going to be inaccurate.
Now there's a political season coming up, obviously, and you've got you've already got a Trump James Austin Johnson is Trump. Obviously, you have Maya who's agreed to.
Play, which makes everything better. She's gonna Yeah, that's gonna be a big deal. I mean, it's also a great thing of like Biden and Obama weren't as fun to watch as Clinton or you know what I mean. It's like there's not a good even if you're the best Bush, Yeah, exactly the best. You know, Will made that fun, you know what I mean, Like he's like, yeah, so good him and now and just there's something about Maya who can come out and do Kamala, who's like juts.
And she's gonna come to New York periodically and do the show over time. She's not gonna be here for the whole season again.
She's got kids. The kids are getting old. Favorite people on Earth, they are getting Yeah, pearls, they're all, they're all getting older.
I mean, ninety nine percent of me now thinks she's gonna win after the debate, But there's still that one percent of me that's afraid theft and so forth right.
And there's also that Yeah, nothing is for sure.
But do you find because of people maybe tired of it, but he winds up winning somehow. You're not going to go with him week to week?
Are you? I don't think so. It's just it's hard to do, right, it's done. It's just done. It's like it's just so he's the same, So the gags are the same. Yeah, it's very difficult to You have to get dig deeper and deeper and deeper, because you know, to half the stuff. You'd go, come on, the President of the United the ex president is not going to
say that that Haitians eat dogs and cats. He's not going to do You can't do that, that's ridiculous, right, And then he does it, and then it's so beyond any comic thing that you can't think of what could you do that would be worse than what he did or funnier or crazier or whatever.
But this lends me, This leads me to the conversation quickly about the film, the SNL film. So it's the first night, the first show, it's the evening there, and I think that my problem with films like that. Nothing against it. I mean I heard it's good and people have said all good things, but I don't necessarily lean into that kind of thing because I think about it's like, if you're going to be honest, it's almost like a reenactment.
Yeah, it's hard. Even when you read books, it's like, and also everybody's as you've learned as you get older, everybody's truth is true to them. So you go like, I was there and that's what happened. I didn't remember that at all, and everybody's recollections are different and things like that, and you go like and also watching it will just feel like you're at work for an extra hour and a half.
So let me just finish by saying, I want to settle an old, old piece of lore over there Saturday Night Live, and I'll let you finish this sentence. I was told by people over these years, now Low, these thirty years, that you have the biggest blank on the staff of SNL. You have the biggest blank. What is it?
Office? Exactly? The office? No office? You got it? Enterprise.
Yeah.
Do you remember when you did Charles Nelson Riley on The Actors Student, Why can you believe that? With will? Oh my god, you played Lore?
He goes and what I can't even remember those lines, but it was so funny when I'm on there and I see he said, hold your glasses between your thumb and your finger and just go like this and shake him like this, And I thought that was probably one of the most insane things I've ever done in my career, Like, who am I doing that? I want to thank you for all the memories you've given me, Charles Nelson Riley.
I wrote that the guy that wipes his ass with a dog, wrote that he went on to be a big movie director, but.
I remember where he started. Alec Bolbins wiping his ass with a dog. God bless him. I love you. I love you too.
My thanks to author Susan Morrison and my friend Steve Higgins. Here's the Thing is recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. This episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, Maureen Hobn, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.