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What makes Lorne Michaels laugh?
That’s no small question. Half a century of aspiring stars have thought hard on it. The answer has launched and stymied many careers while going a long way to defining modern comedy. The hagiographic new movie “Saturday Night” focuses on Michaels as he puts together the 1975 premiere episode of “Saturday Night Live,” but the comedic vision of the man who has gone on to oversee the show for decades remains maddeningly, pointedly remote.
Played with a determined calm by Gabriel Labelle, the young Lorne Michaels comes off as a blandly generic maverick, struggling repeatedly to explain his idea for the show. In an early scene, he compares himself to Thomas Edison, and while one can detect some mocking of the hubris of that statement, there’s not enough. To the extent that his sensibility is illuminated in the screenplay by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, it’s through opposition. In scene after scene, Michaels is the counterculture hero confronted by a procession of squares, suits and old-school naysayers. They’re not just skeptical executives or scolding censors, either. Actors playing Jim Henson, Johnny Carson and Milton Berle make appearances, in roles designed, thematically at least, to show us everything this hip new show is not.
What stands out about this parade of aesthetic antagonists is that perhaps the most important one to the formation of the identity of “Saturday Night Live” goes unmentioned: Carol Burnett.
Despite the sense you get from this cinematic love letter, “Saturday Night Live” did not invent must-see television sketch comedy. It wasn’t even the first important live one on Saturday nights on NBC. (That would be “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s, with a writers room that included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon.) The dominant sketch comedy when “S.N.L.” got started was “The Carol Burnett Show,” a CBS staple since the late 1960s that also featured topical satire, flamboyant performances and star cameos.
In books about the creation of “Saturday Night Live,” the ones the new film’s screenwriters certainly leaned on, Burnett represented a lodestar of sorts for the artists on the show.
“Lorne made it clear that Burnett’s style encompassed everything” the new show would avoid, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote in “Saturday Night: A Backstage History of ‘Saturday Night Live.’” Whereas “The Carol Burnett Show” featured broad performances with actors in Bob Mackie-designed clothes sometimes breaking character as they tried to hold back laughs, “Saturday Night” (as the show was known at first) aimed for a less theatrical, more writerly style with less mugging for the camera.
In “Live From New York,” the oral history by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, brainy writers like Al Franken and Buck Henry say “The Carol Burnett Show” was shorthand for the kind of slicker stuff they were trying not to do. While saying everyone on “S.N.L.” respected her, Paul Shaffer, who played in the house band, added that “too Carol Burnett” was a common way to dismiss an idea.
You saw similar hipster derision in early press coverage. In a deep-dive feature in Rolling Stone from 1976 that spent time with Michaels backstage, a writer contrasted the late-night cool of the new show with Burnett’s safe professionalism. “God forbid, of course, that ‘S.N.’ should ever function with the factory precision of, say, Carol Burnett,” the story wryly noted, “but is the notion of ‘S.N.’s’ writers starting to write at 10 a.m. Mondays, as Burnett’s do, really so prostitutional?”
It’s striking to see Burnett discussed this way, because she is now widely and rightly considered one of our funniest and most influential comedy pioneers. Even “S.N.L.” veterans like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler cite her show as inspiration.
Reitman’s “Saturday Night” is unsparing about so many other talented cultural figures. It’s worth considering why Burnett’s role is omitted.
Perhaps the mention of another influential sketch show complicates the movie’s clear interest in presenting Michaels, who had many years of writing and producing comedy before “Saturday Night Live,” as a revolutionary who gave birth to something entirely new. Ignoring the show’s rejection of Burnett is also consistent with a larger whitewashing of the sexism of the early “S.N.L.” One of the few sketches shown in the movie is a feminist one from Rosie Shuster about women catcalling a construction worker. We see Shuster, who was married to Michaels, praising and gently coaxing John Belushi into wearing a bee costume. But we don’t see Belushi expressing the belief that women were not funny, as original cast member Jane Curtin has described. She said he believed that “women should not be there.”
The most generous explanation is that the movie’s restraint is itself making an argument about the legacy of Michaels. That what made him successful over generations is precisely that he can come off as somewhat hard to pin down, even a cipher. Having a strong point of view is essential to creating a funny sketch series. But an institution that encompasses many different styles and changes with the times while remaining relevant over decades requires a different skill set. There is also evidence of this approach from him. In a revealing 1979 interview in Rolling Stone, Michaels said of the show: “I wanted it to be devoid of definition.”
Lorne Michaels produced a singularly enduring comedy show that has evolved consistently, changing casts and styles, in ways big and small. He’s been open to a wide array of sensibilities, from the boyish goofiness of Jimmy Fallon to the acerbic deadpan of Norm Macdonald, from the precision caricatures of Phil Hartman to the grand guignol splatter-humor of Sarah Sherman. Michaels’s greatest accomplishment is not creating a funny show but keeping it on the air for five decades. To pull that off, being flexible might be a more essential quality than having a coherent voice.
In fact, “Saturday Night Live” has over the years artistically moved in the direction of “The Carol Burnett’ Show,” and not just in terms of a slicker design. The performances on “S.N.L.” are often broad, too. No one was surprised when Dana Carvey broke character in the cold open last weekend during his impression of Joe Biden, one of the highlights so far of the new season.
Asked in 2016 why she had never hosted “Saturday Night Live,” Burnett, now 91 and still doing dynamic work in shows like “Better Call Saul” and “Palm Royale,” told Larry King she had never been asked. The only episode that she ever appeared in was toward the end of the period when Michaels had temporarily left the show. In 1985, when the guest host Harry Anderson said goodbye, surrounded by the cast, he pointed at Burnett in the audience, brought her onstage and described her “as one of the reasons we’re all in this business.”
There have been online campaigns to get Michaels to tap her, including a plea from Patton Oswalt and a petition from fans. Nothing has come of it. But Lorne Michaels has a history of changing course, adjusting on the fly. Ask Shane Gillis, who hosted this year after being fired from the cast a few years earlier. “S.N.L.” should have Burnett host. What better way to celebrate 50 years of an expansive show that began in part as a reaction to Carol Burnett?
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