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But before that, he was one of the original writers on one of the most iconic and seminal comedy shows in American institution, Saturday Night Live. SNL has a huge fall season coming up, beginning on September 28th as the 50th season kicks off. There's talks that creator Lord Michaels may step down, and there's a knockout new movie that I saw it tell you right last week, which premieres in less than a month. It's Jason Reitman's Saturday Night, an adrenaline-filled narrative that takes us, in real time, through the 90 minutes before the first-ever broadcast of SNL in 1975. Ah, okay, here we go again, my name is Lord Michaels, I'm the producer and creator of Saturday Night. We're excited because there's never been a television show like this. Okay, but what kind of show is it, Lauren, do you even know what the show is? Did anyone ask Edison what a light bulb was before your harness' electricity? Oh, who are you in the metaphor? Gummy Chase, killed a redner, and Ayaka, how the fuck do you pronounce this? Loy. These can't be the right size. Yeah, you're right, they should be a little bit smaller. And flash it on rehearsal, and now, weekend update. Good evening. Uh, gentlemen, how long have you been standing there? Long enough. The movie Saturday Night features an electric young cast, like Corey Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Gabriel Lebel as Lord Michaels. And Josh Brenner playing, well, you, Alan, I'm so honored to talk to you. Thank you for being here. It's my pleasure. It really is. Josh Brenner really captured me, you think, huh? I do. I think he really did. How do you feel about it? Oh, about him? You know something, Jason told me that I was portrayed in the movie. My wife and I are watching it out of screening a couple of weeks ago, and I'm looking at my watch. I go, boy, you know, they're running out of time here. When the white pop up, am I going to, maybe he was lying, and I thought it was great. As a matter of fact, I sent him, Josh, an email afterwards, I asked for his email address to tell him how much, how well he captured me. And the fact that a matter is, if you look at the size of my head, okay, my production company's name is Big Head Productions. And when I looked up about Josh, he's in a, he's in that show Billions where his character's name is Big Head. So I think it's just the most poetic thing in the world. The thing I thought was so amazing about the film also, I've been to a taping of "Saturday Night Live," and one of the amazing things is that kinetic energy, particularly in the set changes, I mean, the adrenaline that's just pumping even for the audience. And the format that Jason chose with those 90 minutes before it really captures that. Well, you know, something, it was an amazing experience having been there that night, okay? I was an apprentice writer, and so was my first TV show. So I was mostly like looking around, you know, in China. And it was what Jason did was, as you just said, captured the tension and the chaos of those 90 minutes before we first went on the air. It was something that in watching the movie, it was, it was a nostalgia to it in the sense of what I was feeling, I was getting nervous. I was getting nervous that the show wouldn't get on. I was getting nervous that something would fall, which it did. I mean, I was, you know, I was like, yeah, that happened, well, that didn't happen, but still, I really got caught up in how he was able to, I loved it, the capture the tension of it. That's exactly what he did. And I take my hat off to him. I really do. Spent about an hour with him afterwards, asking him a million questions. You know, a lot of us, myself included, were, we gave technical advice, like the young actress who played Gilda, I spoke with her on a Zoom, oh, three or four times, she was asking me a thousand questions because Gilda was very much my writing partner and my pal during the five years, we were both there. So I was answering her questions, trying to, you know, and she's a British actress. And right? And she, but she speaks English the way we do better than I do. She sounds more American than I do when she wants. And also Robert Wall, who played the director, Dave Wilson, he called me, and I told him everything I remembered about Dave. And so I'm sitting there watching the movie, proud of them, proud of Jason, not knowing what it was like for those, for the cast members, having not been there, but they were directed in such a way. And they probably did whatever research they did in such a way where the actors who played Dan Aykroy, the actor who played Belushi. He's amazing. Is it Dylan O'Brien? That's Dan Aykroyd. Absolutely. And without really looking like him, either, it's the voice of something. There was something about the mannerisms, you know, some of the things that they did were not accurate time wise, okay? So that construction crew kind of thing where the girls, where all the actresses were sort of ogling Dan Aykroyd when he was walking, you know, that happened in a later show. And I was watching it and it was the perfect thing for Jason to pull from somewhere else and put in there. So there was this conglomeration of all sorts of different things, how he called from here and there and managed in this huge pastiche to capture it. And you know, we were at a screening, there was only my wife and I, we were sitting with Chevy Chase and his wife, Howard Shaw, who was the musical director, was there with his wife. Oh, how did Chevy feel about it? Chevy, I think Chevy liked it, but he was a little bit more literal than I was. Okay. You know, look, I only had my character only had three or four lines in it, but his character was quite prominent. So I was just thankful that I was in it as opposed to gone, I didn't say that, didn't. It was the overall thing and Valerie Bromfield, who was a comedian on the first show. She was in the screening also and we just marveled at what Jason did. And I was really curious about it when I first heard about this movie, okay, because usually or many times I should say when you have people playing or impersonating famous people, sometimes that's a very scary thing to do because people would judge it by going, oh, he, no, he didn't capture him. No, he didn't. And so you judge it on the impersonation as opposed to the overall, not for one second that I think that or my wife who worked on the show, that's where we met. She wasn't there the first season, she joined us the third season, but she knows all the players very well. We just got caught up in, look what he created, Jason, the tension. And I was a little bit at the edge of my seat. Now I know the show got on the air, I know it happened, okay, I remember getting on the air, but there was tension and boy, he did an amazing job. And Lauren Michaels as well, Gabriel Lebel. Oh, he was great. He was great. You know, listen, like I said, I was like a rookie. The three apprentice writers were me, Al Franken and his partner, Tom Davis. So we contributed as they have me contributing that joke and we can update. But I must say he did a fantastic job. I'm going to get into more of your specific memories, just a little side note. I know Gilda Radner, so it was so important to you and you have that, the book, Bunny Bunny. I was just wondering that would be a movie. Oh, you know, for years, people have, it was a off Broadway play that did well. And for years, people have wanted to do it. Then it was a matter of who's going to play Gilda. And, you know, every so often I get that call and I go, do it, I'll write it. I'll go see it. I'll do whatever you want. We make a great movie, you know, to two people having this platonic love affair over the course of 14 years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's wonderful. It's wonderful to see her again in this film. It's always wonderful when she comes back to our memory in every way. Absolutely. Let's get into your personal memories as a young man before this. You were writing jokes for an older generation of stand up comics and the Catskills. But you knew Billy Crystal, I understand, who was trying to get on SNL. And he said that he was going to give you an introduction to Lord Michaels and how did that first interview with Lord Michaels go? Well, you know, something I had never had an interview before. I did write jokes. I was right out of college. I started writing jokes for these guys who were twice as old as me. It was like a parent's generation, right? So I learned how to write jokes. But after a while, I got a little tired of that, of writing jokes about paving the driveway. You know, Woodstock had just happened, and Nixon resigned, and there was more stuff to talk about than women's hairdos, you know? So I met Billy, I started hanging out at the clubs in New York City. One was called Catcher Rising Star, the other one was called The Improvisation. And that's where my generation, so to speak, of writers and comedians was starting out. This, I'd say this was '73, '74. So Larry David, that's where I met my buddy Larry, and Billy, and Billy lived three towns away from where my parents lived on Long Island. When I moved back in with them, when I was trying to figure out how to do this comedy writing thing, Billy lived about three towns over. We became friends, and he would pick me up, and at my parents' house, we'd drive in, we'd do our jokes, and we'd drive back, and we would listen to it on cassettes, our respective sets. And I went on stage just to deliver my jokes that those old guys wouldn't buy from me with the hopes that a manager or an agent would like the material, want to give it, want to represent me. How much did the old guys pay for a joke? Seven dollars. Seven dollars? Okay. All right. There's a caveat there. They'd only pay it if it got a laugh. So I would go watch them deliver my jokes, let's say, and they'd come off the stage and go, boy, that joke about the sperm bank didn't work. And I'd go, gee, I heard a laugh, and then we'd barter, and I'd go home with $4. So yeah, so one night I got done early. I had trouble making these six drunks from Des Moines laugh, and I went to the bar and I'm waiting for Billy to get done so he can drive me home. And I was depressed. I was four months into this experiment about advertising my material on stage. And to supplement this great living I was making as a comedy writer, I got a job in a delicatessen in Queens, New York. And you name it, I sliced it for about two years, and I'm waiting for Billy, I'm sitting at the bar, a guy comes in, and he looks at me, and he goes, you know, you're the worst comedian I've ever seen in my life. And I go, well, thank you, I really need to hear that now. My ego really needs to hear that, and he goes, but your material's not bad. Did you write it? Yes. Did he? He said, could I see more? It was Lorne Michaels. And Lorne was going from club to club in New York looking for actors and writers for this new show. So I had a meeting with him, and I went into the city, and I went up to his hotel room, and I gave him this book that I had typed up, and they showed the book in the movie. About a hundred of what I thought were my best jokes, okay? And I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, and I hand him the book, and he opens it, and he reads the first joke, which is a joke that they have in the movie. A joke I had written about a postage stamp, he closed the book, and he had to read the rest of the jokes and give it to the NBC brass and everything to approve it, but he very much gave me a job based on that joke. I mean, he was able to do that to see a person's sensibility, their ingenuity, and it was just in the right place at the right time. Amazing. And what was that first joke? Do you remember it? Well, of course I do, because I'd say it every time anybody gives me the opportunity, and sometimes I say it when they don't even give me the opportunity to show you how long ago it was from the reference points in it. I had written a joke saying that the post office was about the issue with stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States to 10 cents stamp. You want to lick it, it's a quarter, okay, so that was the joke. Chevy did it in the first weekend update. In the movie without ruining a fairy, this won't ruin the movie for anybody, you actually see the guy who plays me, giving Chevy that joke when he's rehearsing weekend update, and it gets a laugh from the crew, and it made it onto air, and it was the first thing I ever had on television. It was very, very exciting. So you were writing jokes, and of course, SNL is second city, and it's a lot of improv, and I'm guessing a very different kind of comedians. What was that like? What was the difference for you writers? That's a great question. When I got to the, we had a meeting, the very, very first day in Lauren's office, and I'm looking around, and I see Balushi, and I see Lorraine Newman, and I see Gilder, and Danny Ackroyd, all of whom have these improv backgrounds. Now if I was writing jokes for comedians, these are one liners or routines where they're on stage, and they just projected outwards towards an audience. I had never written anything for two people who were looking at each other, okay? And they were doing these scenes, and they were improvving and assuming characters, and I'm going, oh my God, I had never heard of second city, okay? And Lorraine was from a west coast group called The Groundlings. I had never heard of The Groundlings. So there was a learning curve there. I learned it, I adapted to it, but it was something new. But I think, you know, weekend update was Chevy looking in one into the camera, which was the way, and they were all jokes. So that's where I first started contributing more so as I was learning how to write for people who are actually facing each other. Was it true that you would be under the desk sometimes writing jokes live? It was the greatest feeling in the world. It was so stimulating because these days I write Broadway plays and books and movies. And if I'm lucky, if I'm lucky, it sees the light of day in two years, right? Here on that show, the show by and large is written Tuesday nights because we have a read through on Wednesday and then they have to start building sets and designing wardrobe and so it is a process that begins. You write something on Tuesday and it's on television on Saturday. And what would also happen was if there's a dress rehearsal Saturday night with an audience they come in 7.30 or 8 o'clock, I don't know exactly what time they come in these days. There's an audience and you put on the show for them. Place in costume and the band plays and the musical guests. Then that show is over. That audience goes home, then you go to Lauren's office where it's decided what sketches would stay in, which would be tweaked or rewritten. Maybe the order changes, maybe the casting within a sketch changes. And it's been the same for 50 years. The same for 50 years. Anyone I speak to, and that's where Lauren shows his particular brilliance. His brilliant as he is between dress and air, taking something that's sort of this amorphous thing and making it crystallize into a show that will go on 11.30 without a hitch. And you bring the changes as a writer. You bring it to cue cards and make sure they had it. And then what I would do is I'd go upstairs to my office and watch the 11 o'clock news. There was no 24/7 cable at the time, it was just the 11 o'clock news. And if something struck me as funny, I'd write a joke about it and it would be on weekend update a half hour later. And there were two times when I was with the show, one time in particular when we did a live show from the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, that while they were on the air live, I was under the weekend update desk, writing jokes and handing it up to them. Yes. You talk about immediate feedback. I was going to say, forget social media and TikTok in New Orleans. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. You hear them laughing or not? You mentioned Chevy. I mean, these are some iconic and we know from books and everything of the egos of some of these people. Tell me a little bit about Chevy and Belushi and what it was like for you as a writer. It was like, okay, as a writer, the triumvirate that I had, I think most of the younger writers would tell you that Lauren, a guy named Michael O'Donoghue, who's very prominent in the movie, and Chevy, that was my triumvirate, okay? Lauren obviously was at the top of that heap. Most everything was his idea. This was his show, O'Donoghue had, he founded the National Lampoon, so he had this, he was the weird guy, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, but, you know, I would look at him, he would look at me and we'd just go, no, okay, it's like from two different planets. And Chevy was this funny guy who fell and he was silly, you know, and those were the guys with experience. As far as Belushi or Gilda were concerned, what was so great about writing for them was you were writing with them for them. Gilda, come into my office and say, I'd like to play Howdy Doody's wife, Debbie Doody, and I go, I don't know what that means, but let's do it, okay? And we would do it together. We had created a character, Gilda and I call Roseanne Rosanna, which we would go on late on a Friday night, the night before a show, go to a local restaurant that stayed open late with a pad and pen, and we would, I would just interview, ask her questions as Roseanne. She would answer them, then I'd go back to my office and I'd shape it and add to it, subtract to it, but make it into something she would do on TV the next night. Same thing with Belushi, same thing with Danny. It was a way of collaboration that I had never experienced before because they weren't necessarily, Danny was a little bit more so disciplined writers, sitting at a typewriter with a legal pad, but they were just spewing ideas and making moves that you go, I wouldn't have thought of that, I don't work that then. So the synergy was, I had it later in my career also with Gary Shandling. It was the same thing, the dynamics of that kind of collaboration is maybe 80% that I'm making these numbers up, 80% of the two of you is the same, okay, sensibility wise, right? That's what attracts you to the other one, but it's the other 20% is an alchemy there that's formed where you create something that neither one of you could have created if you were alone. And it was, I think anybody who comes out of that show, what they learn is collaboration, how important it is. Like I said, you know, anybody I've collaborated with, whether it be Martin Short or Dave Barry or Billy Crystal in the years since, you put your ego aside and it's about the work. It's about the work. It doesn't matter who thought of what, I wouldn't have thought of this unless you had said that other thing. You know what I mean? That's about the work. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big row as man, then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laughing me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get a $100 credit on your next ad campaign, go to linkedin.com/results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com/results. Terms and conditions apply, linkedin, the place to be, to be. I don't know how rowdy the gentlemen and the Catskills were, but the feeling of SNL, the loose feeling, people sleeping with each other, quite a bit of drugs, everything that we know of the lore, was that something you were used to when you came in? I mean, what was that like for you? No, but I welcomed it. You didn't hear me say, oh no, no, no, no, I won't do that. No, let's put it this way, okay? Let's put it this way. When my wife joined the show, the third year of the show, we dated secretly and I told her, I don't want anybody to know it because I didn't want it to be part of the rumor mill. I didn't want it to be something that we made up that we would tell one person, we told Gilda, okay? So when Robert and I got engaged, people didn't even know that we knew each other, okay? I wanted to give it some air of dignity, okay? And that's the way it was. Look, we kept really long hours, it was the 70s, it became incredibly claustrophobic in the sense that, look, there were bunk beds that were put in because we would stay there all the time. So yeah, it could become somewhat incestuous. And when people started getting more famous outside of SNL, I'm thinking of Belushi or Chevy and even more money and stuff was flowing in, did you guys see changes in them? Yes, by and large, I did, look, when Belushi did Animal House, okay, you know, it worked both ways because the culture of the show itself also changed. When John did Animal House, he appeared on the cover, I think of Newsweek by himself in a toga and he had the, you know, the Laurel and nobody, you know, Gilda wasn't there, Bill Murray was, it was him alone. So the culture of the show, it worked two ways. The culture of the show changed a little bit like, oh, this show can get me a movie. This show can get me my own show. So it's not that it became a means to an end, but there was, there was a consciousness of that. There were movie executives who would hang out in the studio, who wrote that, okay. So we started being aware of the world outside. Now for them to come back and be a member of an ensemble again, okay, where they were front and center and on the cover of Newsweek, Gilda did a one woman show on Broadway called Gilda Live and it was between our fourth and fifth seasons and it was at the Winter Garden Theatre here in New York, I don't know how many seats they have, but it may be a couple of thousand and she got a standing ovation every night, her alone and then she came back to be part of an ensemble and she told me, I don't remember this to be the case, but she used to tell me, she says, I got a standing ovation every night and I came back and the only thing I had to do in that first show was deliver a pizza. Now I don't know if that was it. I just don't remember if she might have been in a lot of sketches, but it was. You had to share. You had to be part of a group again and I think that adding to Lauren's brilliance is keeping the so many talented people on the show for so long when the world beckons. But did everyone manage to do that to come back to a team? As I remember it, I know that there was, I wasn't privy to it, but when Chevy came back and hosted, I'm sure others can tell you he got into a fight with Bill Murray and I don't know what it was about or whatever, but by and large, people remembered how it was and fit in nicely, but there was an adjustment. We're talking about Lauren's brilliance in looking through your jokes and understanding that what is his brilliance in spotting the cast? I mean, the people he's picked for 50 years, I mean, even going forward to, you know, Kate McKinnon or all of the Maya Rudolph and everyone, what is it he looks for? What does he see? You know, something, I couldn't define it, but it is uncanny because just when you think that something sort of flat lines, you know, all of a sudden, you know, Maya Rudolph comes along. Adam Sandler comes along, Kate McKinnon comes along, you know, and then you go, wow, wow, you know, I don't, I can't define it. But all I can say is that it stuns me the eye that he has, not only for what's being presented, but for what the potential could be, you know, and I think that that's very much it, you know, okay, that person is this much. I think he has a vision where they can be this much. That's so true. When you look back, if you're an SNL nerd like I am, you can sort of see that people are sort of babies in the beginning and then they start blooming and absolutely now go back further. Bill Murray joined the cast after the Chevy left, you take Bill when he was playing the guy on weekend update where he gave the Oscar predictions, okay, he wrote that stuff himself. That was pure him. And I remember I would be in the studio watching him do it, whether it be a rehearsal or on the air, you know, you know, you know, when he get to supporting actors, supporting actors and the guy that no one cares, he just knocked the cards off, there was an attitude there. There was an attitude there. Somebody sent me the other day a link to a sketch that I had forgotten about. Eric Eidel had hosted the show. I know they sent it to me because I'm interviewing Eric Eidel here in New York to commemorate them. Oh, yeah, October 8th, he's got a book that's coming out October 8th called the Spamalot Diaries, okay. And it's about the making of Spamalot and he asked me if I would be in conversation with him to launch it and I'm very honored to do it. So I think that's why somebody sent me this link was Eric was in it and it was a behind the scenes recording studio scene where Gilda played a Patty Smith kind of character that she'd called Candy Slice, okay. And I didn't know that was in her. I know that she and Paul Schaeffer wrote a lot of those songs together that they had them sing, but you look at Bill Murray and it playing a record executive from a record of pumping and you look at Gilda playing that and you go, what that show did was it once again there was a symbiotic thing going on there. The writers would write something and the actors would expand themselves to fill that role or the and or the actor would have a voice, have an idea and they would partner up with a writer to help make a thing out of it. So once again, it was collaboration. There's a fantastic sensor character in the movie. How did you get away with the jokes that you were doing at the beginning with these type of sensors at NBC? There was a sensor. Our first sensor was actually a male, it was a guy named Jay Ottley. A few years into the show, there was a woman named Jane Crowley, 300 pounds, X-non dress shields. You know what I'm talking about. Perfect character. Yeah. And I think that what Jayce might have done is taken her and made it the one in the movie. That's just so interesting to be an X-non and then go to be a sensor and you talk about the flip of a coin, they let us deal with them unless we ran into a roadblock and then it would be kicked upstairs to him. But this Jane Crowley woman, about the third year of the show, Michael O'Donnell, and I'm running weekend update, called me up and said, "Can we have weekend update brought to you by a product that we make up?" I said, "Go for it." So on that Saturday night, he had Don Pardo, the announcer, say, "And now weekend update brought to you by Pussy Whip, the dessert topping for cats." Well, it got a bit of a laugh. Hello, weekend update. For the weekend update news team brought to you by Pussy Whip, Pussy Whip, the first dessert topping for cats. Here are co-anchor persons Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. And I wanted to do one. So for the following week, during the dress rehearsal with the audience, I had Pardo say and now weekend update brought to you by Blue Balls, B-L-E-U, Blue Balls, the cheese snack from France, got a big, big laugh, okay, we'll put it on television. Jane Crowley comes waddling out of the control room. This is where the sensor would sit during dress rehearsal with the script in front of them because this was the last chance to censor you because you'd go on the air live. And then it's just out there, okay? She waddled over to me and said, "Alan, you can't do that." I said, "Can't do what?" She says, "You can't say Blue Balls on television." And I said, "Why?" And she says, "Because it has to do with the male genitalia." So I said, "Jane, last week you let us say Pussy Whip, which is definitely the female genitalia. And now this week, what kind of sexist organization are you running here?" So she said, "Give me a second." She went back to the control room, picked up a phone called God, I guess. And she came out ten minutes later, and she said, "Alan, I've given it a lot of thought, and I've come to the conclusion that because I gave you Pussy Whip last week, I'll be more than happy to give you Blue Balls this week." And I said, "Jane, that's not necessary. Just let us say it on television, we'll call it even, okay?" But that's the kind of conversations we had. You left in 1980, I believe, after many years. You've said that you look back at it with fondness, but it's also very painful. What did you mean by painful? Well, the nostalgia part, the fun part, and the fondness part speaks for itself. I mean, for me, I went from slicing locks in a delicate test into an Emmy in nine months. I met Gilder on the show. I met my wife on the show. I saw my name in papers in the news. It was great, you know. It was what a ride. The painful part, you know, I would remember when it became a little bit competitive, and I didn't have a sketch on that particular week. God forbid if there were two weeks that I didn't have a sketch on, everyone knew the feeling, but they would feel sorry for you, you're badly for you, but mostly they felt badly for you because you felt inadequate, you felt you weren't contributing. I was lucky that I always had a weekend update to throw some jokes, and so I was usually contributed, but it was painful in that, you know, look, after Belushi did Animal House and the culture of the show changed a little bit. It became a little bit competitive or a little bit more competitive, and you wanted to be represented, you wanted to, you know, you wanted to get laughs, you wanted to be a part of things, and I think, I know personally I felt a little bit like an outsider on those shows that I didn't have anything in it, so I couldn't wait until Monday because it was a new week where you can redeem yourself the next show. What did you, if anything, bring with you from SNL to the other amazing shows you worked on, Shandling or Kerb, for example? What I learned was that nothing is written in stone, you know, and I brought that to the theater when I've had my Broadway stuff, not so much books, but yeah, books also, or movies. Nothing that you write is that precious, that it can't be changed to fit the situation. All right, so it's not like, you know, Neil Simon, the great playwright, in one of his anthologies, I think it's called rewrites, the name of the anthology, I think it's the second one, in the preface, he talks about how his dream as a writer is that his first draft would be the one that's produced, okay? What you learned from that show better than anywhere, okay, is no matter how good it is, it could be better, and once again, Eric Eidel with the Spammalot diaries, he talks about rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, Mike Nichols coming in, telling him to change something that Eric thought was great. And then because Mike said that Eric would change it and would be greater, okay? So scripts are evolving. So I took that with me, once again, collaboration, the importance of that and how great it is and how satisfying creatively it is, I brought with that. And I also learned that sometimes you have it and sometimes you don't, you know, just like a baseball player, you could be really hot for a month and then all of a sudden you go into a slump and you got to work through it. Those things happen. Those things happen in my last book called laugh lines, which is a cultural memoir of my career, and I talk about writer's block, and I asked a couple of writers what, how they handle it, the great writer, Dave Barry, who I've written three books with, Pulitzer Prize winning humor is, I ask them how, what he does when he has writer's block, and he says that I handle it the same way I do constipation. I just sit there and wait for something to come out. So the fact that it's so universal among creative people, you feel good about that, that I'm not alone, that I haven't written my last joke or my last scene, you know. Do you think you could be able to write for SNL today? Boy, I get asked that a lot and I miss personally, I miss the activity. I miss writing something on Tuesday and it's on television on Saturday or writing something on Saturday and it's on television. The activity, the group, you know, I work alone and it's a little sad, but, you know, could I write for it today? If I'm honest with myself, I'm curious about that. I mean, I'm 74 now, I don't even know who half the hosts are. I'll ask our youngest child, Sarri, who's 35, so he's probably older than any writer on the show, who's that host? And she'll say, oh, he's the star of a show I never heard of, that's on a network I never heard of, okay? So I think I would sound maybe update, maybe update because that's the news and I'm good at that, but as far as sketch is a concern, I'll watch the show, which I do every week and by and large, a lot of the reference points, a lot of the impersonations, a lot of the stuff, is stuff that my children and now my grandchildren appreciate more. So I think I would sound a little bit like an old man trying to capture what the kids are thinking, you know, you're suddenly the guy in the cat skills. Now, all of a sudden I'm that guy with a bow tie, but I mean, what about in terms of comedy in general? I mean, there must be things from 1975 that you couldn't do today. Well, you know, Norman Lear, who became a good, very good friend of mine before he passed, he was very blunt in saying that if he had gone out now to sell all in the family, nobody would buy it, you know, certainly not a network. I think that to a great extent a comedy compared to what we did back then and what SNL did for years and years going forward from when I was there, I think woke stuff, I think that political correctness, I think has made comedy a little antiseptic. It's, you know, especially satire, satire was always about punching up, it was Monty Python, the church or the queen, you know, go back to Gulliver's travels, okay? The Mox brothers, it was always about holding a mirror up, reflecting society and making fun of it, satirizing it. And I think now there's a great degree of fear that you're going to offend. And it's usually the people, it's not the people who you're offending. If you do an Italian joke, you're not offending necessarily Italian people, but it's somebody who says, "Oh, Italian people are not going to like that." You go, "Wait a second, I long for the days where everybody made fun of each other and then we went out to lunch afterwards, you know, it doesn't seem to exist." Now, I think, you know, I know I ran into Chris Rock about a year ago, maybe a little bit longer. And he was talking about not doing colleges because he's handed a sheet of paper that has subjects that you shouldn't talk about. Well, college campuses were always the bastion of liberal speech and progression and all of that. And you're censoring it before you even go there. I know that even with writers like myself, and I speak to a lot of fellow writers, that your first draft is when you let it all out. That's when you, whatever the creative spark is, you let it go. And then afterwards you edit or a producer or a network or a studio executive would tell you to tone it down or, you know, change this or change that. I know a lot of writers today on their first draft of censoring themselves projecting how it's going to be received by somebody they have to submit the script to. And that's just not right. It's just antithetical to the creative process and what comedy and, like I said, satire and parody supposed to be about who we're saying that this is such a big fall for us. So now, and it also includes one of the bastions of what SNL is best at, and that's an election. Pretty big one coming up here. Well, I heard where Maya is going to play Kamala and somebody said Steve Martin is playing Tim, Tim, I think that's been refuted. But if you, if you would give this, the gang writing updates for this coming election, a few tips, what would you say? Just let it rip, go for it. We know what we're dealing with with this guy Trump, okay, you've already made it clear that you don't like him. When I was there, it was always left leaning, okay, back to the time when Jimmy Carter was running in the 70s, right, and it always leaned left. And now, you know, it's, the only advice that I would give is I'm sure they can do it better than I can at this point, is you don't have to be fair. I don't think you have to be fair because I think that that will be disingenuous. You know, I think what that show or any satirical thing is, is, is, you know, put your foot on the accelerator and just stand on it. Good advice. Have you heard anything about Lauren leaving and do you have anything? I know the same things you do. I don't have any inside anything. And if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to tell, but we don't. Do you think it should continue with someone else and can it? Well, those are two interesting questions. You know, look, after half a century, it is such an institution. You know, I think, I think it should continue with or without him. I think it would be his greatest legacy that he did something for 50 years and left it in such a state where it kept going. I'm sure that he'll still be around in some way, you know, if I know him. Yeah, I think the show, yeah. And maybe if it's redefined in some way, that's okay too. That's okay too. You know, yeah, the answer is yes. I think it should continue. And I'm sure that he'll make, if he's going to leave a really good choice as to who replaces him. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for all your years of comedy and everything. It's been such a pleasure to be able to talk to you about this. It's been my pleasure too. Thanks for having me. I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors in Their Own Words, a podcast that presents the unvarnished unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. As a country, we need these stories more than ever. Stories from Americans who have borne the battle, including 30-year-old remastered interviews with veterans from World War I recounting their time in the trenches of Europe. And with veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and from our most recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other battlefields Americans may never have heard of. Hear their stories by listening to Warriors in Their Own Words, wherever you find podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING]
It's a huge fall season for SNL! Saturday Night Live will be back for its 50th season on September 23rd and Jason Reitman's movie 'Saturday Night', (about the first ever SNL episode in 1975) premieres in October. Christina is honored to have Alan Zweibel on the show. Alan is an original SNL writer and a 5 time Emmy awards winner. (Josh Brener plays Zweibel in 'Saturday Night) Alan talks about seeing a movie about his first episode of SNL and takes us behind the scenes of the American institution that is Saturday Night Live.
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