“Try telling the story of American comedy without mentioning Saturday Night Live and see how far you get,” says the Financial Times. For half a century, the TV sketch show has been a US cultural fixture; the launch pad from which countless cast members – including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Bill Murray – “ascended to stardom”. Ironic, then, that the enigmatic ringmaster behind it all, “whose vowels were once said to have inspired Dr Evil in the Austin Powers movies”, should be a Canadian.
At 81, Lorne Michaels looks nothing like the long-haired prankster who got “SNL” underway in 1975. But he is still cranking out the shows. Cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret of his “extraordinary tenure”, writes biographer Susan Morrison in The New Yorker. Half believe Michaels is “a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil”. Others see him more as “a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds”.
It’s “a fake set-up”, she told Toronto Life: you can’t have one without the other. Michaels’ “real achievement” is creating “this big sandbox” in which anyone can play. The formula – based around a guest host who has no idea what they’re doing – is largely unchanged, yet just about all viewers believe the funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. “The show has good years and bad years, like the New York Yankies, or the Dow”, but the audience has come to feel something like ownership.
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Some reckon that Michaels’ outsider status gave him a sharper “perspective on American life”. Certainly, as a kid, he was an avid watcher of US TV shows, says Bloomberg. Born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto in 1944, he once described his staid, middle-class childhood “as living next door to imperial Rome – all the action was going on south of the border”.
After graduating from the University of Toronto, Michaels and fellow student Hart Pomerantz formed a comedy duo and won a gig on a CBC radio show. They ended up being fired, but Michaels wasn’t too heartbroken. It sparked a move to New York and its thriving counterculture clubs. After seeing a comic “tour de force” from a young Richard Pryor, Michaels recalls becoming almost “messianic” about comedy, says The New Yorker.
How Saturday Night Live began
The duo got their first break in Los Angeles, writing jokes for The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show in the mid-1960s. When that was cancelled, they were hired at Laugh-In, a hit variety show on NBC, “hailed as the TV’s first collusion with the counterculture”. Nonetheless, Michaels chafed at the restrictions. “The show avoided thorny topics like the Vietnam War”, and he “couldn’t get any Nixon jokes on the air”.
He retreated to Canada to try his luck there, spent a few seasons writing jokes for comedian Lily Tomlin’s show, and in 197,4 his luck changed. NBC had a free slot late on Saturday night and agreed to trial a show pitched by Michaels as looking like “a bunch of kids had sneaked into a studio after the adults went home”. A year later, SNL was born.
Michaels has a “still waters run deep” vibe that has sometimes made him “an object of obsession” among staff, says Toronto Life. He’ll sit stony-faced and then suddenly unleash “one of the great laughs, a real head-back, mouth-open thing”. His management style – “detached but absolute power” – puts even the most imperious guests (including Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Elon Musk) in their place.
An avid reader of biographies, Michaels keeps a mental list of historical figures whose careers resonate with his. “The roster is not modest,” says The New Yorker. Top of the list is Shakespeare, who, Michaels notes, also had to scramble to get his productions on the boards – and “saw to it that, despite any obstacle, the show would go on”.
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