Lorne Michaels might be the most powerful figure in American comedy—and yet, most people barely know who he is. In this interview, New Yorker editor Susan Morrison joins us to discuss her new book Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, a deeply reported, wildly entertaining biography of the man behind SNL. We explore how Michaels built a cultural institution from scratch, reinvented the variety show format, and launched the careers of generations of comedy legends—all while staying deliberately out of the spotlight. Morrison explains how SNL has shaped American humor and politics, and how Michaels maintained control over a live show for nearly 50 years and earned a reputation as one of the most inscrutable and effective bosses in showbiz.

Susan Morrison 

Before we dive into Lorne, because you’re a Spy Magazine fan, I want to tell you that this is in my office. This is our Ivana Trump doll, which featured heavily in the art for a wonderful profile of the late Ivana in Spy. And this was crafted by an artist out of one of my old Barbie dolls.

Nathan J. Robinson

I believe Spy was the first publication to sort of go to war with Donald Trump. That was the start of Trump’s war with the media.

Morrison

Absolutely. We were the only people taking shots at him, but of course, we covered his bankruptcies and all his other idiocies. And anyway, none of us are in jail yet. Let’s move on to Lorne.

Robinson

Okay, so let’s start here. You have poured a decade of your life into producing the definitive biography of Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live. I think the New York Times pointed out in its review that this kind of book, this kind of comprehensive, 600-page book, is often the kind that we reserve for the Founding Fathers.

So the first question for you is, why Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live—who is not necessarily a household name—as a subject? Why were you so fascinated as to pour all of this research and investigation into the biography of this figure in particular?

Morrison

Well, about 10 years ago, when SNL celebrated its 40th anniversary, I watched that anniversary special, which I thought was great. I found myself thinking how remarkable it is that one guy—especially a guy from Canada—had been responsible for making so many generations, so many decades worth, of Americans laugh, and figuring out and even sort of determining what people find funny even well into his 70s—and now he’s 80.

And I realized that it’s not just a Monday morning water cooler thing where people are talking about sketches, but there’s something about the show and its longevity that sort of rewired people’s brains. People use those catchphrases in their wedding vows. And I just realized that he’s kind of hiding in plain sight. Lorne has been around for a long time. He’s always studiously avoided talking much to the press, and I just thought it would be worth really trying to get behind the curtain and figuring out what made him tick. I also knew that he was an object of obsession to people in the comedy world—of all of his employees and the wider comedy world. I didn’t know if the rest of the world knew that. So that was part of the challenge, making them recognize how peculiar he is.

Robinson

It struck me reading the book that you have kind of found the center of the galaxy of American comedy for the last 50 years. It’s not just all the sketches, the catchphrases, the characters that have been on SNL, but when you actually start going through all the people over the last 50 years who have started at SNL, there are the names people know like Norm Macdonald, Tina Fey, Mike Myers, Al Franken, Chris Rock, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Dennis Miller, Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy. There's Robert Downey Jr. Adam McKay. And then I found out there are people involved in SNL that I had no idea were involved in SNL: Albert Brooks, Andy Kaufman, Larry David, The Muppets. What? All of American comedy seems to revolve around this one show.

Morrison

I think that a lot of people don’t realize that. And so, I sort of feel like I got into the Bat Cave and really got a close look at the masked man himself. And you were talking before about the Founding Father thing and how long the book is. I realized once I had been working on it for a while that it wasn’t just a biography of this guy, but to do this properly, it had to be almost like an intellectual history of show business and comedy for the last 60 years—and politics—and that’s why it took so long and why it’s so big.

But Lorne has this wild, Zelig-like, Forrest-Gump-of-a-life, where, even in the years before SNL, he always happened to be in the spot where some major cultural thing was happening: working on Laugh-In; arriving in LA the week Bobby Kennedy was shot. Doing acid with Flip Wilson. Testifying at Keith Richards’ heroin trial. He’s kind of always there. And the thing that I loved the most doing the research was, I have a lot of biographer friends who tell me that the most fun is figuring out what was going on with your subject before he walks onto the world stage. Because once he’s a public figure, people write about him, so figuring out what it was that made him Lorne Michaels was really fun. And he had a kind of wild decade before SNL happened, when he was bouncing around Toronto and Hollywood working on a string of really lame shows, everything from Perry Como’s Christmas Special to Phyllis Diller’s variety show. But what was kind of cool is that he did get down-hearted, and a lot of time he thought, oh, my God, television’s a backwater—it’s a dead end, and I should just go to law school. But almost like a character out of Dickens, no matter how grim the situation he found himself in, he always took a lesson from it. He always found something to learn. And what was fun was connecting the dots between those little lessons and SNL.

For instance, when he worked on the Phyllis Diller show—and for your younger viewers who don’t know who she was, she was this really vinegary comic who wore a fright wig. She was this very un-glam lady comedian, but very cornball on this show. And TV audiences, then in the ’60s, weren’t used to seeing a woman in charge, a woman having her own show. So the producers of that show came up with this idea that Lorne and his partner should write interview questions for Phyllis to start the show by interviewing one of her celebrity guests just in front of the audience. The idea was to sort of warm her up for the audience, to make her seem just like a regular human being, and that worked. But you can draw a direct line between that activity and why SNL opens with a host monologue. The audience just sees this person come out as a human being and connects with them. And so it was so interesting to see him filling his lesson book with examples of what to do.

Robinson

Yes, one of the most interesting of those to me in the book was, you mentioned Zelig, the Woody Allen movie, and, in fact, Lorne Michaels had a brief collaboration with Woody Allen. You had this incredible transcript that you print in the book of a tape where Lorne Michaels and his partner are trying to write a joke for Woody Allen. And it’s such an interesting example of how difficult comedy is and what goes into the craft. They’re sitting around trying to figure out what would make a lobster funny. And failing.

Morrison

Yes, that was the most incredible primary source document that I came upon. I have two hours of them just riffing about a lobster in a tank, and it really shows you just the drudgery of it, of just kind of sitting around trying out premises, trying out premises. And yet, I thought it was interesting because Lorne was in his 20s at that point, and Woody Allen was already famous and an idol to Lorne. But Lorne is kind of taking charge of that session. You can see him, I think, being a little plucky and kind of stroppy and leading Woody. I think it’s kind of amazing.

Robinson 

They don’t manage to work out a good lobster joke. 

Morrison

They don’t. 

Robinson

In fact, they say it’s hard to be funny. 

Morrison

It is hard.

Robinson

Which is so true. And I think one of the things that comes across in the book is just what an achievement it is that SNL has managed to make people laugh for 50 years as the country has changed. They have to refresh the cast. They have all these talented people, and then they disappear, they go, and then you’ve got to try and find a whole new crop of people and make new sketches and new ideas that you haven’t done before. You think about how British comedy shows often do two series, and then they’re done because they feel like they’ve exhausted the premise. SNL has had so many refreshes.

Morrison

Exactly, yes. One of the fun things writing about Lorne is that he’s somebody who has a lot of aphorisms; he has a lot of little rules and maxims that he repeats. I could have just done a glossary of those. But one thing he says is—I’ve heard him say it a lot—how many funny people there are in the world? There are about nine. And so, it’s what you’re saying. It’s a huge challenge. And when he started the show in 1975, what’s interesting is that it was never part of his plan that the cast would become famous. They were almost like background figures. He was focused more on the musical acts and the hosts.

So in the first couple of years, when Chevy Chase became a giant star and then left the show, and then John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd did too, Lorne was kind of gutted. He thought, oh, my God, they’re leaving. It hadn’t occurred to him that he was going to have to keep restocking. But within a certain number of years he realized—he also talks in sports metaphors a lot—that it’s like a sports franchise: he has to have a bench full of rookies, and he always has to have new people in training that they rotate out. And that, I think, is the thing that has allowed him to have this longevity.

During that battle time in Hollywood, when he was working for these schlocky shows, he developed this skill—the way I put it is he kind of noticed the hinges between eras: how the ’60s became the '70s, and the ’70s became the ’80s. He was always determined not to be the old guy who was out of touch with what was hip. He didn’t want to be an aging hipster, so he always had his eye on that. Phil Hartman is maybe getting a little bit close to 40, so make sure you bring in Adam Sandler and David Spade and a slightly new style of comedy. And even now, at 80, he has this ability to look around the corner and figure out what maybe the new vibe is.

Since the book was published, I’ve had some interesting conversations with him about one of his new cast members this year, this very young woman named Jane Wickline. I don’t know if you’ve seen her. She’s kind of deadpan. She’s a departure from the other women on the show, but she has a kind of core of sweetness that reminds me, and I think reminds him, of Gilda Radner. But it’s a quieter sort of comedy, and I think he feels like that’s the future. But I don’t know many other 80-year-olds who are saying, I think this is the future. Do you?

Robinson

There’s so much experimentation. It’s so eclectic when you look over the history of all the different things that have been tried. Some of it has worked. Some of it hasn’t. The Muppets lasted, I think, only one season. And then they’re like, maybe this isn’t the place for the Muppets, and then went on to other success.

Morrison

They were only on the show in the beginning because they were brand names. The Muppets were stars in 1975. Getting the Muppets on your show would be the equivalent of having One Direction or something.

Robinson 

Well, it’s incredible. You have in the book this bullet pointed list of the kind of memo that Michaels had originally at the outset of all the stuff that was going to be on the show. And when you look at it, there’s a rotating guest host, a musical guest, an Albert Brooks movie, the Muppets, repertory cast, five-minute documentary, pre-taped commercial parodies, and you go, who thought this would work? This is such a soup of very different things.

Morrison

Well, Lorne had faith in the very old-fashioned basic concept of the variety show, which was a staple of American television. When he was a little boy, he watched Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and Colgate Comedy Hour—these were almost like vaudeville shows. And so when he was working in Hollywood for these bad variety shows, he liked the format, but it was just that the subjects, the content, was really old. And so the phrase he used when he was pitching his show was, “I want new wine in old bottles.” He liked the variety concept. If you watch old Ed Sullivan shows, there were animal acts, elephant acts, trapeze artists, and puppets. This is sort of what he was doing.

There’s a great thing that he and Lily Tomlin both talked to me about. They collaborated in the ’70s on some specials that she did, and one of the things they bonded over was how, if you watched a Bob Hope comedy special in the early ’70s, they might have a sketch about people being stoned—marijuana was something that frightened the grown-ups—but in the sketches, the people who were supposed to be stoned just acted like drunk people. And what Lorne and Lily wanted to do was to make the comedy really look like stoned people. Most of what was on TV was very square. It was about PTA meetings and getting the car washed. And what he wanted to do was to make the subject matter stuff that young people cared about: sex and drugs and rock and roll. There’s so much drug humor in the early seasons of SNL, and that was brand new.

Robinson

But as you say, the groundedness in the history of American comedy, the old formats, that mixture of the avant-garde and the corny, is very interesting.

Morrison

And one thing that was interesting for me is, I’ve been an editor at the New Yorker for almost 30 years, and there are so many vibrations between the New Yorker and SNL. They’re both weeklies and based in New York, but Lorne told me that when he was first putting the show together, he wanted to hire writers with a lot of distinct voices. That was a new thing. Usually, writers would be mushed together in a writers’ room, and they would all turn out something that sounded the same. He said that he wanted, for people watching the show, for it to feel like a magazine, like the New Yorker. Like there’s the sketch written by a Catskills guy, this sketch written by a surrealist, this sketch written by someone from the National Lampoon—much like readers of the New Yorker would be able to detect different voices. And that’s another thing that was radical in what Lorne did. He cared about elevating the writers. There’s an old Hollywood joke about the stupid starlet who slept with a screenwriter because writers were traditionally the lowest of the low, and Lorne had this idea of making the writers the main event. And that’s still how it is. That is really unusual in showbiz.

Robinson

Funny that you mentioned those parallels. One thing that struck me reading this is as a magazine editor, as an editor-in-chief, I did see immediately that what he’s doing is similar. It’s the curation and cultivation of talent. It’s interesting because he’s not so much a writer. He doesn’t write sketches, but he is very much an editor, pointing and going, no, that has to go; that has to go; that works; that doesn’t work.

Morrison

Yes, it’s about the mix, which I bet is a term that you guys use. We use it every day. It’s very similar. And I think many people—Conan O’Brien, all sorts of people—tell me that the real thing that makes Lorne stand apart from so many other producers and impresarios is a sort of level of taste. He certainly loves lowbrow. I was amazed, sitting in read-throughs and everything, how many fart jokes he seems to like—there’s a lot of scatological humor that he laughs at—but he also likes the kind of brainy high concept stuff. He loved Beyond the Fringe and Nichols and May, but there’s room for all of that. And one of the things about the show is that because it’s live, I think he hopes anyway, you forgive its sins. He always says that on his tombstone will be the word “uneven.” And in any episode of the show, maybe if I watch the show, there are two things in it that I’ll like, and there might be two different things that other people would like. So it’s not going to please everybody.

Robinson 

Right. His contribution goes unnoticed in the same way that a magazine editor’s contributions to the pieces go unnoticed. Everyone notices the stars, but the editor is there in the background, ensuring that the mix is perfect, and you have no idea what the editor is doing.

You mentioned the fact that it’s live. This is so interesting, because that was a fascinating choice to make. I don’t know if it was different in the 1970s, but today there is not that much outright live television, in part because live television is an insane thing to do when you could tape something beforehand and edit it. Especially with the kind of thing that they’re doing, which requires a lot of costume changes and elaborate sets. The idea of doing it live means that he committed this show to this incredibly difficult and chaotic process. And your book tracks what that process looks like over the course of a week to prepare for this period on a Saturday night where you have to go live.

Morrison 

Yes. One of the things that I realized after a few years of just reporting and interviewing Lorne and all of his people—and this is my magazine editor background—is that I wanted to make sure my readers got a sense of what it was like at the show. I didn’t want to write a biography that was like a death march through the years—1987 turns to 1988—and so I interspersed chapters in the book that take you through a typical week at the show. And that’s sort of what it feels like to be in the room, and all the upset and the drama and the tears. And as you see, it’s by Wednesday that it starts to feel like The Hunger Games. The tension ratchets up so that by the time you get to Saturday—some people told me they read the Saturday chapter and their heart is pounding.

Robinson 

Yes, it’s actually quite stressful to read. You feel it.

Morrison 

But I think that one of the things that gives the show its particular energy is that it’s live. Yes, it would be a lot more sensible to pick the right number of sketches on Wednesday after read-through, just polish them, tape the show, and then air it. But it’s this thing—you mentioned it’s the only thing on TV that’s live. Well, the other thing that’s live on TV is sports, and SNL is actually a lot like a sporting match, in terms of speed and unpredictability. All through the years, people have said, why do we still have to stay up all night Tuesday writing the sketches? And, why do we put together a dress rehearsal that’s half an hour longer than what’s going to fit? There’s all this waste and drama built into the schedule. And Lorne is kind of superstitious. He sort of feels like, well, it’s always worked well this way, so let’s just stick with it.

But I think that there’s an intuitive management thing that he feels, that if you keep people on a knife-edge like that all the way up to the last minute, the performances you’re going to get will be more fizzy and crazy and ecstatic. And I think that’s kind of true. People walk into his office at 11 o’clock Saturday night, half an hour before showtime, and they look up at this bulletin board and see, oh, my god, my sketch wasn’t cut, I’m in. It’s that level of adrenaline that I just don’t think would be the same if it was taped. 

Robinson

Well, as you say, you have to admit that even if it all seems ludicrous, the results kind of speak for themselves, and that everyone’s talking on a Sunday about what happened last night on Saturday Night Live, and that has now been true for decades.

Morrison  

Yes, it’s true. And the other thing that’s kind of interesting is, I feel like the show and Lorne have kind of tracked advances in technology. In the beginning, they had short films by Albert Brooks and Gary Weiss and Tom Schiller, and then when YouTube came along, they had those digital shorts, and they work so well in the format. And now you have TikTok. The show is bite-sized, so it kind of works, and it doesn’t really have to be appointment viewing television for it still to be current. Amy Poehler has a funny line. She says that SNL is the show that my parents used to have sex to, and now I watch it on my computer at lunch the next day. But the fact is, it’s consumable that way. I will watch a sketch on the subway on the way to work, and it works.

Robinson 

I mentioned earlier that tape of the long, difficult attempt to create a joke with Woody Allen. And when you go through the book and you have your alternating chapters about each day in the process, you realize what goes into creating what we see on a Saturday night. And one of the things that really struck me is how seriously they have to take the patently absurd.

Morrison

Yes.

Robinson 

How much work, serious work, has to go into something that, if you step back, you think, "but this is so silly."

Morrison

One of my colleagues, a former editor at the New Yorker, Chip McGrath, once wrote a profile—I think he was writing about Kevin Kline. This was about 15 years ago, and he was at SNL the week that Kevin Kline was taping. And he has this wonderful section in his piece about how Kline had this great character—I think he was supposed to play some incredibly sophisticated European film actor. But the joke was that, as he’s swanning around, he keeps farting. There are a lot of fart jokes through the years. And Chip wrote about how there was almost like  NASA-level testing of the fart machine to make sure that the farts were going the right duration and the right tone. The seriousness with which this was being managed and rehearsed and fixed was sort of like as if you were testing an anti-ballistic missile. So you see that kind of thing all the time. And it is fascinating.

Robinson

We had Adam McKay on the program a couple of months ago. His favorite sketch that he wrote there was one where Will Ferrell is the host of a typical daytime talk show. The teleprompter breaks, and because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, civilization collapses, and he ends up eating the weatherman. And then I went back and watched this, I was struck by, my god, they had to spend hours working this out. Because the humor is, in part, from the exact accuracy of the way the daytime talk show hosts speak, the way the set looks—every little intonation—and then all the blood. And somebody had to take this so seriously. So much money and so much work goes into this thing that is nuts.

Morrison

You know what’s so interesting about that? I haven’t thought about that sketch in a while, but it’s such a perfect writer’s sketch because the subtext is saying, look, you are the funniest people in the world, but if they don’t have us—if the teleprompter breaks—they’re nothing. And every now and then, you’ve probably had the experience of seeing a funny person on a talk show, and they’re really not that funny because nobody’s writing their lines for them. So it’s interesting. I can see that being a little bit—I don’t know if it’s an unconscious projection on Adam McKay’s part, but he’s telling the viewers that they’d be nowhere without us.

Robinson

I do want to just emphasize something because we usually talk about politics and culture on this program. People might actually be surprised that we’re talking about Saturday Night Live. But when we got this book  I started to become totally fascinated by it. I think the main thing that was in my head was the historical counterfactual, which is to say: if you didn’t have Lorne Michaels for the last 50 years—if you just remove him from the universe of American comedy—what would the world look like? Because it’s all of American comedy. When you go through it and everyone pops up in this book, you’re like, this show totally changed our entire culture.

Morrison 

Well, it is amazing. As I started working on it, I realized, okay, this is a little bit like the old studio system. He’s created this culture. It’s got walls around it. He’s like the Godfather. He’s kind of controlling all of these people, and they all collaborate. It is hard to imagine the world without it. And then, of course, the sort of things it spawned. I think you probably wouldn’t have had Judd Apatow and his posse, or Ben Stiller and his posse—all of these comedy groups that now work together in this way. That’s sort of a Lorne model, and that that didn't exist before. It’s definitely true.

And then the other thing that I think he’s very responsible for is—I think Frank Rich coined the term and started calling Bill Clinton the “infotainment president.” People make jokes about how a lot of Americans used to get their news from The Daily Show. But with the whole fake news concept, I think that started with some of the great political presidential debate sketches that Jim Downey wrote toward the end of the ’90s and through the 2000s, and Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post coined this term, the “SNL effect.” Americans really were taking their political cues, their understanding of the candidates and everything, from watching SNL, and that was unprecedented. And you started having things like Al Gore going on Letterman, taking a hammer and bashing an ashtray to make a point about government waste. Politicians now view humor as a way to get through to voters, and that would have all been different, too. 

Robinson 

Well, you brought up politics. Obviously SNL is known very much for the opening sketches, and they are often political parodies of Trump or the presidential election. Does Lorne Michaels have a political agenda? Is it just to skewer all politicians and lampoon the absurdities? Or are there points being made that he wants to get across? Is it the writers’ political agendas that kind of filter in?

Morrison  

From the beginning, he has always had this idea that he wants to be an equal opportunity offender, and you take shots at whoever is in power or whoever is foolish, whichever side they’re on. In the beginning, they made fun of Gerald Ford. There was Chevy Chase’s hilarious characterization of Ford as this bumbling klutz, which is ironic because Ford was actually a graceful man who was a football star. But that’s the image of Ford that will go down in history. But they also made fun of Jimmy Carter. They made incredible fun of Bill Clinton. Obama was harder because he was just so cool. But yes, they will want to take shots at whoever is in power, and that’s very important to Lorne. And one of the things that’s been tricky for him in the last eight years, basically since Trump came to power, is that now that we’re in this culture war, as a lot of people see it, he has to deal with these sorts of sensitive Millennials or Gen Z people.

When I was there one day, Cecily Strong was balking at portraying Senator Dianne Feinstein in a sketch as a kind of drooling old lady. Sure, we love Dianne Feinstein, but she’s a political player worth being in a sketch. So he has to deal with that because I think that the younger people feel like they just have to be warriors against the right, and it’s not how he wants his show to be. Not that he wants to be pro-Trump by any measure. I think he recognizes that Trump is an imbecile beyond anyone who’s ever walked the earth. But that’s a challenge too, because reality is just crazier than anything you could dream up. And that’s kind of what they're dealing with, with Trump these days. Sometimes you see these Trump cold opens, which is what those early sketches are called, and it’s just that fabulous actor, James Austin Johnson, saying just what Trump said, with a couple of words changed. Because it’s hard to imagine anything crazier.

Robinson 

One of the words that often comes up to describe Lorne Michaels is “inscrutable.” And I believe reviews of your book have sometimes said that he’s just as inscrutable at the end of it as he was at the beginning, despite your explaining numerous factors. This is a person who, as you say, has avoided the spotlight for a long time despite his influence on American culture. What is it that makes people want to describe him as mercurial or gnomic?

Morrison  

It is very interesting, because it’s not as if he isn’t a psychologically astute guy. Chris Rock said this guy has been thousands of people’s bosses, so he’s almost like a shrink. He’s a good judge of character. He’s a quick study. And he is interior. He believes in psychotherapy. He’s done a lot of time with shrinks, and yet, I think his management style is to be somewhat remote. He lost his father when he was 14. It was a catastrophe for him. He created a little bit of armor around himself, and he also kind of automatically stepped into this role of being a father figure to a lot of the people that he works with. And I don’t think he’s ever read management books. I think he has an intuitive sense of how to get what he needs out of people. But being a little bit withholding, being inscrutable, is part of it, and I don’t believe it's accidental.

I think that, at some level, he’s doing it on purpose. It works for him, for them to be sort of obsessed with him and want to please him, and want to figure him out. That gets great performances out of people. It gets a lot of hard work. I think it’s at least half conscious. I felt that he was quite open with me. I was surprised at how much he just really kind of let go. But it is also true that he, as a producer, is used to manifesting the reality that he wants. There were a couple of times during the reporting—he had no control of any sort over this book and didn’t read it first or anything—I remember confronting him with some uncomfortable, difficult things that were going to be in the book. And at one point, he tried to just say, I don’t know what you're talking about. This was something about a family member of his who had been arrested on a felony arms dealing charge. I think for a minute he thought I would just say, oh, okay, and not put it in the book. But I just said, well, here’s the Washington Post story about it, and he responded.

But I do think he is good at controlling his environment, controlling the people around him, through whatever kind of mind games will work. But yes, he does have some protection, and I think that part of that is that he recognizes it’s a bit of a burden—he often quotes this thing that Fellini said about how all actors want to eat you if you’re the director. They resent the fact that you’re the one who made it happen for them; they want to believe that they made it happen for themselves. So he kind of armors himself against that. 

Robinson  

Well, I do recommend our listeners and readers pick up this book, as many others have. As I mentioned, it’s already a bestseller. If you don’t think you’re interested in Lorne Michaels, I guarantee you will be. And also, if you don’t think that a biography is going to keep you on the edge of your seat, because you have these production of the show chapters, you will feel like you have been a fly on the wall for the production of an episode of Saturday Night Live. And as I say, this is about so much more than Lorne Michaels. It is really about the center of American comedy for the last 50 years. If you want to understand what makes people laugh, what entertains people, what shapes the catchphrases and our political satire and our goofiness—this is about so much more than one mercurial showbiz figure. I’m not even a major viewer. I don’t think I've ever seen an episode of Saturday Night Live on a Saturday night. I've seen plenty of Saturday Night Live sketches and movie spinoffs, but I’ve never sat down at 11 o’clock or whatever to watch an episode. But I was engrossed.

I want to just conclude by asking you, do you have any favorite SNL sketches, characters, moments that you were personally charmed by? You obviously had to watch a lot of SNL over the course of the research. You’ve dived into the archives of this show more than anyone else probably has. Was there anything that charmed you?

Morrison  

There’s two slightly different things that I'll mention from a long-ago era. There’s a great one about Ronald Reagan called “Ronald Reagan, Mastermind,” and it's the great Phil Hartman playing Reagan. And the concept is that his whole sort of befuddled Ronald Reagan thing is an act that he plays for the public, and that when he’s actually in the Oval Office with his advisors, he’s this genius. He was brilliant at military strategy and can do calculus in his head. And it’s really funny. And another thing, because it’s just a beautiful little tone poem, and it’s so much about writing and performance, is a piece called the Bank for Change, and it’s written by and performed by Jim Downey, a good friend of mine who was the long-term head writer of the show. It’s a parody of a bank ad, very room temperature tone, and really all the bank does is that it makes change, and it’s so brilliant.

Robinson

Yes, just thinking about this makes me laugh. It’s so good. People should look it up on YouTube right now. They’re like, if you have a dollar we can give you four quarters—

Morrison  

—four quarters. We can give you 10 dimes. Whatever you need. It’s really good.

Robinson 

Jim Downey is so effortlessly funny. He was on the Conan O’Brien’s podcast. There’s a clip of him on there, just two minutes, where he pretends not to know about the Epstein allegations. And he’s like, Jeff Epstein, the financier, is... what? No, no, no. His delivery on that is so good. And it’s so—I would describe it as effortlessly funny.

Morrison

Yes.

Robinson

And because he’s a guy who doesn’t come out from behind the scenes much, many people’s first exposure to him was watching that in an interview a while ago. Who’s this guy? He’s hilarious.

Morrison

Well, one of the great pleasures of writing this book was not only bringing Lorne from behind the curtain, but so many people like that, so many writers like Jim Downey, Robert Smigel, Jack Handey, and even the wonderful producers who work with Lorne every day, like Erin Doyle and Erik Kenward. No one has ever heard these people’s names. And because I’ve been behind the curtain myself my whole life as an editor, it's really nice to be able to show people what goes into it.

Transcript edited byPatrick Farnsworth.