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By Root 1350 0

’re just kind of escorted around and around and around, and you’re getting your picture taken, you’re getting fitted for something, and people come up to you and pitch ideas that you might or might not understand. And then, on Wednesday, you have that big long read-through that, for some reason, starts a full hour and a half late and then goes for about three hours and then, from that, they cull all these things. You read twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty, six hundred pieces. I can’t even remember. Then you go into this room and they have them all up there on cards posted to a bulletin board, and the next thing you know, you decide what’s going to be on the show. So that by the time you get through that — that moment which, by the way, is after the full dress rehearsal — you’ve sort of done it already, but now you know that it’s live. I mean, it’s horrifying. And yet it’s the most exhilarating thing, like being strapped inside of a huge explosive rocket ship and you’re waiting for the countdown to go and it just might blow you to kingdom come or it might take you to the moon.

The thing that happens the first time you do the show is you’re just completely swept away with the history of the place. I think there’s still stuff tacked up onto bulletin boards that hasn’t moved in seventeen years or so. So you’re reading these things that have been up forever in hallways lined with all those photographs. But when you go down and you’re actually on in Studio 8H, you’re thinking you sort of recognize this place, but you can’t believe it’s as small or as crowded or as dark as it is, and that the band is actually playing as loud as it is.

The first time I did it, it was just the beginning of the Christmas season, so it was December and they were lighting the Christmas tree there in Rockefeller Center. And the offices of Saturday Night Live were like one extremely big and confusing family. Everybody who had kids brought them in, and everybody was staring out the windows of the seventeenth floor looking down at the big tree and watching it all on TV at the same time.

The show was, of course, a history of entrances and exits. Sometimes the entrance was momentous and the exit ignoble, sometimes the exits were en masse. Many of the show’s stars left only to return sporadically in cameo roles; they were like alumni revisiting the campus of their youth. No one ever actually quit on the air, while the show was actually in progress — or, not quite. Damon Wayans came close, with one of the most memorable exits in the annals of exiting.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

I wrote a sketch for Jon Lovitz called “Mr. Monopoly.” The idea was he was a lawyer. And you know the character from the Monopoly board, the character that they draw on the Monopoly game, the little man with the hat? The idea for the sketch was Jon Lovitz was that man, Mr. Monopoly, and he was a very successful lawyer because he had all these “get out of jail free” cards. His clients would go to jail and he would come in with these cards and the cops would hate him: “Damn you, Mr. Monopoly!” And that was the idea for the sketch. And Lovitz was very funny. And Damon Wayans I wrote as a cop who had one line. He would say, “Hey Larry, your lawyer is here to see you.” That was it.

Dress rehearsal went fine. I didn’t know any of the political bull-shit that was going on, but I did know Damon had been angry about various things, including something apparently that was cut at dress rehearsal, and he was furious and he decided between dress and air he was going to quit Saturday Night Live right then and there, he was fed up. And this is how he quit. During the live show, he made his entrance in the sketch not as a cop but as his flamboyant queen gay character that he later did on In Living Color. He came in prancing and delivered “Your lawyer’s here to see you” very swishy. He totally derailed the sketch, derailed the sketch completely. The audience was completely thrown: What’s a gay cop doing in there? Is it about the cop or is it about Lovitz? It was just stunning. I was with Lorne watching, and