Live From New York - James H. Miller [169]
KEVIN NEALON:
I was renting a house in the Hollywood Hills and Dana was living in an apartment over the garage, temporarily, and there was another comedian I was living with and a writer, and I was dating Jan Hooks at the time.
JAN HOOKS, Cast Member:
Kevin was great. We were really, really good friends. And my mom got sick. My mom had cancer. And I just grabbed on to Kevin and he went down to Atlanta where my mom was. And we just started this relationship — it was a relationship out of a kind of trauma. And the only problem was that we both got Saturday Night Live in the middle of it.
He was hired as a featured player and Lorne wasn’t quite sure what I was. He thought the year before I was too old, and then I heard through the grapevine that he thought I had a weird mouth and he didn’t want to hire me because of my mouth.
TERRY TURNER:
Dana and Bonnie and I wrote a lot of the Church Ladys together, but it was Dana’s creation. We sort of played support. We were the only people — because we were from the South and there was a cable industry in the South that hadn’t quite reached into New York — we were the first people who really knew, next to Jan, who Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were, and all of the nuances of who they were, which is sort of how we got into the Church Lady, because it became a target of that character. And we were sort of the people who could access it quickly.
JAN HOOKS:
I knew Tammy Faye Bakker from the seventies. She had a show in Atlanta — when I worked in Atlanta. I would just religiously, pardon the pun, watch. It was just unbelievable. And I turned my friends on to Tammy Faye. And I actually went in to Lorne and said that there’s a woman that’s on cable, Tammy Faye Bakker, and I would really love to do her. He said, “I’ve never heard of her.” I said, “Yeah, but she’s such a great character.” And then, lo and behold, the scandal happened.
ROSIE SHUSTER, Writer:
Dana’s audition tape was the most amazing audition tape I’ve ever seen, because he nailed impressions and pushed them to this surreal place but he also did these amazingly absurd, highly original characters like the chopping broccoli guy. I especially responded to this rudimentary version of the Church Lady. The smug superior attitude was there. And the consummately couchy “Isn’t that special?” I think that character reminded me of a Waspy, repressed side of Toronto that was very big on shaming. So I mentioned that to Lorne and he teamed me up with Dana, who at the time was this sketch-comedy virgin, and together we anchored this character in a “Church Chat” talk-show format. And we added all this titillating talk of engorged naughty bits and all that kind of stuff.
“Church Chat” stole the rehearsal and it got moved up to open the show, the first show of the new season. So it was pretty prominent, pretty scary. But it struck a main vein pretty instantly, instant franchise time, and they were very fun to write. The Church Lady would project her filthy erotomaniac imagination all over the poor hapless guest, whoever they were. She would basically verbally slime them with her own repressed garbage and then she’d go to town shaming them. She had a black belt in shaming. And then she’d coyly suggest their behavior was the work of Satan.
Thinking back, I think the Church Lady was the forerunner of what Kenneth Starr did to Bill Clinton.
DANA CARVEY:
The very first night was a crisis. The Church Lady — which no one knew if it would work — was going to be the last sketch on in the dress rehearsal, right before the good-nights — in other words, the dumping ground. But then it killed in dress and they moved it up to be the very first sketch. And then I had this chopping broccoli thing, and then the show was sort of on my shoulders for some reason, and I felt just intense pressure. I would essentially cry in my dressing room. I’m emotional. And then I was swearing at myself in the mirror. There was so much pressure, because there I was, thirty-one, I never thought I would get on Saturday Night Live, and here