Live From New York - James H. Miller [194]
Lorne had wisely paired me up in an office with Christine Zander, and we hit it off immediately. She had been there a few years and knew how to navigate herself around politically there. So the beginning was really great.
ADAM SANDLER:
It helped my whole career when I went from a stand-up comedian who would write maybe a couple of jokes a week that I would be excited about to — I think I was twenty-three when I got on the show — all of a sudden writing a few skits a week and helping other guys out with their ideas and trying to do jokes for their skits. All of a sudden, I thought about writing more. I thought about what really makes me laugh.
FRED WOLF:
My little group that came up on that Saturday Night Live were Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Dennis Miller. It was a giant cast. The first time I was there, I was writing for the guys who were featured players who weren’t really getting on the air as much as maybe they’d want to. And so I concentrated on writing for Schneider, Spade, Adam Sandler, and, you know, whenever I could, I’d throw some stuff everyone else’s way too. But I mainly wrote with those guys. And then, when Norm Macdonald was at it, he was another friend of mine and so I wrote with him and for him also.
DAVID MANDEL, Writer:
I was in the Lampoon and, between my junior and senior year, we did a project down at Comedy Central which was called “MTV, Give Me Back My Life.” It was a fake ten-year-anniversary documentary for MTV. And Al Franken was an adviser to it. And the following summer, Al and a guy named Billy Kimble and a couple of the executives from Comedy Central who had been on the show that I worked on for the Lampoon went on to do the comedy coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions.
And they all remembered me and hired me back. So I went and worked on that. I spent all summer doing the Democratic and Republican stuff with Al and, at the end of the summer, he basically said, “You’re funny. I’m going to talk to Jim and Lorne and get you on Saturday Night Live.” Which was perhaps one of the great moments of my life.
TIM MEADOWS, Cast Member:
A well-written sketch is basically anything by Jack Handey or Robert Smigel. Those guys write sketches that are refreshing to watch and different takes on the subjects or comic premise. It’s original.
BOB ODENKIRK:
I would like to state for the record that Robert Smigel saved sketch comedy in America. I think he was the best sketch writer in America for like that ten-year period, his first ten years there. And as great as Jim Downey is, and as pure as he is, I think Robert was really hitting his stride and, you know, doing amazing things — everything from a McLaughlin Group to the James Kirk sketch to a lot of Perot stuff to so much great stuff, like that opening where Steve Martin sings “I’m not going to phone it in tonight”: Smigel. I mean just genius work. Solid, amazing, brilliant, and smart.
CONAN O’BRIEN, Writer:
I love Robert. We all do. We actually have a word that I invented at SNL, because whenever someone tells a Robert story they start by saying, “Look, I love Robert, he’s talented, he’s prolific, I love him, I love him — but.” And then they tell the story about something horrible that he did. So about two years ago, I said, “Whenever we talk about Robert, we waste all this time — time is precious here — and we waste all this time doing the first part before you actually say, ‘But, you know, he killed my cat,’ or whatever.” And I said, “From now on, instead of that part, we’ll just say ‘chipple.’” I made up this word, and it worked, because now people just go, “chipple,” and that saves a lot of time.
Partly because it really is a live show and not live-on-tape like The Tonight Show or Late Show with David Letterman, SNL has a history filled with surprises, shocks, major and minor calamities, and, most of all, controversies. But all of