• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1326 0

you’re good at.” And that was Lorne’s opinion too. He said, “You’ve finally found a unique voice, just do that.” And then about two weeks later, he said, “Why don’t you write up another ‘Hollywood Minute’?” And he had never asked me to do something like that, which basically meant it would probably be on the show. And I thought, “Great!” So I was such a whore doing that. I probably wouldn’t have done it as much as I did, but it was actually getting in the back of my head that I might get fired at that point — because it was three years in, and I hadn’t made much of a dent.

And I did it every couple of weeks. It was crazy, I didn’t care who I took out, I was just an unknown guy making fun of million-dollar celebrities for no reason, just to take their legs out. A year or two later, it was less interesting, because I had turned into one of them.

FRED WOLF:

I would actually beg Spade to not hit the people that probably couldn’t take a hit. It just drove me crazy to make fun of some of the celebrities that were already having their own troubles. I used to tell him, “Who knows where you’ll be one day when you’re turning on the TV and you’ll see somebody say something as nasty about you as what you’re saying about them, and it’s going to just send you into a free fall?” And, you know, he listened to me somewhat. If you hit Madonna, she’ll take it. If you hit Michael Jackson, he’ll take it. But you can’t hit the real easy targets.

AL FRANKEN:

I originally wrote Stuart Smalley for Mike Myers. But when he did it in read-through, it didn’t work, because it was so specifically in my head and in my ear, and I think Smigel said I should do it, and I did it, and it worked. I felt while I was doing it that I had such good reactions that I did another one. And then, in the room between dress and air, I would of course demand that they cut other people’s sketches so Stuart could be in the show.

One day, when I was picking up tickets for The Producers, the guy I got the tickets from asked me, “When are you going to do a Stuart sequel?” And I said, “Well, the movie lost about $15 million, and I’ve discovered that when you lose money for a studio, they don’t want to make a sequel. Now if that doesn’t tell you what this business is about, I don’t know what does.” This is my standard answer.

DAVID SPADE:

I thought “buh-bye” was good, and the good thing about it was that we only did it twice, and yet I still hear it. I used to think that you had to do something twenty-five times and beat it into their heads to get some catchphrase going, but “buh-bye” and the receptionist’s “… and you are?” were just kind of stumbled into. We probably should have just left it at one — although it’s never been the case, in any sketch that’s worked in history, to leave it at one. It’s usually “leave it at thirty.”

ADAM SANDLER:

Before I was on the show, I didn’t really know what I was doing quite yet. But once I was in a room with like Jim Downey — who if you wrote a skit and Jim liked it, you were high for a week — and Robert Smigel, the same thing, it was always about impressing those guys. If you had just one line in the skit that they would comment on, you felt like you were doing something special. It was just sitting in a room with the guys you idolized, and I guess after a little while you developed what you think was the kind of comedy you wanted to do — and the kind that those guys would disapprove of.

BOB ODENKIRK:

I think Sandler really seemed to take everybody by surprise. I mean, the things that Adam was doing were so sort of inconsequential — silly songs and just like basically dicking around, you know. I’d been there for a couple years, and I really believe in good sketch comedy and great sketches, really solid sketches, and yet I thought that Sandler brought a really great breath of fresh air to the show and relaxed the show when it was getting kind of uptight and formulaic. So I liked what Adam did. But I think his fame or his success did surprise maybe everybody.

ADAM SANDLER:

I remember in the beginning when I would be on-camera,