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LORNE MICHAELS:

Some people, their whole lives, are just injustice collectors. They’re going to find new injustices every day. That’s what they do, and that’s what they are.

There were disgruntled writers too. Tensions that had existed virtually from the beginning between writers and performers — and between performers who were also writers and those who weren’t — flared up anew, perhaps because in the early nineties, SNL had seemed so much more a performers’ program than a writers’ showcase. Writers may also have been dismayed at the fortunes amassed by some performers once they left the show and went to Hollywood (in one or two cases taking favored SNL writers with them), while the less fortunate stayed behind in New York. Saturday Night Live was apparently being looked upon even by some of its cast and creative team the way the network regarded it — as an ATM rather than as a learning experience or a creative challenge.

TERRY TURNER:

Bonnie and I had done comedy writing before. We had written sketches before. Saturday Night did a great thing for us. It knocked all the rough edges off of us very fast — that, you know, you didn’t go for certain jokes. You tried to stay smart. You tried to stay current. And if it didn’t work, it was really an abrasive situation.

I remember one time at the end of one particular piece, Lorne got to the end of it, and he said, “And what did we learn from this?” Then everybody snickered and put our piece to one side. I thought, “I’m glad I’m not near the window; I would jump out right now.” It’s a tough environment. It’s a good environment. I’m glad that Bonnie and I had each other to lean on.

JACK HANDEY:

Jim Downey likes to laugh. It seems to amuse him to think that I was fired from the show. He thinks I’m a really good writer, and so it amuses him to think that the show was so stupid that they would fire me. But I sort of decided I’d had enough of the show and they weren’t going to put my “Deep Thoughts” on, and so I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and just did some writing there. And then, finally, toward the end of that next season they said, “Hey, come back and do some guest writing.” I did, and everybody really liked what I did, and so they said, well, come back — come back and work on the show some more.

I’d written some “Deep Thoughts” for the National Lampoon, and there was a college magazine called Ampersand, and I just knew that getting them on television was sort of a key to promoting them. And I felt like it was really important. I did a book of them and that was the main point. I knew that to get a popular book of them, television promotion was important. But I think my worth as a sketch writer finally overcame the resistance to putting my name on it. And they proved to be pretty popular. And also they have a utilitarian purpose on the show which I didn’t foresee, which was that a lot of times they need, you know, thirty seconds to move the cameras from one set to another, so they can just drop in something like that, and so it was helpful in that regard. I probably did more than two hundred of them.

JAMES DOWNEY:

To me it was always, number one, to do comedy about things that are going on in politics or the culture, and do it without confusing or offending the smarter people. I always thought that if comedy is going to confuse anybody, by rights it should be the stupider people. You shouldn’t be punished for knowing more. Sometimes there are things on the show that really annoy me. The more you know about the target of the satire, the more you go, “But wait a minute. That’s not right. He’s precisely the opposite of that.” But for people who only have a passing acquaintance with it, it just feels, “Yeah, that’s right.”

One time there was a Willard Scott thing on the show, and the basic idea was that he was a big, dumb buffoon, and it just made me crazy — and I was the producer at the time and I could have killed it, but of course it got big laughs from the audience. But my point was,