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I spent about twenty minutes alone with Clinton once — him and the shooters; I guess there were a couple of gunmen there from the Secret Service. And man, he was nice as hell to me. Just so complimentary, knew everything I had ever said. He asked me to do him, sure. And I did. One time I did a correspondents dinner where I played his clone. He faked a leg injury and I had to come up and finish the speech, oh yeah, and he was like, “And how would you say this line? How would you say that line?”

With Gore, on the other hand, you could see the puppet and the puppeteer. You know, The Wizard of Oz — “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”? That was Gore to me. He had no ability to mask what he was feeling or thinking. We could see him trying really hard, and in a way that’s kind of endearing.

On SNL, we’re looking for the jugular. If it comes up on the Republican side, we’ll hit it. You can’t educate an audience and get them to laugh at the same time; you have to find out what it is that they are feeling at that moment and hit it. They basically should be somewhat in agreement with you in their laughter.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

Lorne defers to Downey to this degree: If Downey says, “I have an idea for a political piece, I don’t know what it is, I haven’t written it yet, but I will write it,” Lorne will block out the six minutes and build the set without having seen or heard the premise. If a Downey sketch is coming in, that’s our cold opening, build the set. We’ll get the pages maybe the night before, if we’re lucky.

DON OHLMEYER:

Downey and Franken are great political satirists. And they always have been. Election years are always very strong years for the show. And they have an ability to get right to the heart of the matter. They don’t necessarily stop at the superficial.

I think they’ve done a fabulous job with — it’s a terrible thing to say, but I mean this whole situation with terrorism is such fertile ground for what SNL does. It’s kind of like playing to their strength. It gives them characters that are in the forefront of the public mind to spoof.

JAMES DOWNEY:

Nowadays, since I came back again after being fired as “Update” guy, I sort of have a mandate to write topical political stuff, although I do other kinds of things too. I’m not always happy — not only with choices made about my own stuff but choices in general. I’d like to see more of the sort of pieces where it’s about the premise or the conceit and not about a popular returning character. But at least these days I never have to be in the position of being the guy who’s the reason someone else’s piece didn’t get on, or rewriting someone else, so that’s nice. I get to just write.

DARRELL HAMMOND:

I was glad to hear that Ted Koppel likes my impression of him, because I admire him and I don’t want him to think I’m a schmuck, you know? I mean some of those guys you just admire. Plus, we didn’t really take shots at Koppel. And you can’t. How do you take a shot at an esteemed journalist who, by every indication, is a pretty good guy and trying to contribute, you know? You don’t take shots at him, what you do is to take him and put him somewhere he would not normally be. In a bathtub, having a bubble bath. You know what I mean.

I actually performed for Koppel at a tribute for him at the Museum of Broadcasting. It’s very strange. Because I went there in full Koppel drag. I had the hair and the nose and I had a bit prepared, and they told me that I was to wait until Sam Donaldson got up to give his appreciation of Ted and then I should walk in and interrupt him. And I thought, okay. And so Donaldson is up there, and I walk in and I’m like, “Excuse me?” And when I look into Koppel’s eyes, right, I got so scared. And I got so scared I could only say to him, this is what was embarrassing, I could only say it in his voice, I said, “Are you mad at me?” I couldn’t help it. And he goes, “No, I’m not mad at you, give me the microphone.” And then he takes the mike and he like