Live From New York - James H. Miller [240]
The first cast of Saturday Night Live had lacked one thing that all subsequent groups would enjoy: access to the work of predecessors. When the show was new, it had no models and barely a template. They made it up as they went along, and many improvisations born of desperation became traditions and tenets. Members of succeeding casts were always haunted by the first — its taped work recycled perpetually in reruns — and put to the challenge of trying to equal its impact. In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the show that had been designed for the TV generation was passed along to the SNL generation — talented kids whose earliest memories of watching the show were among their earliest memories of watching, or maybe even doing, anything. Now the Saturday Night Live creative team, before the cameras and behind them, included people younger than the show itself, video age babies who’d never known a TV universe without it.
JIMMY FALLON:
I’m the same age as the show. When I first saw it, I was like seven or eight years old. My parents used to tape it and show me and my sister only the “clean” sketches. The others were too risqué for us, so we couldn’t watch the whole thing. They were good censors, because we thought it was a treat just to see anything funny, especially Mr. Bill. I don’t know why, but “Wild and Crazy Guys” was our favorite. It was risqué, but we didn’t realize as kids what things like birth control devices or tight bulges meant. We were just little kids. We used to perform the sketches at parties, and relatives would be like, “You let your kids say this?” But I had no idea what it meant.
RACHEL DRATCH, Cast Member:
I’ve watched the show since its beginning. I was really young. I’d watch it every Saturday and have friends over and make them stay up to watch the show. It was like a ritual of mine. Gilda Radner was my favorite. Looking back, the thing I loved about her was just — I don’t know, you never saw a “woman comedian.” There was no separation, no gender thing. Being in Chicago and hearing “women aren’t funny” and all that stuff, I liked her the most.
CHERI OTERI, Cast Member:
I grew up on the old shows. I remember my mom would let us stay up, because it became such a treat. It was a time when you should have gone to bed but we were up, and I remember to this day my favorites are Bill Murray and Gilda Radner, because I laughed and I related to their characters. I loved their characters. I would recognize when someone else was funny even if they weren’t necessarily my type of humor.
When Bill Murray hosted here that time, it was amazing. This writer that I write with, we got into a huge fight. It was a brawl. I mean, screaming and everything. We were screaming so hard at each other. And when you walk out after a fight like that, you’re shaking, because you can’t believe it got that heated and violent. So I walk out after it’s over and there’s Bill Murray standing there. He heard the whole thing! And he’s like my idol. And this was the first time something like that ever happened. He just looked at me. I felt so ashamed. And the next day I had to sit next to him at rehearsal and I go, “I’m really sorry you had to hear that yesterday.” And he said, “Cheri, I felt like I was home.”
MOLLY SHANNON, Cast Member:
I didn’t watch the show as much as other people. I loved Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, but I didn’t think about being on Saturday Night Live until I was in college. That wasn’t always my dream from my whole childhood. It just started in college that I knew I wanted to be on that show.
At NYU, I was a drama major, and I did all of these serious acting classes doing “sense memory,” and my God, soooo serious, with all these drama students and ugh! And musical thea-tuh. But then we did this revue show, and Adam Sandler was in it, this little comedy sketch show — and it was the best. We made fun of the teachers with little comedy sketches. And