• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1381 0

a bitch this woman is.” She’s sort of this Jewish princess with a literary bent, and it was always like, “I don’t even know how to talk to someone like this.” I would just say stuff like, “Marilyn, come on, you’re wearing thigh-high boots. How the fuck am I supposed to take you seriously?” That’s all I could say to her in my head. I couldn’t really argue with her about the point of it, because she didn’t get my point of view. She didn’t get me at that point. The mistake was always to argue with her about the thing. The right thing to do was always make her laugh. If you could make her laugh, then she could see that you knew what you were talking about, because if you were good enough to make her laugh, you must be funny. And it took me years to figure that out.

So anyway we were arguing about “Badlands.” There’s some lyric in “Badlands” that’s really appropriate for what we did, for what we’d done. It wasn’t “Born to Run” and just doing a classic song, which is what we always used to do; “Badlands” was more about what our experience had been. It was really about us. And Paul was like, “‘Badlands’?” And when we started singing the song, his eyes lit up and he got it. He looked at me and he got it. Marilyn was still arguing and Paul said, “It’s going to be ‘Badlands.’” Paul will listen to everything, he’s a fantastic listener, but when he actually speaks, he’s speaking because he knows the right answer. So when he got it, it was like, “Great. Now we’re there.” The writing of it and doing that as a group was really fun. I think we took five or six days to finish it.

Singing the harmony part with Paul to “Badlands” on that show was one of the high points of my entire career. We hit the notes. We pushed the hell out of it. We even put more lyrics in. They wanted to cut lyrics and cut the time and we said, “No, this is what we’re going to do,” and everybody just got out of the way. And when we did it and we nailed it, I thought, “Bruce Springsteen’s got to be liking this.”

It was sort of an honor to have the first sketch on that show, I thought. And I thought we just killed. We had a blast. And to really just go out there, cold, and to show them that we still had it, that we can go out there and kill, no warm-up, just walk out there, the show opens up and kills from the first minute — that was great. And then the show just sort of cruised from there on. Everybody was funny, everybody was loose. The show was a success from the first sketch. If the first sketch had died, there would have been tension, there would have been anxiety, people would have pushed a little too hard. God, they did a great show. Everybody did great. Everybody was funny. The party was great; the party went on and on.

TOM HANKS:

At the twenty-fifth-reunion show, I remember thinking, “Why did I get saddled with the monologue again? Why am I always the guy with the monologue?” I did the monologue in the fifteenth-anniversary show too, and actually made a joke about it: “I’ve been elected to come out with what is traditionally the funniest part of the show, the monologue, the host monologue.” It’s a terrible job. But then again, to go up there and do it on the twenty-fifth-anniversary show, come on, that’s a thrill. And an honor.

I think a lot of people who leave go away saying they’re never going to come back. They feel just devoured by the experience of doing the show. But as time goes by, I think they realize that, hey, they were part of something that is singular and that there’s still nothing else like on TV. I think it’s interesting that there have been many, many attempts to try to re-create whatever Saturday Night Live does, and they all fail. That’s why I found the twenty-fifth-anniversary reunion so emotional, because all these people from different eras who had gone through this quagmire and had been in the trenches and everything, they just forgot about it and were feeling real celebra-tory. It was a nice evening. Lord knows, it was star-studded as well.

AL FRANKEN:

Saturday Night Live was a very positive experience for all of us. It was