Live From New York - James H. Miller [268]
First, Michaels’s longtime close friend Paul Simon sang his song “The Boxer,” a number that Michaels himself requested (though others on the staff found it dubiously appropriate). Onstage, a crowd of New York firemen and policemen listened silently, grim faces panned by the studio cameras. The song over, Michaels stepped up and asked Giuliani if it was all right for Saturday Night Live to be “funny.” Giuliani responded, smiling slightly, “Why start now?” Then, when the laughter subsided, Giuliani exultantly shouted the show’s famous opening line.
Live from New York, New York was alive.
AMY POEHLER:
I was home in the East Village on 9/11. I could see the towers out of my window. All of us who were working on the show at the time called each other to see if everybody was okay, and then after all that died down the next question was, What are we going to do? Do we even have a job? I was thinking they might postpone the show. There was talk about everything coming to a halt. Even thinking about your work, your work in comedy, seemed so kind of frivolous at the time you couldn’t even indulge in thinking about it. And then a couple weeks went by and it was like, “Oh yeah, we gotta put on a show.” I just remember it being incredibly emotional and Rudy Giuliani being there. It was very tense and very weird.
RUDOLPH GIULIANI:
Lorne asked me if I would appear on the first show they did after September 11. They had visualized what they wanted before they talked to me. In other words, they wanted me and the police commissioner and the fire commissioner, and they wanted a group of firefighters and police officers in order to do something that would honor them. But they also wanted to see if I would appear and in essence make it easier for people to laugh again, basically say to them, “It’s okay to laugh.”
I don’t remember if it was Lorne or Brad Grey who called me and actually wanted to know if I thought it was okay to go ahead with the show, which Letterman had also asked through his producers — whether it was okay to go ahead with that show. Several people had called me to ask me that. I think at Saturday Night Live, they were debating whether to do it that week or the next week. And I said not only did I think it was okay to go ahead with the show, I said sooner rather than later. People have to get back into learning how to laugh and cry on the same day, because they’re going to be doing it for a long time.
It was a period of time in which I knew I couldn’t move people back to normal, but maybe we could at least get them to start doing the things they normally did, to be able to deal with some of the pain they were going through. One of the ways you get through a horrible catastrophic event — like if you lose your mother or your father or a loved one — is you grieve, you mourn, and then you try to get back into your normal way of life. So I pushed them to go ahead with the show.
I thought the show made a tremendous contribution, and I thought the way they handled it — I’ve seen that tape maybe two or three times since then — was absolutely magnificent. It’s hard to watch it and not have a tear in your eye.
I’ll tell you what happened the night of the show. I was operating at that point on like two or three hours’ sleep per night, and I was going to go home immediately after the opening. I was going to leave after the beginning and not stay for the whole show. And Fire Commissioner Von Essen and I went upstairs to Lorne’s office to get our stuff — and we couldn’t leave.
And I don’t know if that was the funniest Saturday Night ever, but to me it was, because it was like I literally hadn’t laughed from September 11th up to that point. So it was a little bit like when you go to a restaurant and you’re very hungry and the food tastes terrific; you’re not sure if the food really is terrific or you’re just very hungry.
But we just spent the next hour and a half in Lorne’s office just laughing. We couldn’t leave. And it was like a release. There were a number of the police officers