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to solve it yourself, even if he told you a better solution. As Gertrude Stein used to say, “You can’t tell nobody what they don’t know — not even that they don’t know it.” And he embodies that. I’ll come into his office and say, “Listen, this is what I want to do,” and Lorne will say something completely at right angles to it. And I’ll go, “Well, I don’t think that’s really relevant.” And he’ll just go, “Okay.” Meaning — “I’m not listening to what you’re saying. This is what I’m saying. And I know that if you do it, you’re going to do it, so what are you here for? Let’s go do something else. Let’s go to dinner.”

It’s not his job to help me with logistical problems. His job is to look at something and if he thinks it’s funny, to laugh with all his heart and soul. When he laughs, America laughs.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:

If you see the movie Man on the Moon, you’ll see Lorne and Dave Letterman in it, both playing themselves, and it’s interesting how they each approached their appearance. Lorne actually tried to make himself look like he looked back when Andy Kaufman was on Saturday Night Live — he’s barefoot and he’s eating with chopsticks in his lounge chair. And then, when they re-created the scene when Andy was with Letterman, Dave has his regular glasses on, which he didn’t wear back then. He’s wearing his regular suit. He made no attempt whatsoever to act in this movie other than to go through the motions. And in a way it’s a lot easier for me to deal with a guy like Dave than it is with Lorne, who’s kind of an actor. He’s a guy who wants everybody to love him; Dave doesn’t give a shit about that. So I seem to be able to read Dave better. The bottom line is, you know, Dave; he’s nuts. There’s no doubt about it. But he also is what he is. He’s never acting, as far as I can tell. He is genuine, and when he’s pissed off, he’s pissed off, and when he’s in a good mood, he’s in a good mood. I could never tell any of that with Lorne.

COLIN QUINN, Cast Member:

I always thought I could tell how Lorne really felt about things. Even though he doesn’t say it most of the time, he does laugh. Like at read-through. He reads all the stage directions, which is a hard thing to do. I’ve read stage directions before, and it’s fuckin’ hard. It’s a pain in the ass. And he does it every show. You can tell if he likes something or doesn’t like it by the way he reads those stage directions. He can be one of the bigger laughers at read-through, but when he doesn’t like it, he has no problem just sitting there quietly.

DAN AYKROYD, Cast Member:

Lorne is not much of a mystery. This is a very decent guy who was brought up with really good values, with that Canadian work ethic, with a home that had a parental warmth, and he was able to explore his gift relatively early in life. He’s brilliant, he’s a genius, and to me there’s not much of a mystery there.

CHEVY CHASE, Cast Member:

There’s no mystery about who Lorne is to me because we came in on the same level basically. It’s just that as time goes on, people become, they’re made into a legend by those who are hired and, you know, Saturday Night Live, oh, nobody’s going to live up to the original cast, nobody can live up to this or that. But there’s one thing that stays steady all the way through — Lorne Michaels. Nobody can live up to that, because he put the whole thing together.

He’s very nonconfrontational — probably both his strongest and his weakest suit. Lorne is both involved and uninvolved in some ways. His lack of confrontational abilities doesn’t serve him well on occasion, because he can’t fire anyone. He finds it difficult to fire people. That’s a lovely thing too in many ways. But when the chips are down and it comes to artistic integrity versus the network’s fear of what a sponsor might or might not say if such and such a sketch is put on, he’s there. He’ll confront.

Lorne may be frightening to the last five or six casts, to the younger set, as it were. It may be daunting to be around Lorne. I think he may seem intimidating because he seems to know so much. But he’s been there all