Live From New York - James H. Miller [39]
I just thought, “Wow, okay, we’re into the undiscovered country here, if they’re doing this kind of stuff on TV.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
We wanted to redefine comedy the way the Beatles redefined what being a pop star was. That required not pandering, and it also required removing neediness, the need to please. It was like, we’re only going to please those people who are like us. The presumption was there were a lot of people like us. And that turned out to be so.
In its first weeks, the show looked little like it does today — different even from the episodes that aired mere months later. The repertory players got relatively little time at first, but that grew along with their popularity. Albert Brooks’s films didn’t turn out as Michaels had hoped, and there were frequent arguments over the fact that they weren’t short enough.
Brooks was angry — and is still irked to this day — that in its first review of the show, Newsweek gave credit for some of the clever parodies of network shows included in his short film not to him but to the show’s writers and performers. In fact, Brooks was working in a virtual vacuum on the other side of the country. He went on to a brilliant career as comic and filmmaker. The Muppets didn’t starve either; soon after being dumped, they were signed by England’s Lew Grade to star in The Muppet Show, a hugely profitable, globally syndicated half hour that made Jim Henson a millionaire many times over.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
Whoever drew the short straw that week had to write the Muppet sketch. The first time I met O’Donoghue, I walked into Lorne’s office, and Belushi’s there, Aykroyd’s there, people the likes of which had never crossed my path before, and I look in a corner of the room and there’s a guy I learned was Michael O’Donoghue. What was he doing, you ask? He had taken Big Bird, a stuffed toy of Big Bird, and the cord from the venetian blinds, and he wrapped the cord around Big Bird’s neck. He was lynching Big Bird. And that’s how we all felt about the Muppets.
Franken and Davis and I were the rookie writers, and the others always rigged it so we were the ones who wrote the Muppet sketches. So I went over to Jim Henson’s townhouse on like Sixty-eighth Street with a sketch I had written. There was one character named Skred, and I remember we’re reading the sketch, Jim Henson’s reading the pages, and he gets to a line and he says, “Oh, Skred wouldn’t say this.”
And I look, and on a table over there is this cloth thing that is folded over like laundry, and it’s Skred. “Oh, but he wouldn’t say this.” Oh, sorry. It’s like when I was doing Garry Shandling’s first series, we wanted to have Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop on. I said, “Of course we’ll fly you out,” and she said, “Well, what about Lamb Chop?” What about Lamb Chop?!? She says that Lamb Chop gets a seat. I swear to God, I almost threw my back out giving her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn’t insane. I laughed and she said, “Lamb Chop doesn’t sit in the back.” I said, “If I’m not mistaken, are we talking about the same Lamb Chop? Because, you know, it’s a sock! It’s a sock with a button, okay?!?”
And it ended up we didn’t use her because it was too insane.
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
O’Donoghue had the best line about the Muppets. He used to say, “I won’t write for felt.”
CRAIG KELLEM:
There was this shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment when Lorne turned and looked at me and he said, “How do you fire the Muppets?”
HERBERT SCHLOSSER:
I remember being at one of the tapings of the show live on more than one occasion when the Muppets were on. Some of the