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CARRIE FISHER:

I was around Michael O’Donoghue until he was deeply offended that I married Paul and his ex-girlfriend was maid of honor and he wasn’t in the wedding, and he never spoke to me again. I went up to him again at some point and said, “Can’t we put this aside?” He just screamed at me. It was horrible. But I loved Michael. Michael and I had gone to Ireland together, and I think we were actually the first people to do ’ludes and mead. I was shooting the Star Wars movies, and John and Danny wanted to be in them as space creatures or something. I think it was mostly John.

DAN AYKROYD:

I was never proprietary about pieces. Look, if a piece didn’t work, you know, please get it out and let’s do what works for the show, let’s put someone else’s piece in there. But I had a lot of strength behind me, because I had Franken and Davis and Downey and O’Donoghue as my cowriters, and oftentimes we’d come in, and there’d be three or four of us real strong writers, and so we knew we were going to get on. The goods had been created.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

Lorne urged me to repeat characters. I refused to do it because I wanted to, you know, dazzle everybody with my versatility. And that kept me anonymous. That was the same pitfall for Danny. He was much more comfortable doing characters, and I think that it made him less recognizable than John, who was always John even when he was the Samurai. And Billy was always Billy. He did Todd in the Nerds but basically he was Billy. So even though I loved the kind of work that I did, and still do — I love the character work — I think it keeps you more anonymous than people who play themselves.

BUCK HENRY, Host:

I never had a problem with repeating characters, saying, “Oh, we’ve done enough Coneheads,” or that we had done enough of, you know, anything that worked. I thought, why not keep going and doing it? You would only stop it if you had a concept that didn’t live up to the characters. Then you would say, “Oh, this is not strong enough for the characters, and we can’t do this.”

DON NOVELLO, Writer:

I wrote the Greek restaurant sketch the second week I was there. It is like a hit song, I guess, in a way. The restaurant is called Billygoat’s. I used to go down there all the time to this Billygoat Tavern — I worked in advertising then — just to hear these guys going, “Cheese-burger cheeseburger cheeseburger.” It’s still there. They’ve really played it up. They have a sign outside, “Cheeseburger Cheeseburger.” It’s on some Chicago tour, they drop by. And they opened a few other places. They sell them at the stadium, but it’s always “cheeseburger cheeseburger,” they play it up big. The people at the diner recognized it right away on the show.

It was a big thing to do at the time. We had a live grill there, a working grill, they were really making cheeseburgers. I’d say we did six, seven, eight of those sketches.

BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:

Don Novello and I came in at the same time, and we got put in a former storeroom that abutted the elevator shaft. You could barely hear because of the noise from the elevator shaft. There were no windows. That’s where we started out. And they were trying to make us work together. And then when he wrote that “cheeseburger cheese-burger” thing, he got a decent office. The next year I got a decent office after I did a series of like Knights of Columbus meetings, which introduced the character of Garrett Morris’s Chico Esquela.

GARRETT MORRIS, Cast Member:

Chico was my favorite, but I also really liked “I’m going to get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see.” Now that was when we were improvising. Lorne actually said, “Look, I want to do a thing called the ‘Death Row Follies.’ You be a prisoner, you be so-and-so, you be so-and-so, go away and come back with something.” That’s what we did. See I liked it when they did it like that, even though I was desperately learning the technique that these guys were masters at — John and Gilda particularly. I’m the kind of guy, “Throw me out there,