Live From New York - James H. Miller [67]
A lot of stuff on Saturday Night Live was really my kind of stuff, because I like to do stuff that’s really new and exploratory. If stuff was on the line either racially or sexually, I didn’t give a damn. If you want to try it, let’s try it.
JAMES SIGNORELLI:
If we gave every sketch that anybody ever complained about not having an ending an ending, the show would fail. I don’t think people say that as a criticism. I think they just say it.
BILL MURRAY:
Danny was the best at saving sketches, when things were really deadly, when things were really dying. When you’re dying, you just play for yourself: “Let’s make ourselves laugh. If we’re not making them laugh, let’s start over again and just make ourselves laugh.” And that fearlessness would then turn the audience.
When people talk about the old cast versus the later casts, I think that was the one thing that our group had; we had that training, so there were more tricks. We’d learned working together as a group in a service way. Nowadays there’s probably more stand-ups that end up on the show, sort of more individual guys, than there used to be, and they’re individually good but they maybe don’t have that particular skill or training or as much experience in that area.
I think the old cast made bad sketches work, or made sketches that were incomplete work. You were always in process, you were always in play. You weren’t trying to get the laugh on that line. You were always seeing like a bigger movement of the whole sketch and the other characters in it, and you were watching them and trying to make them look good.
That was another thing we learned, that you make the other person look good and then you don’t have to worry about how you come off. Make the other people look good and you’ll be fine. Sometimes there’d be sketches that would be incomplete and the writers may have never found how to make it work. And maybe we didn’t even figure out the literary resolution of the sketch precisely. But in the performance of it you managed to shape a roundness, a completeness, the wholeness of it. And if you were alert in the middle of the scene, you’d see: “Okay, now these people are really fully developed as much as we’re going to do, and now this character will drive the resolution of it and these characters will satisfy it enough.” That was what we did.
DAN AYKROYD:
If you look at Carol Burnett or Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, they rely on something to take you out of it, so that whenever you have a great ending, you’ve got a great piece. We struggled with the endings, yeah, and they were probably the hardest part of the sketch.
I think the ending to a movie is hard, the ending to a television show, the ending to anything is tough. You kind of want to wrap everything up with a bow and button it all up and hark back to what you have done before and end on a high note or great joke. And that’s not always possible.
JAMES SIGNORELLI:
Nobody really understood what Lorne’s contribution was, which was integral to the whole thing, not only in selecting the people but in creating an atmosphere where people could endure the pressure and where the pressure was, in fact, a good thing — a cumulative pressure with a release. And that rhythm, you know, that kind of — I don’t know what to compare it to — but that rhythm is what kept the show going, because everybody could start, start, rush, rush, rush, rush, peak, and crash — and then start again.
DAN AYKROYD:
Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute was developed in the lab. That started with me doing guys I’d seen up in Canada — the local tire salesman, whatever. And then when I was living with Rosie, I used to do that at home with her, you know. As part of our love life, that character would emerge. And she said we have to do this, so we wrote it up. It started in the bedroom — you know, “Come here, little lady.” I do that with my wife today and still get a laugh. No sex, but a laugh. So that was definitely a laboratory-incubated character.
PAUL SHAFFER, Musician: