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By Root 1372 0

Nick the Lounge Singer sketch was one that I walked into the read-through. They’d read all the sketches for the week and I said, “Oh, I have one more.” I had never written really anything, and I was just dying on the vine, because like I said, as the new guy I was pretty much the second cop through the door every week, the second FBI guy, whatever. Danny was always kind enough to write me in as the second something; no one else even bothered. That was my lifestyle. Then, I don’t know, something happened and somebody gave me this shower soap thing in the shape of a microphone and I took off with it and wrote this sketch. But basically it wasn’t even written; it was half-written. I started doing it at the read-through, and you’re supposed to have a copy of the script for everyone — you’re supposed to duplicate them for the entire crew — but I was the only one with a copy. I just started doing it, and I was getting huge laughs, and then I said, “I haven’t finished the ending yet.”

Well, there was this silence. This bone-crushing silence. And Tom Davis said, “I would love to help Bill finish writing that sketch, Lorne.” And it was the grandest gesture of like, “This son of a bitch needs this badly, and you know I can make sure he gets it done.” At that point it had gotten a lot of laughs, so it was like okay. So Davis helped me finish that sketch, that was the shower-mike sketch, and then we started writing all the Nicks.

PAUL SHAFFER:

Billy decided to do a version of the kind of character that he had been doing in Chicago: Nick the Lounge Singer. And of course I would be the pianist, but I also got to participate in the writing of it with Billy, Tom Davis, and Danny. Danny would always make an appearance in it as an Indian guy. At ski resorts in Canada, there were always guys like that who operated the chair lift, and they always found a dead animal in the sewage system or something, and that was his appearance. Marilyn Miller was also instrumental in writing this.

Billy’s performance was so over-the-top, it almost superseded the writing. We did five or six of them — I’m just guessing. They always had to come from Billy, and I never knew what his criteria were, but whatever he wanted to do was just right. “Star Wars” of course was his idea, but then we would collaborate on the lyrics once he got the idea. Most of it came from him, though.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I wrote a lot of Gilda’s first sketches. Like I did the first Emily Litella. I did the first Roseanne Roseannadanna before she had a name. I did a lot of the Baba Wawas. And I did all the Todd and Lisas. I watched every one of those on the live show because I loved it so much, and it just didn’t seem like it had been done the same way at dress or even, you know, a couple times before. It just seemed so amazingly live and raw.

PENNY MARSHALL:

Gilda went with Paul Simon. She also went out with Billy. One night I was about to see Billy and he said, “I’m no good, ask Gilda.” He was drinking, you know. Everyone went through their periods of bad behavior.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

Billy and Gilda’s relationship didn’t really affect me, except that I can remember them coming to read-through and fighting. And she was furious with him and she’d just told him not to talk to her and he’d be begging her — and this would be acted out in front of all of us.

JANE CURTIN:

Billy and Gilda? When you’re changing clothes backstage right next to two people who are involved, oh yeah, you know what’s going on between those two people.

BILL MURRAY:

Lisa Loopner was a great character for Gilda because she could actually laugh inside of it. That sketch was all about making her laugh. There was a lot of extra in that. Those sketches were always tragically overwritten. They couldn’t edit worth a damn, and they wouldn’t edit. It was a turn for both of us, because she had this thing that was so extreme that you could throw anything at it and it would hit the mark, partly because she was such a bright target and partly because of the way she reacted to it.

You never saw nerds enjoying themselves