Live From New York - James H. Miller [81]
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
Milton Berle took a liking to me and gravitated to me, I think because in the early seventies, I had written all these jokes for Catskill comics. And I wrote jokes for a lot of the Friars Club roasts, where Uncle Miltie was usually the roastmaster. You played to people’s stereotypes with those jokes — Jack Benny was the cheap one, and so on — and with Berle, all I had known was he wore a dress on TV and supposedly stole everybody’s jokes. And also I learned early on that he was the guy with the big dick, one of the biggest in show business. So I started writing big dick jokes about him for these Friars roasts.
Now fast-forward a few years and I’m in Milton Berle’s dressing room at Saturday Night Live. He’s sitting on a couch behind a coffee table and he’s wearing a very short kind of bathrobe, the kind that comes down to about midthigh. And somehow I just say to him, “You know, it’s so weird that I’m here talking to you, because for years I was writing jokes about your dick.” I said, “I wrote all these jokes about your cock and now I’m talking to you — I feel like there’s some violation or something here.”
He says to me: “You mean you never saw it?” I said, “Uh, no, I don’t believe I did.” Then he said, “Well, would you like to?” And before I had a chance to say, “Not really” or “Can I think about it?” or whatever, he parts his bathrobe and he just takes out this — this anaconda. He lays it on the table and I’m looking into this thing, right? I’m looking into the head of Milton Berle’s dick. It was enormous. It was like a pepperoni. And he goes, “What do you think of the boy?” And I’m looking right at it and I go, “Oh, it’s really, really nice.”
At which point Gilda opens the door to the dressing room. It’s like an I Love Lucy sketch, but this honestly happened! She opens the door to his dressing room just in time to see me looking into his dick saying, “Yeah, it’s really, really nice.”
I tell Milton, “I’ll talk to you later,” closed the door, and left.
LORNE MICHAELS:
I had resisted having Berle on, but Jean Doumanian talked me into it on the basis of “How could we not?” I knew we were heading for disaster from minute one. The sketch in the old folks home was supposed to be sentimental, but during rehearsal, when Gilda would feed Milton, he was letting the food dribble out and all over his face. So I go, “Milton, she’s giving a speech here and you’re completely upstaging her with the mashed potatoes coming down your chin.” And he’d say, “Now you’re getting two laughs instead of one.” And I’d say, “Well, no,” and then he’d pat me on the shoulder and go, “I know, I know — ‘satire.’” He’d say that whenever I’d say anything.
Just before the close of the live show — and it’s not a very good show — he said to me, “Don’t worry about a thing, the standing ovation is all arranged.” He was singing “September Song,” and I swear to God there were ten people, which was the number of seats he had, who stood up in the balcony. The only time it’s ever happened. I was quite clear in the booth about not cutting to it. We don’t do that.
I have great affection for old-time show business. But it had become corrupt. It wasn’t what it had been. The show was trying to get away from that.
Saturday Night Live invigorated viewers because it represented so many departures from the safe, the sane, and the expected. One of Michaels’s rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home. In those first five years especially, SNL writers were not pleased when a studio audience applauded some social sentiment or political opinion in a sketch or “Weekend Update” item. The writers wanted laughs, not consensus.
In its earliest days, the SNL company exuded a contempt not for the medium but for the bad habits it had developed over the years — and the innocuousness that infected virtually every genre, including sketch-comedy shows. Pandering to “the folks at home,