Live From New York - James H. Miller [86]
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
We had Buck Henry and Jane Curtin at the “Update” desk waiting for this Bacchus Parade to come, and all our jokes were about the floats and the specific things that would pass by the reviewing stand where they sat. But then somebody got killed — there was this horrible accident at the beginning of the parade route, two miles away. So for the entire hour and a half or so that we were on TV, there was no parade. Every time the bright lights came on Jane and Buck, millions of kids were vomiting and drinking and throwing balloons at them. And I’m under the desk while they’re on live TV being pelted, and I’m writing jokes about there not being a parade — what you would have seen had somebody not been killed, okay?
And I remember the last joke I wrote, the concluding joke, was something along the lines of, I’m paraphrasing, “Mardi Gras is French for ‘no parade.’”
PENNY MARSHALL:
Oh, was that a disaster! That was ridiculous. The parade was rerouted because there was an accident. People were throwing things at Buck and Jane. Meanwhile, Cindy and I had to do this Apollo Ball thing, but Cindy got lost and didn’t make the first part of it. There were men dressed as women, but we weren’t allowed to say that on television. We couldn’t say they were men because it was prime time. In those days, we couldn’t even say “do it” on Laverne and Shirley.
BUCK HENRY:
It was a very, very bad week for Garrett Morris, because that was his hometown and his sketch was canceled and he didn’t have much to do. He was severely pissed off. He wandered off. Everyone felt very badly about it. And yet the show wasn’t bad, considering there were, I think, fifteen live locations. O’Donoghue even got to do his reindeer dance, or whatever the hell that was, and there was Belushi doing, of course, Brando doing A Streetcar Named Desire.
GARRETT MORRIS:
I was unhappy about it, because I had a song I wanted to do, a song called “Walking Down Bourbon Street.” I’m a composer, and here I’m also a native son and I would have been doing a song about New Orleans. But Lorne didn’t see it, and I think he was influenced by a lot of people. So now I’m not in one thing on the show, and nobody is saying anything about that. The only thing I could do is walk off, but I don’t want that reputation. By the way, the cast went to my aunt’s house and ate ’til they could hardly leave the house. They had to like put their stomachs on wheelbarrows to get to their cars.
PAUL SHAFFER:
Naturally I wanted to do more performing. The fifth season, Lorne made me a featured player, which was a supporting actor, and I was in certain sketches that year playing various characters and things. I had a Nerd character I played, I played Robert Vesco one time in a Christmas sketch, and various things.
And then there was the famous time when I said “fuck” on live television. The sketch was about a medieval band rehearsing. Did you ever hear of the Troggs tape? The Troggs were a band in the sixties; “Wild Thing” was their song. There’s a tape that circulates in the music business of them in the studio trying to make a follow-up to “Wild Thing” and not being able really to communicate. They didn’t know musical terminology so they just kept saying “fuck” over and over: “You had the fucking beat,” they kept saying. They couldn’t seem to re-create what they had done before. It’s a famous music biz tape.
Anyway, Franken and Davis had the idea to transcribe this Troggs tape and make a sketch out of it but make it into a medieval band rehearsing and saying those lines. I remember James Taylor was in it too, because he was the musical guest that week, and Laraine Newman. We made up our own word, “flogging,” instead of “fucking,” and we would say, “Well, you had the floggin’ beat before” and we were all doing British accents, some more successfully