• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The seasoned host, wearing a huge white lei around his neck, introduced the bearded comic so that he could have a few words. “Yeah, I got a few words for you,” Carlin teased, standing in front of the tiki torches. After breezing through a few innocuous words he joked were poorly coined—hernia should be “hisnia,” migraine should be “yourgraine”—he addressed the words with which he’d become inextricably linked, even for Como’s luau crowd. There are, he marveled, more words to describe dirty words (lewd, naughty, foul, vile, and so on) than there are dirty words themselves: “Imagine all those words describing dirty words, and all I could think of were seven of them.” He looked considerably less comfortable in a taped bit on the beach, in which he put on a Royal Navy officer’s tricornered hat and knee breeches to portray Captain James Cook in a sad adaptation of his long-dormant “Indian Sergeant” routine.

There was one exception to the network mediocrity he was subjecting himself to, which turned out to be a major one, although no one involved could be so sure at the time. NBC was looking for something to fill its late-Saturday time slot. For years network affiliates had been running Carson highlights on the weekends, but now the notoriously work-averse host wanted to reserve his best repeats to fill the additional weeknights he was planning to take off. Impressionist Rich Little was considered for a show, as was the game show panelist and host Bert Convy. Eventually, however, NBC president Herbert Schlosser decided to go with something different. He invited twenty-seven-year-old Dick Ebersol, an ABC executive who assisted Roone Arledge in that network’s powerful sports department, out to his home on Fire Island. Ebersol had just turned down Schlosser’s offer to run NBC Sports. Determined to get this guy in the fold somehow, the company president made an offer: How would Ebersol like to take a shot at Saturday night?

The young producer quickly decided the show should set itself apart from Carson, the king of late-night comedy, by appealing to the generation under thirty. To line up credibility for the project, he convinced Pryor to come aboard. Pryor’s commitment led to verbal agreements with Lily Tomlin and Carlin. But Pryor, who was growing increasingly distrustful of television and its restrictions, soon reneged.

Back to square one, Ebersol began discussing ideas with thirty-ish comedy writer and producer Lorne Michaels, who had written for Phyllis Diller, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and the Burns and Schreiber show. Michaels had also produced a pair of specials for Tomlin. He was enthusiastic, and told Ebersol that he wanted to create “the first show in the history of television to talk—absent expletives—the same language being talked on college campuses and streets.” The idea, he said, was to cross Monty Python’s Flying Circus with 60 Minutes. Ebersol told Schlosser he wanted Michaels to produce the show.

Before potential cast members were auditioned, the charismatic Michaels began identifying possible hosts. Albert Brooks was asked, but declined; according to Brooks, Ebersol and Michaels got the idea of using a different guest host each week from him. Robert Klein was approached. Eventually, with only months to spare, the repertory company began to take shape: Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi from the original Second City in Chicago, and Dan Aykroyd from its offshoot in Toronto.

Needing a known quantity to anchor the inaugural episode, Michaels turned to one of the show’s talent consultants, Craig Kellem, Carlin’s agent in the 1960s. Kellem recommended they go back to Carlin, who had experience filling in for Carson but was by now an icon to the rowdy young audience the producer hoped to attract. “Trying to get talent for the show was not easy,” Kellem recalls. “Lorne wasn’t that high on using George, but we needed somebody. George Carlin was still George Carlin.” Kellem was a bit puzzled by Michaels’s lukewarm response to having Carlin host. It wasn’t as though