The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [94]
Everybody in the show was good: Belushi, Gilda Radner, my brother Brian, Harold Ramis, Joe Flaherty and later Richard Belzer. One night something happened and I came late, so I got to watch the scenes. And it was the funniest show I’ve ever seen in my life. They were the funniest people in the world. I was laughing so hard. And I’d already done the show for three and a half months.
How did you get from the Lampoon show to ‘Saturday Night Live’?
Well, while we were in the stage show, they started to cast Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell and Saturday Night Live at the same time. People from both programs would come and watch our show. We all auditioned for Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live. Things dragged on and on, and Brian and I and Belushi were going to take the job on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, ’cause it didn’t look like Michaels was going to hire us. Then Belushi got hired for Saturday Night Live, and Brian and Chris Guest and I took a job on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. Everybody else was on the other show. So we were on TV, and they were on TV. But they were the show, and we were on with the Chinese acrobats and elephants and all sorts of crazy acts, and we would get cut almost every other week. And then that show got canceled, and we got a job working on a documentary that TVTV was making about the Super Bowl. Michael Shamberg was doing it, and he wanted to have funny people doing funny things with the situation.
Then Shamberg asked me if I wanted to work for him on the next couple of documentaries, so I went out to California for nine months. During which time Saturday Night Live kept rolling, and Chevy left the show, and they wanted somebody new, and they called me up. I’d worked with Gilda and Belushi in the Lampoon show; I’d met Danny when we were both in Second City. So they just figured I knew the styles. “We’ve worked with him. He’s all right.”
What was it like coming on as the new guy?
Well, it was tough. I had to spend about six months being the second cop, the second FBI guy. The first week I was on they gave me sort of a test. They gave me a lot of stuff to do, and I went crazy, I loved it. I roared. I was there on a look-see basis. I had a three-show deal. It was three shows, see if I can do it. After the first show, Lorne said, “Well, I guess you’ll be moving to New York.” So that made me feel good, but then for the next six months, I didn’t have anything to do. They gave me a lot the first week, and then I realized how competitive it really was.
The hard part was, the writers made the show, and the writers didn’t know me, so they’d write for who they knew. If you do a great scene one week, the next week the writers would write for you. If you blew a joke in somebody’s sketch, you were history. You were invisible. I blew a joke in one of Anne Beatts’ sketches, and she still hasn’t forgiven me.
What was the joke, and how did you blow it?
We were four guys running clubs, and I was opening a new bar called the Not Just a Meat-Rack Bar. I blew the line. I had the office right next to hers, and she wouldn’t even look at me for at least six weeks. It was like that. If you blew a joke, people didn’t trust you. If you blew a joke, what you basically did was you failed to get this writer’s joke to 20 million people that were watching the show. Twenty million people would have laughed if you’d said those words properly. It was very serious. I blew one of Michael O’Donoghue’s jokes. It was the Burger King sketch. The counterman said, “How do you want yours? We’ll make it any way you want it.” And I was supposed to say, “I want mine with the blood of a Colombian cocoi frog on it.” What happened was I went out there and for the heck of it, I wore this brand-new yellow silk baseball jacket that someone had given