David Mandel, a former Saturday Night Live writer, was asked to name the favorite characters he created for Phil Hartman.

Mandel rummaged through his memory banks. “He’s probably in every sketch I ever wrote,” he said. “Yet at the same time, I’m trying to think, What is a specific thing?” He laughed. “It’s the very definition of Phil.”

No less than Lorne Michaels once wondered if Hartman hadn’t “touched greatness” more than any SNL cast member. Yet Hartman’s genius is the toughest to properly appreciate. “He was definitely a guy that was in everything,” Mandel said. “And he could play anything. Yet you never got a sense that everybody knew exactly who he was.”

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Part of the reason Hartman remains fuzzy in our memories was his own doing. When he joined SNL’s cast in 1986, it was customary for a newcomer to declare he would be the next John Belushi. Hartman had a different ambition. He told the Los Angeles Times he wanted to be the next Dan Aykroyd.

But another part is the unusual nature of Hartman’s talent. Hartman was so good at playing smarmy, air-quoting, golden-voiced sharpies — “20 percent droid,” said the writer Robert Smigel — that it’s difficult to catalogue all the comic notes he left behind in the universe.

You know when Stephen Colbert jogs across the stage and gives the audience a significant look? Or when Ron Burgundy exclaims, “By the beard of Zeus!”? These aren’t quotations, or even conscious homages. But make no mistake. What you’re observing is Hartmanism — the art of being unctuous.

Mike Thomas has written a smart and rigorous Hartman biography, out next month, called You Might Remember Me. It fills in the life of a man who showed the world little more than a too-wide smile. He was born Philip Hartmann, with double n’s, in Ontario, Canada, in 1948. Thomas traces the first appearance of the trademark Hartman character to the comedian’s childhood. Hartman walked into his neighbors’ house and repeated a line he’d heard on radio: “Good morning, all you happy people!”

Hartman was the fourth of eight children. “Didn’t get a lot of attention,” he said later — and here the classic, overarticulate Hartman voice began — “that’s why I’m craving it so much now!” The family moved to the United States before Hartman was 10 and eventually settled in California, which relieved him of the burden of being Canadian. He was raised on ’50s pop: Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, and 101 ersatz Philip Marlowes.

You might have guessed all of that. You might not have guessed, as Thomas reports, that Hartman was a diligent pothead. Or that Hartman was on a lifelong search for enlightenment, test-driving The Urantia Book, surf philosophy, Buddhism, and the I Ching. A friend suggests to Thomas that Hartman dropped the second “n” from his last name because it improved his I Ching “destiny number.”

Talk to the people who knew Hartman and the “real” Phil remains elusive. “The real Phil kicked in when he was drawing,” Stephen Root, who acted on NewsRadio with Hartman, told me. “He would draw a lot on set. That’s when he was most relaxed.” Thanks to the connections of his brother John, a music manager and agent, Hartman designed album art for bands like Crosby, Stills & Nash and America.

“He was my teacher,” said Julia Sweeney, who studied improv under Hartman at the Groundlings. “His voice was strong and loud and low. But then I got to know him as a friend and discovered his voice was really soft, and that was a really neat thing to know about him.”

That was all a lot of people knew about Hartman. He engaged with the ’60s strictly on sexual and pharmacological terms. (“I’m gonna ski my brains out till I get drafted,” he wrote to a friend.) Hartman had no moral creed other than living well and being funny. Thomas reconstructs a scene at California’s Mammoth Mountain, in which Hartman and a friend joined a bunch of skinny-dippers in the hot springs. A fog had settled over the area that night. Hartman began to perform. For the next few hours, the people gathered could hear a voice coming from somewhere in the mists, doing impressions.

In 1975, Hartman went to the birthday party of a pal who’d booked the Groundlings’ theater for a private performance. The troupe’s founder, Gary Austin, was sitting in the green room when he heard loud laughter outside. When he came out to investigate, he found Hartman onstage. After the show, Hartman asked Austin, “How do I join the Groundlings?”

Hartman’s basic training was very different than if he’d brought his bag of characters to, say, the Comedy Store. “People who go into improv to get laughs are on the wrong track,” Austin said. “You go onstage, interact with human beings, and out comes theater. Sometimes, it’s funny. Sometimes, it’s Chekhov. Which, by the way, is also funny.”

Hartman became one of the Groundlings’ go-to stars. He invented Chick Hazard, a tough-talking detective (“I wanted to shinny up one of [her legs] like a native boy looking for coconuts”), and Lightman, a mystic who came onstage and pointed flashlights at the audience. Hartman had an intellectual bent — it was as if he could take his humor and break it into its component parts. Sweeney remembered a classroom exercise in which Hartman asked students to choose a family member they felt particularly close to. Then he asked them to choose a Looney Tunes character. Finally, Hartman told his students to combine the loved one and the cartoon into a single character.

Around 1985, Michaels came to Los Angeles, watched the Groundlings perform, and pointed his bony finger at … Jon Lovitz. Few could believe it, most of all Lovitz, who told coworkers at SNL of Hartman: “He’s way better than me!”

Hartman pressed on in supporting parts. He did the movie Last Resort, in which he played a man trying to pick up Charles Grodin. “All I remember him saying is, ‘I don’t want to play the character gay,’” Grodin told me. “I said — and I wasn’t insulting him — ‘Just be yourself.’”

Hartman helped fellow Groundling Paul Reubens create Pee-wee Herman and his menagerie — Hartman was Kap’n Karl — and got a writing credit on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985. When Reubens hosted Saturday Night Live that fall, Hartman tagged along as one of his personal writers. Michaels was impressed, and Hartman was invited to audition.

Hartman’s SNL audition tape may be the only surviving footage in which he is radiating nervous energy rather than merely affecting it. “You like impressions?” he asked SNL’s producers. “I know you do!”

He whirled through Jack Benny, John Wayne, and Jack Nicholson — though he did them in the guise of “German impressionist” Gunther Johann. Then Lovitz hopped onstage. Hartman seemed to relax, for his plastic men were better when paired with more authentic, schlubbier types. Here, Hartman played a past-prime actor from World War II propaganda films and Lovitz the head of a studio.

Hartman: If you’re unhappy with my work, tell me now!

Lovitz: All right. Everyone says you’re the worst actor in town.

Hartman: Don’t leave me hanging by a thread! …

Lovitz: All right, you’re through. You hear me? Through! You’ll never work in this town again. Your life is finished!

Hartman: What’s the word on the street?

To everyone’s relief, Michaels pointed his finger at Hartman. At 38, Hartman became the oldest member of the Saturday Night Live cast — the “grandfather of comedy,” he joked.

From the toy box containing Unfrozen Cave Man Lawyer, Bill Clinton, and The Simpsons’ Troy McClure, it’s possible to extract and describe the classic Phil Hartman character. It’s close enough to the actual Hartman that we might call this fellow “Hartman,” with quotes.

“Hartman” was an authority figure in love with his own sonorous voice. “Like 60 years in the business of being an announcer,” said his SNL costar Kevin Nealon.

When “Hartman” spoke, it was in a language of lies. Keyrock the Caveman jived his way through a closing statement; Clinton emoted feel-your-pain liberalism; for McClure, it was the golden patter of the announcer reading a bogus script.

“Hartman” affected a common touch: I’m just a caveman … As Steve Lookner, who joined SNL’s writing staff in 1993, put it, “It’s taking it to the limit of how cocky you can be and still fool people into thinking you’re simple.”

His con was ludicrously obvious: It’s more of a Shelbyville idea … But because we knew he was swindling us, that made the swindle easier to enjoy. “You appreciate the artifice,” Root said. “Even if you know what he is doing. Because he is doing it so well. ‘Oh, I don’t mind. That’s OK. It’s not that much money …’”

The final thing about “Hartman” is that he was just a bit remote. This is key to understanding why Hartman the actor may be tough to properly appreciate. We could spend a long weekend with Wayne and Garth, and tolerate at least a lunch with Lovitz’s Tommy Flanagan. Hartman’s creations were highly polished and vacuum-sealed, easy to laugh at but harder to hug.

The Saturday Night Live cast had a name for Hartman. “His nickname was Glue because he held all the sketches together,” Nealon said.

The Glue’s arrival found SNL mired in one of its customary existential crises. For the 1985-86 season, Michaels hired actors like Robert Downey Jr. and Randy Quaid, who weren’t natural sketch players. “The writers were vilified my first year there,” said Smigel, who joined the show in 1985. “Just a constant course of how shitty the writing was.”

The next season cut a new path from the start. One of the first sketches in the premiere was called “Quiz Masters.” It starred three newly hired actors most Americans had never seen before. Dana Carvey played a game-show contestant who happened to be a psychic. Jan Hooks was the other contestant. And Hartman was (of course) the host. As the crowd began to laugh, producer James Downey turned to Smigel and said, “The audience feels safe.”

Part of the reason cast members called Hartman the Glue was his authority. To have Hartman in a sketch meant somebody was going to be doing their job very well, even if the sketch’s conceit was an inch thin. “People like Phil make it safe for people to be crazier,” Sweeney said. “They’re the gravitas. It’s not going to go completely off the rails if Phil’s in the sketch.”

“There is no Costello without Abbott,” explained Mandel, who went on to become an executive producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm. “They called him Glue for different reasons, but one of them was you can’t have that Matt Foley character if Phil Hartman isn’t there to be the dad reacting off it.”

They also called him the Glue for his willingness to cloak his own personality — which perhaps came easy to Hartman. It’s the defining trait of SNL glue guys, starting with Aykroyd and running through Joe Piscopo, Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, and Taran Killam. “That’s the way he was like Danny more than Belushi,” said Rosie Shuster, a former SNL writer. “He poured the Phil out and morphed into the madman inside of his character.”

Of the glue guys, only Aykroyd could carry as many sketches. And Hartman probably wore more hairpieces. He was Frank Sinatra in sketches created by writers Bonnie and Terry Turner after the real Chairman’s gonzo letter to George Michael; the character later mated with Smigel’s McLaughlin Group parody to form “The Sinatra Group.” He was Phil Donahue, introducing the author of the book Women Good, Men Bad — watch Hartman pound his head with the mic, a move that wasn’t in the script. He was Frankenstein’s monster, in his monosyllabic powwows with Tonto and Tarzan. (“Fire … baaaad!”)

Hartman was well aware of his own usefulness. “I’m Mr. Potato Head,” he would say. Or he would walk by the writers, put on his phoniest announcer voice, and say, “Hello, fellows!”

Nealon was another very useful SNL player. If he and Hartman met in the hall after not having seen each other in a while, they morphed into generic ad executives — organization men.

“Hey, Jed, how are you?” Nealon would say.

“Hey, Walt,” Hartman replied. “Meeting in R&D in 20 minutes. Catch up with you then!”

SNL cast members made an art form out of skimpy preparation, especially for thankless parts like “Corporate Executive.” Yet when they came to the Glue’s dressing room, they found Hartman had made a binder containing all of his scripts for a particular show. Each sketch was in a separate tabbed section; lines were highlighted, and Hartman had made annotations in the margins.

What the ’70s SNL offered in danger and snorting ambition, the early Hartman years matched with consistency and professionalism. In Carvey, Hooks, and Hartman, the show had three actors who might have time-traveled from a ’50s sketch show, and a writing staff that was happy — after updating a few references — to treat them as such. This was the era of “Master Thespian,” “Robot Repair,” William Shatner vaporizing Trekkies, and “Dukakis After Dark.” “We were docile nerds in our twenties and thirties,” Smigel said of the writers.

Starting with the 1988-89 season, a new breed of writer-actor arrived who could speak to the MTV generation. Mike Myers came aboard with a rough version of Wayne Campbell in tow. Within two years, he was joined by Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade, and Chris Rock. Now, the Glue’s job wasn’t just smoothing out a weekly comedy show. He was holding together two generations.

Recall the best sketches of the “new” SNL and Hartman is somewhere in nearly every one. He was the dulcet-voiced announcer preceding “Wayne’s World” (“You are watching Cable 10 …”). He was the dad in Farley’s maiden SNL turn as motivational speaker Matt Foley. As is now legend, Farley accidentally belly flopped through a coffee table during the sketch. Spade, Sweeney, and host Christina Applegate lapsed into laughter. Watch how Hartman turned to Sweeney and affected a father’s disapproving stare. He was still working a thankless part.

In the early ’90s, Hartman also remained an emissary of the “old” SNL, the era when you took a screwy Jack Handey idea like “Unfrozen Cave Man Lawyer” and read it more or less straight.

“In the age-old fight between writerly concepts and performance, performance usually wins — especially with a live audience,” Handey wrote in an email. “It’s hard for Shavian wit to beat an actor dropping his pants. … Phil was great in idea-driven things because he was fearless. He would play an absurd character without racing for the door.”

But being the Glue had its blues, too. Hartman watched Myers and Carvey strike it rich with the movie version of Wayne’s World. Myers had Dieter from “Sprockets” and Linda Richman from “Coffee Talk.” Carvey had the Church Lady and Hans and Franz (with Nealon). Metaphorically and otherwise, Hartman was the Ed McMahon to Carvey’s Johnny Carson.

“You mean, does it bother me that I’m a loser?” Hartman told Greg Kinnear. “No, no, of course not. I enjoy the relative obscurity I’ve had. Why should I be concerned that 20-year-olds are running off and making $200 million movies?”

There are many theories as to why Hartman was confined to being the Glue. As SNL’s resident grandpa, Hartman got older parts — authority figures rather than subverters of authority. “He never wrote a character hosting a talk show, which is sort of the shortcut to a recurring hit,” Smigel said. Moreover, people wondered if Carvey and Farley could throw themselves into parts in a way Hartman couldn’t — if his orderly, bindered approach to comedy might be holding him back.

“He even talked to me about it,” Sweeney said. “It was the moment when Pat became really popular. He said, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky that happened. I’ve been trying to have a breakout character for years. Treasure it. That’s not something that happens all the time.’”

Nobody on SNL begrudged Hartman a movie tie-in. But they realized that getting their own movies was easier with the Glue being the Glue. “I felt we all understood how much harder his job was than ours,” Sweeney said. “We didn’t want that. We wanted him just as he was.”

On December 5, 1992, Hartman’s Clinton came jogging into a McDonald’s. Nealon’s Secret Service agent told the president not to tell Hillary. Here the classic Hartman voice replied: “There’s going to be a whole bunch of things we don’t tell Mrs. Clinton.”

The 1992 election brought Hartman his biggest wave of popularity. Carvey was playing George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot. Al Franken supplied much of the writing. And Hartman got to play not just Clinton but also Perot’s running mate, James Stockdale — which basically required him to wear the Phil Donahue hairpiece and talk like Frankenstein’s monster.

Inside McDonald’s, Hartman’s Clinton gobbled McNuggets off people’s trays while explaining his policy of sending aid to Somalia. The crowd roared — for Clinton was as accessible as any character Hartman ever played. He had a great closing line to the Secret Service: “Race you to the Pizza Hut!”

“If you remember that sketch,” said Mandel, who wrote it with Franken, “Phil’s eating so much food he literally starts to choke in the middle of it. Rob Schneider hands him a drink to help him wash it down. That was the level of commitment. He went for it.”

It’s interesting to compare Hartman’s Clinton with Carvey’s Bush. Carvey did impressions in the manner of a stand-up comic. He would seize on a line or gesture — Bush’s “not gonna do it,” say — and repeat it over and over to goose the crowd. Hartman had a different approach. He burrowed into a character in such a hyper-logical way that he unleashed a signature line — “I feel your pain” — only as much as the actual figure did. Here again we see why Hartman’s genius remains fuzzy. Hartman’s Clinton was the impression you admired. Carvey’s Bush was the one you quoted the next day.

Additionally, Carvey made Bush the Elder far more cuddly than he actually was. Hartman did for Clinton what he did for Ronald Reagan — he alighted on his huckster streak. After the (real) Gennifer Flowers said Clinton had a small penis, Hartman’s Clinton retorted, “I don’t have a small penis. Gennifer Flowers has a big mouth.”

Hartman claimed on talk shows that the gags didn’t go over well at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Paul Begala, who was a White House counselor to Clinton, said he remembered Clinton loving the sketch. “Those of us on the White House staff,” Begala said, “loved Phil’s impression as well — perhaps laughing a little harder when POTUS wasn’t around.”

By the spring of 1994, SNL’s old core of actors was drifting away. Hooks had left for Designing Women in 1991. Carvey followed two years later for movies. Hartman decided that he would leave, too.

We needn’t repeat the libel that the show lost its mojo forever, that Saturday Night Live was “dead,” etc. But it was changing. The sight of Hartman burrowed deep inside a character like Frank Sinatra gave way to Adam Sandler doing Adam Sandler.

“On ‘Weekend Update,’ no one’s pretending to be a newscaster,” Nealon said. “They’re pretending to be themselves telling jokes. Or the featured players, who are basically coming on doing their stand-up. It’s not bad, just different.”

“I feel like I got off the Titanic,” Hartman told TV Guide the next spring. Disclaimers aside, the 1994-95 season was a notable slog. The writers discovered Hartman had been doing the work of three or four actors. They lacked a go-to guy for dads and attorneys. SNL wasn’t just diminished by Hartman’s absence, as it had been with Aykroyd’s or Belushi’s or Eddie Murphy’s. It was unglued.

The Phil-less players opened the new season with a nod to their departed pal. In “Bill Clinton Audition,” the joke was that a generation had turned over and no one was left to play Bubba. Sandler did Clinton as whiny guitar player. Spade did Clinton as a sneering pop-culture critic. Farley, Chris Elliott, and Tim Meadows did their bits. “The sketch,” Mandel said, “was our direct response to, ‘Phil ain’t here and we got nothing.’”

As a free agent, Hartman played the Glue to the world. He lent his voice to cartoons: The Simpsons, The Smurfs, Dennis the Menace (he was born to play Mr. Wilson), Ren & Stimpy. Yet leading-man parts continued to elude him. NBC offered him The Phil Show, a variety show Hartman said would do for the genre what David Letterman had done for late night. It was scuttled before it ever aired.

So Hartman hopped to NewsRadio, a sitcom created by Paul Simms as a censor-friendly cousin to The Larry Sanders Show. He was once again the “grandfather of comedy” to nestlings Dave Foley, Andy Dick, and Joe Rogan. “Phil was the name on the show,” Root said. “We kind of looked up to him as someone who had been through the wars at Saturday Night Live to get his material on the air. We almost had to calm him down a little the first year. ‘We want to all come together, Phil — we’re not competing against you.’ It took him a few shows to realize, Oh, OK, you’re not going to trample on me.”

NewsRadio’s Bill McNeal was quintessential Hartman — somewhat remote and mostly unlovable, he masked his intentions with a newsman’s faux-grandiosity. “You wonder, are they really that way in real life?” Hartman told a writer. “Do they go home and say, ‘Honey, I’m home and I’m going to the refrigerator now to have a fine pilsner’?”

Speaking of Hartmanism: “Are they really that way in real life?” is Anchorman as an elevator pitch.

NewsRadio was pitted against ABC hits like Home Improvement, proving that Hartman would again be undercut by breakout hits. “Did I tell you about NewsRadio?” Hartman said to Letterman. “It’s one of the top five shows — in my opinion.” NBC reluctantly gave the show a fifth season on May 18, 1998.

Less than two weeks later, Hartman was dead. In You Might Remember Me, Thomas carefully reports the details of Hartman’s murder. But if early death felt almost inevitable for supernovas like Belushi and Farley, it hangs on Hartman’s biography like an unearned twist ending. Here’s what we know: His wife, Brynn, was concerned enough about her moods to take Zoloft. The Hartmans’ marriage was bad. Indeed, some friends only caught glimpses of the “real” Phil when Hartman complained about his wife. (Soon after, Hartman would revert to form: “I’m back with my blushing bride!”) As a husband, he could be distant, detached, and — when rough patches hit — strategically stoned.

On the night of May 28, 1998, or in the days before, Brynn ingested cocaine, alcohol, and Zoloft. After midnight, she shot Hartman three times. The best guess is that Hartman was sleeping and didn’t feel much pain. Some hours later, Brynn lay down next to her husband and killed herself. Thomas reports that when Hartman’s body was found by police, his mouth seemed to be curled in a smile.

Hartman doesn’t need a had-he-lived counterfactual. In all likelihood, he would have remained a tube of pop-culture Glue — not cast as the lead in Anchorman, but practically guaranteed a role as Ron Burgundy’s station manager. “Phil in that next level would have been the best dad in movies, the best boss in movies,” said Michael Gruber, one of his agents at William Morris.

“As older character actors, the reason we want to do something is because of a good script,” Root said. “It all starts from there. He was realizing that and starting to look at nice indie stuff and better parts. I think he would have gone in that direction.”

His comic notes are still drifting around in the universe, over-enunciated words and significant stares. “Colbert is like the closest thing to Hartman,” Smigel said.

“I would say at least once a month I hear something on the radio, or something on TV, and I’ll think, Oh, that’s Phil! They’re just doing Phil!” Sweeney said.

“I don’t know if it’s my own bias or if it’s real,” she said. “Of course he was mimicking voices like that. There’s like five layers there.” It’s as if the classic “Hartman” so perfectly aped announcers that the announcers now seem to be doing him.

Here’s why it’s difficult to properly appreciate Phil Hartman. Because his characters were 20 percent droid. Because he reminded you more of your dad than your best pal. Because Hartman’s biggest gift was a kind of comedic graciousness, which he used to hide the show’s seams and to make other funny people look good. As the writer Steve Lookner put it, “How many people can you say that about on Saturday Night Live?” 

Illustration by Linsey Fields

A graph of Saturday Night Live’s household ratings creates a shape like the Matterhorn over the show’s first five years, followed by a sheer rock face in the early ’80s that flattens into a long alluvial plain gently sloping down to the present, with modest hillocks and troughs along the way.

It would be beautiful as a skyline, but it’s not great for a television show.

What gives? You could explain the show’s ratings decline as a result of the proliferation of cable channels, which sliced and diced the viewership pie, the advent of DVR (not recorded in these numbers), and, above all, Al Gore’s invention of the Internet. You could argue the decline is a bit of a red herring — that the show still has relatively strong ratings in the context of network television. Or you could just buttress some surely true theories with some pretty charts.⁴

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Theory I: SNL Ratings vs. Cocaine Use

In James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s Live From New York, Al Franken (now a U.S. senator for Minnesota) recounts the mountains of blow that fueled the grueling work of a weekly live variety show. “It was impossible to do the show without the drugs,” Franken says. Clearly and tragically, cocaine’s wages were steep. John Belushi died first, in 1982, and then it was Chris Farley, the man who most took after Belushi, from the same drug combination in 1997. Countless septa were obliterated. But from the powdery white haze emerged an antic, razor-sharp, and brilliant show.

Can it really be a coincidence that Saturday Night Live reached its heights between 1975 and 1980, when cocaine use (as measured in Americans between the ages of 18 and 25) was also at its peak? For those were the glory days of Pablo Escobar’s cartel, which flooded the U.S. market with cheap, relatively high-quality Colombian gold. And that was the golden era of a show born of the crucible of no sleep, feverish activity, and debauchery. Could Belushi’s embodiment of inchoate rage, Samurai Futaba, have existed without buckets of blow? Could the public have revered him as much had they not caught his sketches after hoovering a line of snow from the coffee table in front of the TV? (If you’re over the age of 35, don’t even pretend you weren’t high then, jittery and confident in a patterned silk dress shirt, reeking of Brut with a white penumbra forming around your nostrils.)

The zeitgeist had a bloody nose. It was sweaty. There was powder in the air. The question is whether the C₁₇H₂₁NO₄  gave birth to the madcap antics of early SNL or whether it simply amped up our appreciation of it. Either way, as the data empirically prove, the combination of a coked-up show and a coked-up audience was ratings gold. SNL: another victim of the failed War on Drugs.

Theory II: SNL Ratings vs. GDP

Too much prosperity and humor are enemy states. Poverty can be, too, of course, once a basic threshold of comfort is crossed; but before that threshold is guarded by sententious marble lions, humor has a home. That’s the sweet spot of hilarity: just barely making it.

Regardless of the personal biographies of the cast — with a Canadian Jew as a mastermind, a web-toed almost-priest, a black Juilliard student, an Albanian addict, and so on — the spirit of SNL in the early years was decidedly the voice of the outsider. A bit from the very first episode is the perfect example: “Show Us Your Guns,” a short film based on a similar campaign for Lark cigarettes, featured a few longhairs in the back of an open truck, imploring all-too-obliging Americans to brandish their weapons. SNL was an interloper, a street that wound its way from the outer boroughs of network television into the mainstream American experience. It was the Alexis de Tocqueville of comedy.

So what happened? Though GDP has grown, income inequality has as well, as shown below (using the Gini coefficient). So there should be more disenfranchised people to enjoy SNL, right? Like 99 percent of them.

Alas for SNL, that’s not the case. The graph above shows that as America grew financially comfortable (as measured by real GDP, in billions of chained 2009 dollars), the public’s taste for being poked soured. For a whole bunch of internal reasons starting around 1990, as described in Live From New York, the program’s sketches became more of a “performers’ program than a writers’ showcase.” Part of this had to do with the show’s increasingly successful forays into movies. Wayne’s World, based on an SNL sketch, became a fantastically profitable film (produced by Lorne Michaels) in 1992. The idea that characters might be able to helm their own movie franchises took hold, and, as Miller and Shales tell it, eventually considerations of long-term bankability trumped brilliant writerly conceits. The year after Wayne’s World was the moment when income inequality and SNL ratings went from being collinear for about five years to starkly divergent. This was, after all, the era when Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Farley, and David Spade (and, to a lesser extent, Chris Rock) flourished. But these men excelled in apolitical character-based sketches, exactly the sort of actors one could build multimillion-dollar film franchises around.

Just at the moment Saturday Night Live could have become more relevant as a gleeful subversive voice of the dispossessed, it retreated further away from the incisive political satire. Of course, the cast trots out a presidential imitator every election cycle, and some of them have been brilliant. Dana Carvey killed it as both Ross Perot and George H.W. Bush; Darrell Hammond made a stellar Bill Clinton; and Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin became a national talking point. But political-minded viewers no longer had to wait until Saturday night, and they probably shouldn’t ever have had to. As shows like The Daily Show took the lead in skewering politics and political analysis, SNL turned more to caricature, not criticism, and was eventually co-opted by the very targets of its satire. It became standard for pols to come on the show and exhibit their in-on-the-jokeness. Bring on the Mason jars, clad your kids in corduroy, name them Mason — SNL was becoming an ouroboros of gentle irony. It was becoming television’s version of Fort Greene.

Theory III: SNL Ratings vs. Sex Throughout Marriage

Anyone who has been in a marriage for 40 years — or for five years, or three, or ever, or, for that matter, anyone who has ever been in a long-term relationship (successful or not) — knows that sustaining that initial incandescence is a fool’s errand. What are our lives but a managed retreat from those early magic moments and a futile attempt to hold on to them?

And so it is with television. The chaotic devil-may-care camaraderie of the early years was the engine for the monstrous show’s popularity. There were no rules, no inhibitions. It was like the early days of MMA, or a honeymoon.

When the show began, SNL didn’t have SNL to imitate, or its own myth hanging over it, creepily and darkly. More importantly, just being on the show was the goal itself. That was the whole game — those moments of living, breathing, writing Saturday Night Live. The 1 a.m. high, the all-night parties at the Blues Bar.

But just as in a marriage, the demands and lures of the outside world intercede. So it was with Saturday Night Live, which became a breeding ground for spinoffs and bankable stars. The show has nearly fully transformed from a vibrant community to a rutting ground for Michaels’s vast dynasty.

It makes one yearn for those incandescent moments no one ever saw. Like that time after the first season, in early July, when Michaels invited Dan Aykroyd and Belushi out to Joshua Tree, and Chevy Chase cooked, and everyone got wasted and everything seemed so perfect, precisely because it could never be repeated. As Michaels relates in Live From New York:

At about five o’clock in the morning, the sun was way too bright and woke us up. There was some sort of noise outside, so I staggered to the door. When I opened it, I saw Danny standing in the archway just a few feet away … we look out and there’s John, on the diving board, doing these cannonballs. He goes straight up, hits the board, comes down and then flips over into the pool. This was just for our benefit, Danny’s and mine, because there was nobody else awake or watching it.

Back then it was just SNL versus the world.

Joshua David Stein (@fakejoshstein) is a writer in New York. He once wrote an album about women he dated and Lewis Lapham.

Forty years ago, in the beginning, the first two words in Saturday Night Live mattered far more than the third. In 1975, only certain types of people watched television late on a Saturday night: loners and stoners, outcasts, shut-ins, the very young, and the very, very bored. Naming the show after its suspect time slot was a dog whistle to those likely either to see themselves as a member of the cast of misfits or to see the future of TV. It was an invitation to escape. Sure, the destination was a graveyard — but look at everybody dancing!

In fact, for the first year and a half of the show, the title had only two words. Though it never broadcast from tape, NBC’s Saturday Night didn’t become Saturday Night Live until March of 1977. (An ill-advised ABC variety show starring Howard Cosell had been using the name.) It’s not that the “live” part of the show was an afterthought, exactly. According to Tom Shales and Jim Miller’s indispensable Live From New York, Lorne Michaels, when he wasn’t palling around with Paul Simon or gobbling ’shrooms in the desert, insisted on it. Live TV was both an homage to and an echo of the earliest days of the business, when outsize talents like Milton Berle and Sid Caesar were making up the rules as they went along. Michaels knew his target audience was too young to connect to that history, but he hoped the same spirit of invention might somehow translate and give him the spiritual space to start something fresh, as if rebooting the entire medium were the only way to save it.

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Still, it wasn’t an easy sell. To those on the outside, it was an oddity, a throwback affectation. NBC hadn’t broadcast an original series live since Howdy Doody went off the air in 1960, and the lack of safety net made for some rough landings. On one early occasion, viewers tuning in to see wacky samurai were instead greeted by a blank, gray screen. To those on the inside, the format was an ever-present, ever-tightening noose. “Everyone was quite terrified about the live aspect of the show,” comedian and frequent guest Robert Klein told Shales and Miller. When asked what she remembered about her early hosting turns, Candice Bergen told them simply, “I remember the terror.”

Fear, of course, can be fuel. And in retrospect, it’s easy to see how the impossible demands of the live schedule came to define SNL, both comedically and culturally. (As Albert Brooks put it, “What happens when you stay up until eleven-thirty? Guys like Belushi do nine gallons of coke to make it up that late.”)¹ Even when the ferocious coke snowstorms of the ’70s and ’80s thawed into an ocean of the diet, liquid, and legal variety in the ’00s, all the heavy lifting still occurred in the wee small hours of Tuesday’s infamous all-night writing session. The show’s manic energy still built and bubbled like a pressure cooker throughout the week, requiring an insane level of calibration to correctly time the eventual explosion. (In a February interview, Lorne Michaels said that current star Kate McKinnon had to learn not to “peak too soon” at dress rehearsal.) It’s a zero-to-100 — and then back to zero — lifestyle that can lead to brilliant inspiration and dangerous cases of whiplash. Lorne’s stubborn insistence on doing it live has shortened careers, wrecked marriages, and driven highly paid executives batty. And yet, here’s the funny thing — funnier, even, than Albert Brooks measuring out drugs by the gallon: As SNL rounds the corner into its fifth decade, doing it live is the very thing that has guaranteed the show immortality.

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There was a time, not too long ago, when none of this seemed likely. As SNL celebrated its 30th anniversary, the live broadcast remained existential but also provided plenty of angst. On Comedy Central, programs like The Daily Show reminded people of the nimbleness and value of editing. On Fox, MADtv reminded networks of the economy and control of tape. And with SNL running like a machine — a patented 30 Rock–style fart machine on occasion, but still — the lack of delay led mostly to aggravation. Think of Ashlee Simpson’s infamous jig or nearly anything featuring Jimmy Fallon during his six-year tenure. A fan first and a performer second, Fallon broke so many times, the studio had to be swept clean after every sketch. To watch episodes from this era now is to wish for less cowbell. It’s borderline criminal that Will Ferrell’s permanent record is marred by Fallon’s inability to hold it together. Check out the immortal “Behind the Music” sketch and see what stands out: Other than Ferrell’s bulging midsection, it’s Fallon’s off-book giggle. (He had one job!) Ferrell was painting masterpieces, but, thanks to the single-take nature of SNL, what we’re left with is a handful of Polaroids.

In fact, what finally pushed SNL, kicking and screaming, into the Internet era was a fateful move away from immediacy. When “Lazy Sunday” exploded onto a nascent YouTube in late 2005, it blew the doors off the show, transforming it from clubhouse to open bar. Even the name seemed prescient: Saturday nights could now be experienced anytime, anywhere — even in line for a cupcake shop or while buying tickets for a “dreamworld of magic.” Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island crew triple-handledly rescued Saturday Night Live — not from irrelevance, maybe, but from a long, slow fade on the cultural fringe. That’s precisely where Lorne had intentionally set up shop in the ’70s, of course, but the mainstream had changed plenty since then, as had the definition of cool. Now, inclusivity was in. Access was to be expected, not earned. By freeing Saturday Night Live from both the limits of Saturday nights and the pressures of being live, the Digital Shorts helped establish the show as a truly 21st-century brand: a highly specific type of gentle irreverence available at any hour to be consumed and shared at will. In past decades, SNL attempted to climb upward, into movies. Now it spread sideways, onto Hulu and DVRs. It gobbled up real estate in prime time, it devoured late-night talk shows. The rigors of SNL once chased stars away. Now, as former writer John Mulaney told me recently, everybody comes back.

So why, then, does the live show persist? The answer has more to do with the ways television has changed than how SNL has. In 2014, none of TV’s old rules seem to apply. Hit shows leak viewers like colanders, established stars and brands earn recognition but no ratings, and even towering juggernauts like American Idol have been brought perilously low. With broadcast options expanding and network margins shrinking, the definition of success continues to be defined downward. Only one thing appears immune to the ravages of this new diminished reality: the live broadcast. Sports, awards shows, and ginned-up, back-to-the-future events like musicals have all seen their viewership soar of late. (This week’s Emmy Awards were no exception — with 15.6 million viewers, Monday was the most-watched night on any network since the Oscars on March 2.) All sorts of industry buzzwords and acronyms can be used to explain this, but the only one that really matters is FOMO: fear of missing out. A culture of instant reaction needs something unexpected to react to. Dramas can be saved and savored, reality shows can be binged, but live broadcasts have become essential, immediate viewing.²

For this reason alone, Saturday Night Live will never die. While its quality still varies, the ratings now rarely do. (In fact, during NBC’s recent disaster swoon, SNL was one of the few points of light. In the 2012-13 season, the 38-year-old show provided the network with its highest rating in the coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic.) And the show’s value goes far beyond traditional metrics. While other networks appear corporate and remote, Studio 8H provides NBC with a very public greenroom, a place where talent gathers and — this is key — actually has fun. Never exactly cutthroat (in front of the cameras, anyway), SNL has become even warmer and cuddlier in recent years, positioning itself as a safe landing spot for all manner of troubled celebrities and politicians. Lindsay Lohan and Sarah Palin may be targets, but they and their handlers know SNL will always provide them with the chance to be in on the joke. Increasingly, that’s something the audience wants as well. Even those of us who rolled our eyes at Jimmy Fallon breaking cheered when Bill Hader would regularly shatter as Stefon. The fragility of the gag is now baked-in. Yesterday’s cheap Polaroids become today’s coveted Snapchats. The moment is more valuable than the memory.

There’s no question this past season was the weakest in at least a decade. Saturday Night Live has endured the loss of major stars many times over, but it’s rarely had to replace so much vital glue: If Kristen Wiig was a supernova, Bill Hader and Fred Armisen kept the lights on. Still, I’ll keep watching — not in the hope that something will go wrong, but with faith that things will eventually go right. (That 2015 is a major anniversary and 2016 is a presidential election help considerably on that score.) Down years happen to SNL, but they’re no longer potentially fatal. In fact, they barely matter at all. The franchise matters more than the players;³ the potential matters more than the reality. SNL is never truly sunk, because it never stops splashing. Great things don’t always happen. But we tune in because, in a manner unlike any other series on television, there’s always the delicious possibility that they will.

Illustration by Linsey Fields

The battlefield smolders under a blood-red sky choked with dust. From the grim tableau of broken samurai swords, dead horses, shocking upsets, mummified driving cats, the torn bodies of notable and forgettable repeating characters alike, and tiny scattered specks of blackened bone that I think used to be Chris Kattan, emerge our finalists.

1. Will Ferrell (22,337 votes)
4. Bill Hader (3,762 votes)

First, Will Ferrell’s leisurely Sunday-stroll decapitation of Bill Hader. I have an eternal love for Hader, and it should be noted that no cast member has ever managed the trick of making breaking up during a bit an indispensable part of the sketch’s joke DNA like Hader (with writer John Mulaney) did with Stefon. That’s not to say Jimmy Fallon never tried. That said, Hader was always punching above his weight here. Ferrell is simply a Bill Brasky–esque giant.

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Of my 10 favorite SNL sketches of all time, Ferrell (often with writer Adam McKay) is probably involved in eight. In his best SNL bits, Ferrell managed to use his white-guy everydudeness in a wonderfully self-aware way, dropping the mask, inch by inch, to reveal streaks of anarchic malevolence that turned over-the-top violence and sociopathology into sly jabs at his own privilege.

There’s the morning show that turns dystopian when the teleprompter goes down in “Wake Up and Smile.” There’s psychopathic middle manager Mr. Tarkanian, of “Evil Boss,” who abuses everyone around him without fear of ever being held accountable. There’s “Crazy Doctor’s Office” the single-most demented skit of the last 15 years that is actually funny. It seems amazing now that Ferrell actually dropped un-bleeped N-bombs during his “Coconut Bangers’ Ball” sketch as out-of-touch crooner Robert Goulet. Perhaps more amazing is that SNL let him do the character several more times, including in a sketch in which Jay Z and Beanie Sigel smoke blunts on air. Ferrell’s genius was his ability to make himself the butt of the joke, to make the offensive things he did during a sketch a commentary on the character he was playing — not just shock-value bullshit. That’s why it works when Ferrell mumbles, “We should get some men with guns and sweep out those ghettos,” during “Wake Up and Smile,” and that is a nearly impossible balance to strike. Get it wrong, and your career is over or you become Gavin McInnes.

And, of course, there’s Ferrell’s Greatest Hits reel, a trove of quotable sketches as unforgettable as anything anyone on SNL has ever produced. Ferrell mining existential suburban unhappiness in “Family Dinner Argument.” Ferrell skewering classic-rock myth-building with “More Cowbell,” a sketch that Fallon, as he was wont to do, subconsciously (?) tries his best to ruin. (Think that’s too strong? Perhaps. But notice: Fallon never once cracked up during a sketch he starred in.) On and on. Alex Trebek. The Devil and Garth Brooks. The pure belly-laugh pop sugar of the Spartan cheerleaders. James Lipton. Harry Caray. Marty and Bobbi Culp. Ferrell made it look so easy that — even with accolades and the movie stardom and the multi-DVD Best of Will Ferrell collections — I actually think he’s underrated. No cast member has ever come up bigger in a more fraught spot than Ferrell did when he donned an American flag speedo on SNL’s second show after 9/11, and that bit probably just barely makes most top 10 Will Ferrell lists, if it makes it at all.

1. Eddie Murphy (11,267 votes)
4. Phil Hartman (14,710 votes)

Phil Hartman over Eddie Murphy is an outcome I agree with, though not without reservations. SNL Eddie Murphy really belongs in its own category, after all; his entire career on the show is one outlier after another. How many 19-year-olds are funny enough to make SNL? Does Murphy even make SNL if not for the Doumanian-Ebersol interregnum? How many 20-year-olds are talented enough to keep an entire late-night sketch comedy show from being canceled? Eddie Murphy defined his era. So, it makes sense that not all of Murphy’s work from that time has held up as Saturday Night Live and the rest of the world transitioned away from that era. What does hold up, across the board, is Murphy’s still startling confidence, his swaggering through a scene as if he couldn’t even conceive of a dimension in which he was not hilarious. Murphy was compared to Richard Pryor often because — spoiler — they’re both black. But really they could not be more different. Pryor was vulnerable; his act was basically one uproarious and heartbreaking story after another about what a mess his life was. That was not Murphy. SNL Eddie Murphy had power brokers like Jeff Katzenberg waiting around in the writers’ room just to give him million-dollar checks. If there’s one SNL moment that sums up Murphy, it’s from the December 1984 episode he hosted at 23. During a sketch titled “Black History Minute,” Murphy, affecting a Huey P. Newton militancy, stumbles over a line, and instead of just carrying on, shouts, “So I messed up, shut up!” Of course, that got a laugh, because from 1981 to 1984, it was basically illegal to not laugh at Murphy.

Famously, Murphy hasn’t associated himself with SNL since David Spade made a joke at his expense in the early ’90s for his “Hollywood Minute” on “Weekend Update.”

Phil Hartman is, for my money, the greatest SNL cast member ever. He was a do-everything chameleon who could carry a sketch front-and-center or hold it together just by his very presence. The best way to put it, I guess, would be to say that, as a comedic performer, he had taste.

His audition is amazing, all the tools there on display. He starts with the Dashiell Hammett–esque private investigator Chick Hazard (“I was a sucker for long legs. I wanted to shinny up one of hers like a native boy looking for coconuts”), then transitions to a slick, fast-patter infomercial pitchman hocking a stun gun, presaging his work on The Simpsons. Next up: Gunther Johann, a German comedian specializing in impressions of actors from Hollywood’s golden age. Then a vanilla news anchorman spouting non sequiturs (“Marijuana abuse among the elderly is rising drastically”); Jack Nicholson doing Hamlet; a shot at the late Charles Rocket, who was fired for infamously saying “fuck” on the air; and some closing bits he’d like to bring to the show, including “Playhouse 90″ (“90-second dramas that are very intense”), a riff on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and two quick impressions of William Shatner and Charlton Heston.

“Sexual Tension Diner” from the 1989-90 season is the kind of one-off character-driven sketch that would be hard-pressed to make air on today’s SNL, which is typically overly reliant on cameos. Hartman isn’t the star of that skit, but what he does is sublime; you know within a few seconds that his Earl is puppy-dog friend-zone in love with Jan Hooks’s Brenda the waitress. His acting coach creation Bobby Coldsman (“This is something. This is nothing.”) hits the bull’s-eye for anyone who has ever experienced the existential thirst and sublimated dread of an actual acting class.

He was the best kind of impressionist in that he didn’t go for slavish accuracy. Instead, much like Dana Carvey, he’d create these alternate-reality versions of the people he was imitating, conjured out of vocal hooks and behavioral tics. Did Ed McMahon ever say “You are correct, Sir”? I don’t think it matters. (It’s even funnier when you consider that Johnny Carson hated SNL.) Hartman’s lion in winter Frank Sinatra (“Sign-AID O’Connor!”) was so funny that the Sinatra family took issue with it, which should be the standard by which all Sinatra impressions should be judged. Hartman’s Bill Clinton at McDonald’s is the definitive SNL Clinton, and the way he delivers the line “Jim, lemme tell you something — there’s gonna be a whole bunch of things we don’t tell Mrs. Clinton” only gets better when you realize the skit aired six years before the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

So, here we go. Hartman vs. Ferrell. A fitting final for the two best to ever do it.

Illustration by Linsey Fields.

After five years as a cast member, Nasim Pedrad left Saturday Night Live this spring with as little fanfare or melodrama as possible. During her final week on the show, she went about her business as usual — nobody, Pedrad included, knew exactly when she’d be moving on. But she’d had ample time to prepare for her departure: For two years, she’d been in talks to join Mulaney, a new Fox sitcom helmed by ex-SNL writer John Mulaney that premieres in October. She’s graduated from SNL, where she was best known for her impressions of wide-ranging cultural icons (from Arianna Huffington to M.I.A. and Kim Kardashian), to play Mulaney’s mouthy roommate. It’s a change of pace, but there won’t be too much culture shock for Pedrad — Mulaney’s executive producer is none other than Lorne Michaels. We spoke about her early days on the show, the Kardashians, and her decision to leave.

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You’re going directly from SNL to John Mulaney’s new show. Can you talk a little bit about the project?

Mulaney plays a stand-up comic who is living with two friends, Seymour and Jane. I play Jane. He’s sort of figuring his way up through the entertainment industry. Jane has absolutely zero interest in comedy, and completely can’t wrap her head around why anyone would ever be a comedy groupie. She’s definitely the alpha of the apartment, and has no problem speaking her mind.

John told me he had written Jane with me in mind. From the moment I read it, I knew I wanted to be a part of the project. We’ve been through quite a few iterations, because the show first started out at NBC, and then it moved to Fox. It started a couple years ago.

So you’ve known you were going to be leaving for a long time.

When I first signed on to Mulaney, all I knew was that we were going to shoot a pilot. I never want to get ahead of myself with opportunities because in this industry, things can change so quickly. And as quickly as something can come together, it can fall apart or not get picked up. But one day we found out that Fox had ordered 16 episodes of the show, and it became clear to me that it would be virtually impossible to be on two TV shows at the same time. It made sense to leave SNL now.

What was the decision-making process like for you?

I don’t think it’s ever easy to leave SNL, only because you know how special that place is. I certainly lucked out in that I had the opportunity to go and dive into a project also produced by Lorne Michaels. I certainly wouldn’t leave SNL for any project. But when Mulaney came to me with the show, I couldn’t pass it up. It kind of felt like a no-brainer.

Your relationship with SNL and Lorne must be pretty good, then.

Yeah … I mean, I owe everything to him. The fact that he continues, still, to help me pull off paying my rent every month is something I’m very grateful for.

Do you remember what the casting process was like for you five years ago?

At the time, I was in L.A., just auditioning and hoping to land a part, dramatic or comedic. I started to feel really stagnant, waiting for a part. I was also taking classes at UCB and Groundlings, and at the higher levels, they focus on writing. It was such a relief to be able to write. During those programs, I wrote a one-woman show called Me, Myself, and Iran, and it ended up getting to Tina Fey. She recommended me to audition for SNL, so I got my first of two auditions through her.

All they tell you when you find out you got the audition is, “You have five minutes.” It doesn’t get more detailed than that. You could do stand-up, you could do characters, you could do 20 impressions. There are no rules. I did about six different characters, including Kim Kardashian. It was 2009, and she just so happened to have become other-level famous that year, so it made sense to do her. I also did Charlyne Yi – my goal was to try to show some range. And then I got a second audition and a meeting one-on-one with Lorne Michaels in his office, which is, I think, so he can make sure you’re not crazy.

As an Iranian American, how did SNL factor into your upbringing?

I was born in Iran, and my parents did their best to speak to us in Farsi as often as they could when we were at home so we could grow up to be bilingual. I remember watching I Love Lucy and SNL, and leaning toward comedy as a kid. But I would watch those shows in an effort to understand American culture and assimilate, because I wasn’t necessarily getting as much of that from my parents as my American friends were. I have early memories of watching the show, and knowing that it was going to help me stay in the know, even in the years when I was too young to fully understand what the sketches were about.

You did so many pop-culture characters throughout your time on the show. Did you feel like your airtime was especially dependent on those people being newsworthy?

We all hope that we have opportunities to play people the public is talking about. And we’re learning about those opportunities as the audience is. There are times when a story will break on a Thursday, and the writers will scramble to write a cold open to address it. And sometimes it just comes down to, “OK, who would make the most sense to play this person?” We’re all keeping up with the news and looking for people to play.

Generally, getting an original character on is a little bit of a harder sell. There’s not a ton of real estate on the show to give every cast member a chance to do their own thing every episode.

Does that battle for real estate create tension in the cast?

Because of the pressure cooker of what it is, we all feel like we’re in the trenches together. And we have everything to gain by being supportive of each other. Taran Killam says that being on that show is like Survivor, and that’s really true in a lot of ways. [But] I don’t think there’s anything to gain from being anything but loving and supportive of your fellow cast members. You’re going through a really unique experience, and it’s a roller coaster — you could be in a bunch of sketches during dress rehearsal, and all of those sketches can be cut before air. It makes you very strong. You sort of feel like, If I can do this … and there are few jobs that are even that physically demanding.

It certainly does get easier the longer you’re there, and the more you get accustomed to the process. But I think, like a lot of people who’ve been on that show have said, you always feel like a guest there. That’s also what’s exciting — it forces you to not get lazy, and to be evolving and developing your voice, and finding ways to get your laughs.

Do you know if Kim Kardashian has seen your impression of her?

I can’t say for sure. I did meet the Kardashians at an event for E! once, and I do remember Khloe asking us, “Do we really sound like that?” That’s the closest I came to gauging their awareness of what we were doing on the show. I think we sort of giggled. I smiled and kind of nodded and walked away, but later explained that it’s so clearly an exaggerated version that has turned into its own thing.

What sticks out as a highlight of your experience on the show?

Arianna Huffington was always really fun. And we knew she was kind of digging it, so we didn’t have to be scared of any backlash. I worked on those with John Mulaney — he wrote them. It was fun to cover the politics of that week through the eyes of a very articulate, bright, empowered woman.

There was definitely a funny moment I clocked during the Charlize Theron week. I played a character named Heshy, and the sketch really hinged on her and I simultaneously pulling off these dance moves to specific sound effects. She’s such a pro, and she really wanted to nail it down perfectly. So we would rehearse as much as we had time for. The moves were insane, and she was so committed to pulling them off. I was like, I can’t believe I have a job where I’m making Charlize Theron do this many pelvic thrusts to the sound of a cash register. Or walking down the hallway and seeing Lady Gaga sitting on the floor casually eating chicken nuggets.

I’ll never forget my very first show. I had a card in my changing room from Kristen Wiig. It just had a heart on the inside, and she’d written “Have fun.” That always stayed with me.

What was your last week on the show like?

I didn’t know at the time that it would be my last show, because we hadn’t gotten the schedule for Mulaney yet. In retrospect, I’m very grateful I didn’t know. There would have been a lot of lingering in doorways and giving wistful glances to coworkers when they were trying to focus on a sketch. So it’s definitely for the best. I can tend to be very nostalgic. I went into it like any season finale, and had a blast.

Carrie Battan (@cbattan) is a writer in New York.

Illustration by Linsey Fields

The very first episode of Saturday Night Live featured a short film called “The Impossible Truth.” It was a Ripley’s Believe It or Not!–style faux-newsreel, written and directed by Albert Brooks, depicting such wonders as New York City’s first totally blind cab driver and the state of Israel agreeing to trade places with the state of Georgia. Brooks — who’d turned down an offer from NBC to be the permanent host of a late-night show in what became the SNL time slot — ended up contributing six films to the show and then moved on to make his first feature, 1979’s Real Life. “The relationship was symbiotic while it lasted — it helped me, it helped them,” he told Bill Zehme years later. “I learned my craft and got out.” But from that point on, the short film was as much a part of the show’s DNA as the musical guest segment or “Weekend Update.”

This was partly a practical consideration. A brief filmed segment could be slipped into the lineup if a show was running a few minutes under; it could also be bumped to the following week if necessary. They gave the show — and the cast — a chance to catch its breath. But over the years, the shorts have also served an important aesthetic purpose. They’re expressions of the SNL sensibility that aren’t bound by the formal constraints of live TV or sketch comedy. In a sense, the short-film space is the one recurring segment where the rules are still up for grabs, and over the years, it’s produced some of the most memorable bits in SNL history, from the endless agonies of Mr. Bill to the Lonely Island’s blinged-out sea cruise, “I’m on a Boat.” Sometimes they’re the funniest thing on the show; there have been periods when they’re the only funny thing on the show. And sometimes they’re memorable because they’re not really funny at all.

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In the film “Love Is a Dream,” from December 1988, an old woman (played by Jan Hooks) visits a bank on a snowy day and takes a diamond tiara out of a safe-deposit box. She places it on her head, and black-and-white gives way to color as Hooks dreams she’s young and beautiful, waltzing with a handsome prince played by Phil Hartman. They sing the Bing Crosby song with which the film shares its title; then they part, and Hooks finds herself alone in the bank once again. As she shuffles out of the vault, the guard tips his hat. It’s Hartman, also in old-age makeup. She blows him a kiss. In 1988, the joke, to the extent that there was one, was that there was no joke; it was a romantic fantasy that happened to star two funny people. Hartman died 10 years later; “Love Is a Dream,” rendered retroactively poignant, was the last segment aired on SNL’s 1998 memorial tribute special.

The director of “Love Is a Dream” was Tom Schiller, who made a series of short films for the show between 1977 and 1981, then returned as SNL’s in-house filmmaker during the second Lorne Michaels administration. Schiller’s father was a writer for I Love Lucy; Schiller grew up in Los Angeles, aspiring — in his words — to make “foreign films.” He had a snob’s distrust of television and took a job on SNL against the advice of his friend and mentor Henry Miller. Schiller was a writer during the show’s first two seasons — he wrote “Samurai Hotel,” which introduced the world to one of John Belushi’s most enduring characters — before inheriting the job of in-house filmmaker from Brooks’s successor, Gary Weis. The “Schiller’s Reel” segments — collected only once, on a now out-of-print VHS, although still available on the Saturday Night Live DVDs — ranged from faux-documentaries about human cloning and Picasso’s (fictional) stint as a New York City resident to a film-noir parody about caffeine addiction.

As a founding SNL writer, Schiller was close with the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and that intimacy bled into the films, many of which now double as prophetic or bittersweet portraits of the cast members involved. In “Perchance to Dream,” from 1979, a bum finds a bottle on the sidewalk, drinks the contents, and imagines he’s onstage reciting Shakespeare; then he’s rudely awakened by a cop with a nightstick, ordering him to move along. The bum is played by Bill Murray, whose emergence as a dramatic actor was still decades away. The Federico Fellini homage “La Dolce Gilda,” shot in and around an SNL after-party, stars Gilda Radner, lonely despite the presence of a swinging jet-set crowd (including Dan Aykroyd in the Mastroianni role, going full swag in a white suit). And in what may be Schiller’s most famous short, the eerily prophetic “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” an aged John Belushi visits the Not Ready for Prime Time Cemetery and recounts for the camera the circumstances of each cast member’s untimely death.

“Why me?” Belushi wonders. “Why did I live so long? They’re all dead.” He pauses. “I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a dancer!” And he’s off, frolicking among the graves.

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How did you first meet Lorne Michaels?

When I was about 17, I was already working for a documentary filmmaker in the Pacific Palisades and working on documentary films. I made my own film on Henry Miller. My father was a writer on I Love Lucy. I grew up on the set of I Love Lucy. I was actually there for the grape-stomping sequence when I was 6. And one day my father said, “You’ve got to meet this guy — he’s this Canadian writer, but he knows all the great restaurants in L.A.” I thought, I don’t really care about the great restaurants in L.A., but OK. So Lorne came over to the house, and he seemed like a nice enough guy. The surprising thing was, he lit a joint in my room, which I would never do in my father’s house. I thought, Hmm — interesting, and I started hanging out with him at the Chateau Marmont, which had a lot of colorful regulars, some of whom would become the nucleus of Saturday Night Live.

Lorne kept talking about this late-night show, this comedy show he wanted to do. Like 24/7 he would talk about it, to the point of boredom. He kept asking me if I’d like to come work on it, and I was conflicted, because my then-pal Henry Miller said, “Don’t go work on TV, it’ll kill your soul.” But Lorne kept painting this picture of New York, and being a writer, and working on a late-night show, and it sounded kind of interesting. Since I wanted to be a foreign-film director, L.A. didn’t seem like the place to be, and I finally succumbed and took his invitation. In the summer of 1975, I was in a little office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza with Lorne. I was sitting there with him as he started hiring all the writers and cast.

You were there for the big bang!

Yeah. We used to go to Catch a Rising Star and the Improv to watch performers. I remember seeing Chevy Chase and Richard Belzer. There were auditions, and John Belushi came and auditioned as the Samurai, which led me later to write “Samurai Hotel” for him. Lorne was going around and meeting people. I remember we went to Bernie Brillstein’s office, who was Lorne’s agent at that time. Having grown up in the business, I had a suspicion of agents. We met Dick Ebersol. And we went to NBC in Burbank, where Lorne screened the Monty Python show for this executive there. We sat in the back of the theater for an hour and the executive was on the phone the entire time, which was funny to me. I was like a fly on the wall, watching all this stuff happen.

I imagine, since you’d sort of grown up in that milieu, that you were more at home in that world than Lorne, in some ways.

I was more at home, and not as impressed.

You didn’t start making films for SNL right away. What was your official job title when you first got hired?

Well, at first, I was just sort of Lorne’s assistant. But since he had talked me into being a writer, I was quickly made one of the first writers, along with people like Michael O’Donoghue, Anne Beatts. I hired [Al] Franken and [Tom] Davis from a whole bunch of scripts, and they came out, too. Chevy Chase was a writer, too. People like that.

Had you ever written sketch comedy before?

Never in my entire life span. I didn’t even know how. I don’t think I got anything on the air in the first 10 shows, except one parody commercial for “Triopenin,” which was an arthritis medicine that you couldn’t open, because it had the safety cap.

I remember that one. The guy is struggling with the cap the whole time, and then at the end the bottle is busted open.

And it was for poor, arthritic people who couldn’t work their fingers. I was so excited when that thing finally aired — it was my big triumph. Those were Chevy’s fingers, because he was very good at finger work. He did a hand-puppet thing in The Groove Tube, by Ken Shapiro, if you remember that film. It’s sort of like [John Landis’s] Kentucky Fried Movie. Those were both precursors of Saturday Night Live.

You were the third person to make films for the show.

Albert Brooks did some terrific films, but they were so long. They were like five minutes, seven, and they became longer and longer. The ideal length for a film on that show, I discovered, was two and a half minutes. That’s as long as you could sustain someone’s interest without imposing on the show. Also, it’s a challenge to do a beginning, middle, and end in two and a half minutes. Anyway, some of it got so long that they stopped using Albert Brooks. Then they used a guy named Gary Weis, who I knew from growing up in L.A. at Topanga Beach. He was a surfer, but he used to make films and show them to the surfers. One of them was an airplane flying overhead, and then he superimposed a seagull flying at the same time, a double image, and he showed this to the surfers, and they were like, “Oh, wow, man, that’s good.” Not to knock him — he did do some really sweet films for that show. And then I don’t know what happened. I guess he moved on, and it was my turn. My first one was called “The Acid Generation: Where Are They Now?” It was all these old people remembering Jimi Hendrix as if it was yesterday. So that was the joke. I shot it in Venice [California] in an old people’s home.

Had the show become a cultural phenomenon yet? At what point was it clear to you that you were part of something huge?

I’d say within the first two years it started to catch on. If you were out, and said, “I’m a writer on Saturday Night Live,” suddenly everyone would take interest in you.

What was the process like? Was it hard to get them to sign off on something you wanted to shoot?

At the beginning, I had a lot of freedom. At the writers’ meeting, I would say, “I’d like to do a film on John Belushi, where everyone else is dead in the graveyard and he’s the oldest surviving cast member.” Everyone would just say, “OK, yeah, go ahead and do it.”

Wow. So you had a budget, and this great cast, and the resources of Saturday Night Live behind you, without a lot of oversight.

Yes. It was like having a miniature studio behind you — as long as I kept it not too horribly expensive, it was taken care of.

That’s amazing. How old were you at this point?

I was about 25, 24. I think I was the only short-film maker ever to make money at it. I don’t envy those poor people who have to enter those festivals all the time.

And on SNL, the films didn’t have to run the same gantlet that a sketch did?

Yeah. When I wrote sketches, you would go in and out of Lorne’s office and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. It was almost excruciating sometimes, what you had to do. Even down to airtime and dress rehearsal, you have to change it. It was very horrible. But if it went on the air and it worked, then you were happy.

With a film, I think I’d have to show it to Lorne or some head writers, and they’d have to say “OK.” But usually in the beginning, they just accepted them right away. It was only later, after the five-year lapse, when Lorne went away and then we all went back again, that they became more scrutinized, and it was more painful, and it didn’t flow as easily.

Things were more policed in general?

Exactly. There were more people with clipboards walking around. [The show] was established and it had a formula.

You had a number of famous people in “Sushi by the Pool.” I assume you knew Desi Arnaz Jr. through your father, but how did you manage to get Carrie Fisher and everyone else to be in it?

I can’t remember. I met a lot of people and actors through Saturday Night Live. I was good friends with Chevy, and he knew those people. Steven Keats was an actor. The guy whose pool I used was an agent who I was friends with. He was also friends with Hal Holbrook — that was him running down the hill shouting, “Earthquake!” I thought that was quite a coup. He did it twice. I said “Could you do it for a close-up?” Which was really funny. Carrie Fisher I had met through Saturday Night Live.

Of that original group, who were you tightest with?

I was pals with Lorne for a long time. I was great friends with Chevy for a long time, and he was my introduction to New York. Then, strangely enough, I was friends with Bill Murray when he came in for a while. They sort of have half-lives, these friendships, because the people become so famous that they’re inaccessible after a while. But those were the people I was really friends with.

That intimacy comes through in the films, in which a lot of the cast members play themselves, or versions of themselves.

I knew I could do a really good one on Belushi, because to me — to everybody — he was the face of Saturday Night Live. He was like the mascot. Gilda [Radner] was like the heart of Saturday Night. Billy [Murray] was good, too. He already had that character, the Honker, so I had him do that, in the one about him being a bum who could recite Shakespeare suddenly. Many of the cast had already-established characters when they came to the show, so those were ready-made.

The Samurai was one of those, too, right?

Belushi had that, but no one knew how to use it, so I thought of “Samurai Hotelier,” and they changed it to “Samurai Hotel,” because they didn’t think the audience would understand what “hotelier” meant. It was the first time that I came up against people saying, “Well, a television audience wouldn’t know what that word meant.”

Those three films — the one with Belushi, “La Dolce Gilda,” and Bill Murray — all have a strange resonance to them, given the trajectory of these people’s lives in the years that followed. Even the Murray one is really affecting, because it seems to capture some frustrated desire in him to be something more than a goofy comic actor. Did you have any sense that you were tapping into something as you were making the films?

“Don’t let me film you or you’ll die.” I had no idea [Belushi] was going to die. It was a tragic way for a film to become famous and prophetic and sad. But he did have a “live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse” attitude — or in his case, a corpulent corpse. I don’t know. But thank you. I think when you hang out so tightly with all these people, you begin to see what their essence is, and what the best thing is that they can do, and that led to me making those films. Later, when I came back to the new show, I wasn’t able to hang out with as many people like that. I didn’t exactly know what the essence of Adam Sandler was! So I wasn’t able to make films as deep and meaningful as the earlier ones.

But I’ll tell you about “La Dolce Gilda” — I went to Italy, and I went to Fellini and I said, “I made a film — an homage to you.” He said, “We must arrange a screening.” And so I showed “La Dolce Gilda” to Fellini, and he said, “It’s sweet — it has the atmosphere of some of my films.” He was my great idol, so I was in heaven. I was floating on air.

Like a lot of people from the class of ’75, you left the show around the time Lorne Michaels did, in 1980. Was that about solidarity with Lorne?

Something like that. We were all kind of burned-out anyway. It’s amazingly stressful to write that way. People think it’s so easy to write comedy, but even my father will tell you — it burns you out. At that point, I was chosen to make a feature film, which I did for the next year. And then we all left, until Lorne came back about six years later, and asked me to join him again, and I stayed another six years.

You reenlisted for another tour.

Yeah, probably another five years longer than I should’ve.

You did some really good stuff in that later period!

Maybe.

The feature was Nothing Lasts Forever. That was the first Saturday Night Live movie, in a way.

There had been one before by Gary Weis, called The Rutles — he did that with Eric Idle. But I think it was a TV movie, not a full-fledged movie. So maybe you’re right, that my film was Lorne’s first foray into feature films.

But this was after Animal House and Caddyshack and Chevy’s Foul Play, so there must have been a sense that the SNL guys could open a movie. Were people just coming to Lorne with bags of money, asking him to make them some kind of Saturday Night Live movie?

Yeah, I think so. I think he had a deal with MGM, and he had five of us write films. One was by Guido Sarducci — Don Novello — who I think wrote one about himself. Franken and Davis wrote one called 1985, set in the future, but it had millions of AMC Pacer cars in the opening, which would be too expensive. And Lorne was writing one with his friend John Head, based on an old novel — not Wuthering Heights, but something like that.¹ And then he told me to just write a Tom Schiller movie. I had no idea how to write one, but I thought, Oh, boy, here’s my chance, and I started writing.

But you never felt, as you were writing, that you were writing Saturday Night Live: The Movie.

No. I thought, I’m going to write a great feature film that will propel me into the stellar group of great filmmakers of America.

Was MGM expecting something more like the show?

Yeah, I think so, and I think that’s one of the reasons it wasn’t distributed. I think they thought they were going to get something like Airplane! When they chose to make it, and I was astonished that they chose my film to go, not one of the other ones. I think they thought it was the cheapest way to get out of the contract. Don’t forget, at the time, MGM was wobbling. They were in really bad shape. Different presidents coming in and out. They were being bought by Gulf and Western. So I don’t know what happened, but it may have been a financial thing.

“We can get an SNL film on the cheap …”

Right. “And it’ll have Bill Murray in it and stuff.” But he was only in maybe 15 percent of the movie!

So you still don’t really know why it didn’t get distributed? I’ve read that there were some issues with your use of stock footage and clips from older films.

I think that’s what they say. There are some music cues, as well. I have no idea what the real reason is. I think it’s just not commercial, and it would cost too much to bring it out and advertise it and pay the actors and stuff. That’s my real feeling.

Surely at this point, there must be enough interest in it for somebody to put it out. It’s the lost Saturday Night Live movie!

It’s owned now by Warner Bros. They always threaten to release it, this guy at Warner Archives, which is where it is. But it never quite gets out. They still could, but — as saddening as it is that it didn’t get released — there’s something satisfying that it’s become an underground favorite, and that people discover it and get to see it for the first time. I’m going to a screening in Jacksonville, Florida, next month. It’s always fun to show it. It’s just great to have a small group of people that appreciate it.

As an American-born foreign filmmaker, I imagine there’s something appealing about that for you. You released a movie directly into myth.

It became what I always wanted it to be. It’s a succès d’estime, as they call it.

When you were making it, was that what you wanted?

No, I thought I was going to be the next Cecil B. DeMille.

Right, although as you alluded to, it’s not the most lucrative growth industry. I think there’s a number of things in that later SNL run, some of them are harder to see now, but I remember some of them being really great. It sounds like you don’t look back on that period with as much fondness.

No, I think the craft is still there. I think maybe the actors weren’t. “Love Is a Dream,” with Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks, I’m proud of that. I made one thing which you can see online called “Broadway Story,” based on the serials of the ’30s and ’40s. It’s a four-parter. It uses the whole cast at that time, but it never got the showing that I thought it would get.

It never ran?

They ran three and then they yanked it.

And you were also involved with “Sprockets” when you came back, right?

I did a few little insert things for the “Sprockets” show. Those were fun. [Mike] Myers was fun to work with.

You did the German-expressionist movies for the “Germany’s Most Disturbing Home Videos” segment, right? With Kyle MacLachlan as the German Bob Saget?

That’s right. Myers was good at that. He knew that stuff and was funny. I also did one with Chris Farley, where he’s in the restaurant and gets fake coffee and he goes berserk.

Farley died young, too. Does this ever freak you out?

It’s like I told you: Don’t let me film you.

You’re bad luck.

Good entertainment, and bad luck.

Have you paid much attention to SNL’s Digital Shorts, or the stuff on sites like Funny or Die?

Yes, I’ve seen them. I think they’re hilarious, but they’re so different. What I tried to do was imitate French films and stuff, and they’re doing some bizarre, wild, off-the-wall interesting video stuff. It’s not my thing, but I think it’s very funny.

You were usually trying to reproduce some aesthetic — that was always half the joke.

Also, my stuff is much more soppy and cloying compared to today. I’m trying to tug on your heartstrings a little bit, and I don’t think people doing videos of cats being zapped with electronic machines are trying to do that. 

Illustration by Linsey Fields

Because Lorne Michaels won’t know what a decent night’s sleep is until he’s made Saturday Night Live as unavoidable as Star Wars or the Marvelverse in pop culture’s cosmic debris field, he’s never given up on transferring the show’s buzziest sketch characters to the big screen. This has turned out to be a lonely passion at times. While deciding to Hollywoodize Wayne’s World back in 1992 was a no-brainer, it took real doggedness to imagine audiences were baying for MacGruber — one of 2010’s biggest box office flops and the most recent SNL-derived movie to date.

All the same, even the notorious It’s Pat, which Michaels had nothing to do with, has its WTF fascinations — not charms, I’m not crazy — in the big rearview mirror. That’s because totally concocted Cheez Whiz movies often make better time capsules than class acts do. Stephen Hawking could go nuts trying to figure out why these particular one-joke goofs struck America’s funny bone to the point that Michaels thought they’d kill at the multiplex.

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With one or two exceptions, the Saturday Night Live movies never really struck a nerve. New cast members caught on fast that patenting their own go-to dunce or kook was the surest guarantee of airtime and subsequent film appearances, which prioritized safe bets over interesting gambles. But since eliciting compassion for dunces and kooks wasn’t the point of the original sketches, the big-screen versions’ hallmark is how often they have to invert their parent skit’s snarky premise to make sense at feature length.

If you’re into watching memory lane turn into a bowling alley, you’ll also gaze in wonder at the clutch of formerly zeitgeist-yeasty performers who’ve long since faded from view. Maybe Mike Myers won’t need to depend on Wayne’s World to keep him feeling like a big cheese in the old folks’ home, but Dana Carvey hasn’t been as fortunate. And then there’s U.S. Senator Al Franken — the star of 1995’s Stuart Saves His Family — who apparently has his own idiosyncratic notion of how to recede into obscurity.

On top of that, because Michaels always did know talent, you’re getting early glimpses of people destined for bigger or more durable careers than the movies’ ostensible stars. Future queen of the indies Parker Posey and future Ellen DeGeneres Ellen DeGeneres both turn up in 1993’s Coneheads, for instance. So does a ferally callow Adam Sandler — and second-billed Jane Curtin and fourth-billed Laraine Newman must wonder sometimes about the fame train’s whimsies.

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The fun of playing pop culture spelunkhead is that it lets you ignore how few of these movies had any reason to exist besides the obvious parasitic one. Whether they’ve scraped by with audiences or even at the box office, all SNL movies share the same basic dilemma: Movies based on sketch characters are one step up — and sometimes not even that — from movies based on video games.

Adding to the strain on the screenwriters’ ingenuity, successive generations of series regulars kept going to the same well. Stupidity is an easy failing to spoof, especially when it’s made so garish that even the dimmest bulbs in the audience can feel superior. Morons with quirky voices and simpleton worldviews have been the show’s most reliable recurring laugh-getters, from the noogie-addicted Loopners, who never got a movie incarnation, to Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan’s Roxbury Guys, who did.

Among other things, this is a good reason to suspect that SNL’s role in propagandizing for the Great Liberal Conspiracy is overrated. However farcically presented, the message that life’s losers deserve only ridicule — how else can you know for sure you’re not one of them? — isn’t starkly at odds with the winner-take-all callousness Ronald Reagan did his best to make as American as Humvees. Yet the common thread of SNL-derived movies is how they take sketches whose default mode is cool-kid contempt for also-rans and turn them into acceptably heartwarming triumphs of the dumb-ass metalhead, dorky-clubland shlemiel, or hydrocephalic-space-alien spirit.

There’s no ideology at work here — just expediency. Different mediums have different needs. With the weird-and-what-else-is-new exception of The Blues Brothers’ Jake and Elwood Blues, none of these characters originated as human beings (or refugees from the planet Remulak) whose behavior and/or aspirations audiences were supposed to root for. But when we go to the movies, we’re partial to having our snark served with mush for dessert.

If the central challenge of the Cinema of Lorne is cooking up some sort of serviceably dopey plot to rationalize the spawning gag, the other is infusing sentimentality into the mix. Those chores aren’t unrelated. Keep this in mind as we wade into separating — if not precisely gold from dross — good-to-great Cheez Whiz from bad.

Most Charming: Wayne’s World

Not much of a contest here, considering that mush was the middle name Mike Myers dropped the day he left Canada and took back once he’d made the big time. Even though Austin Powers remains the ultimate proof that satire was Myers’s version of Walter Mitty–ism — a long-standing SNL tradition, keynoted by the singing career Eddie Murphy launched by burlesquing other singers — the Wayne’s World headbangers were probably his secret ideal of the simple life. If it turned out Wayne could also quote Kierkegaard in Chinese to woo Tia Carrere and learn American history from an erudite Alice Cooper, so much the better. With director Penelope Spheeris adding her own underdog sympathies to the concept’s reconfigured bias, WW upgraded the original skit’s suburban yokels to holy innocents by pitting them against ace smoothie Rob Lowe’s cynical TV entrepreneur, who wants to exploit and corrupt their amateur-hour appeal — and if Kevin Smith wasn’t paying close attention, Kierkegaard is the name of a deodorant. Starting with the guys’ “Bohemian Rhapsody” sing-along, infectious good nature trumps residual snark every time, the revealingly unintrusive meta jokes about product placement and formula clichés included.

Most Underrated: Stuart Saves His Family

A figure of fun in his TV incarnation, Al Franken’s hapless self-help addict, Stuart Smalley, got turned into an everyman in Harold Ramis’s movie. Just not an everyman anyone wanted to identify with, apparently, considering that it was the worst dud of Ramis’s usually commercially blessed career and the second-worst (after It’s Pat) money-loser of any SNL-based gizmo. A silly man who discovers his resilience is one thing, but one who does it without relinquishing his fatuousness is another, and that’s the difference between a movie that audiences might have embraced and a box office flop. Half Frank Capra for the age of psychobabble and half the trials of Job gone Bourgie Nights, this one’s an art flick despite itself. Which in this lineup is, yes, a compliment.

Rock Bottom: It’s Pat

Again, no contest. But since you’re most likely among the seven billion or so human beings of all sexes who’ve taken a pass on checking out this notorious piece of mange, you may be wondering just how bad it can be. Answer: so bad it’s amazing no semiotician has stepped forward to hail It’s Pat as a misunderstood masterpiece. It isn’t, though — just miscalculated in every way, starting with the grafted-on mania (now Pat the creepy androgyne is a fame whore, too) that makes the character more grotesque, not less. Putting us on Pat’s side by making Pat a sweetie-pie martyr to society’s prejudices shoulda been child’s play, but the loathing that was always implicit in Sweeney’s creation gets foregrounded instead. If you care, Dave Foley is awesomely wasted as Pat’s similarly gender-challenged one-and-only; his performance has the tenderness his costar’s lacks. Luckily, though, Foley has had other showcases for his talent — maybe not enough of them, but plenty.

The Definition of Middling: A Night at the Roxbury

Talk about a movie that has no justification for existing. Not only were acumen-challenged Steve and Doug Butabi a third-generation knockoff of Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin’s disco-era Wild and Crazy Guys, but Dumb and Dumber had also already done better by almost every joke on view. People who actually are stars making fun of the dimwits stuck on the wrong side of the velvet rope have never been my favorite cup of snideness, either. But Kattan and Ferrell go together like anchovy on a pizza, casting Dan Hedaya and Loni Anderson as their parents is a good enough joke that you can almost forgive the script’s failure to get much traction out of it, and the Richard Grieco cameo is a hoot. That said, fall asleep at almost any point — the bros’ dance routine once they finally get into the Roxbury is an exception — and you’ll wake up not having missed a thing.

Most Culturally Evocative: The Blues Brothers

Back in 1980, unwowed reviewers bemoaned its bloated budget, two-hour-plus running time, and notoriously overscaled demolition-derby climax. Meanwhile, music purists snorted at — OK, wanted to set fire to — the spectacle of a couple of self-indulgent white boys with money to burn travestying the blues, R&B, and soul music that Belushi and Aykroyd so awkwardly doted on. But what do you know, that last one is the story of rock and roll. Wittingly or not — and most often not — The Blues Brothers never stops shining a light on the contradictions and ironies involved in white people’s appropriation of African American culture, from both stars’ blatant equation of this music with a form of manliness that was otherwise beyond them to the shaggy-Chihuahua plot device of our heroes trying to raise money for the orphanage they were raised in. Heck, I’d like to read the PhD dissertation about minstrelsy that can touch it. Besides, if you think — not unreasonably — that Ray Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and the cast’s other ringers deserved a less undignified showcase for their genius, tell me which one so many moviegoers would ever have seen them in.

Most Unwittingly Ahead of Its Time: Coneheads

It’s not as if illegal aliens and other newbies to the American dream — those pesky gays, for instance — weren’t already hot topics in 1993; they were just somewhat less hyperbolized by panic. But Hollywood wasn’t making many comedies about them unless you count this one. Turning the Coneheads into the melting pot’s latest candidates for assimilation added fresh resonance to the skit version’s subliminal jokes — namely, that (1) every family is from outer space behind closed doors, and (2) teens and parents are always aliens to each other. As perfunctory as a lot of Coneheads is, which is putting it kindly — except for David Spade, who’s happy as a clam to deploy his purring-douche-bag shtick, everyone involved looks as if they’d rather be somewhere else — the movie gains something from 20-plus years of hindsight flavoring the popcorn.

The One That Never Got Made: Sprockets

The movie incarnation of “Dieter” — the disconcertingly post-everything German art fart who was Myers’s most flamboyant creation — might have been the rare SNL flick that did strike a nerve. But Myers ended up getting sued by Universal for bailing on the script — which is famous in comedy-head circles as a lost bit of genius. The big beneficiary? Sacha Baron Cohen, whose character Brüno owes Myers a sizable debt. Then again, Brüno didn’t do nearly as well as Cohen’s Borat, despite being (or because it was) the bolder and better movie of the two. So maybe Myers’s commercial instinct wasn’t wrong, much as I’d have loved to see him get there first.

The One You Wish They’d Made: Jane, You Ignorant Slut

Speaking of Aykroyd and Curtin, the duo’s 1970s spats on “Weekend Update” — her comeback was “Dan, you pompous ass” — parodied testily conservative James J. Kilpatrick and priggishly liberal Shana Alexander’s “Point/Counterpoint” segments on 60 Minutes, the long-forgotten and relatively decorous acorn from which our whole shouting-head TV culture grew. If anyone’s looking for prescience, here it is by the truckload, to the point that today’s kids probably wouldn’t be able to grasp that any burlesque is involved. And what do you mean, how could they have padded Jane and Dan’s pissing match to feature length? Haven’t we been doing just that since Hillary Clinton was still wearing headbands?

Tom Carson (@TomCarsonWriter) is GQ’s movie reviewer and the author of Gilligan’s Wake and Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter.

Illustration by Linsey Fields.

Saturday Night Live is a show that was born out of chaos, molded by it. Its backstage debauchery is legendary, the professional rigors that inspired said debauchery doubly so. Should it be a surprise, then, that the final result of our exhaustive, weeklong bracket to determine the greatest cast member of all time wound up being so … predictable?

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Will Ferrell was the tournament favorite long before it began. He’s the rare class clown who’s also the class president. Out of the hundreds of talented funny people who have had their names shouted out by Don Pardo (R.I.P.!) over the past four decades, Ferrell was unique in both his charisma and his generosity. Sure, he mauled the screen as Robert Goulet and Gene Frenkle. But no SNL superstar ever passed the rock as eagerly and often as he did: sharing the hot tub with Rachel Dratch and Jimmy Fallon (and never big-timing the latter when Fallon’s giggles stepped all over a punch line), playing straight man to Darrell Hammond (himself the ultimate straight man!), shaking his pom-poms for Cheri Oteri, tickling the ivories for Ana Gasteyer. This is a man so outrageously gifted that he sold out a Broadway run on the back of an impression — and yet, in his first film, accepted equal billing with Chris Kattan. Ferrell was a glue guy but also a champion huffer. He won this thing easily, and it’s hard to argue he shouldn’t have.

1. Will Ferrell (19,536 votes)
2. Phil Hartman (12,762 votes)

Ferrell’s only real competition — and in the end, it wasn’t all that close — was Phil Hartman, a genius talent eulogized so well Wednesday on this very site by Bryan Curtis. Hartman, Curtis wrote, was blessed with “a kind of comedic graciousness, which he used to hide the show’s seams and to make other funny people look good.” Hartman’s brilliance was far more understated than Ferrell’s, which is a polite way of saying it was possible, on occasion, to tear your eyes away from him. (The former’s genius lay in the way he disappeared into parts. The latter can’t help but reveal everything.) But the two shared an inimitable ability to puff themselves up into hot-air balloon extremes of buffoonery while simultaneously puncturing the myth of the great American male. Just as Ferrell could have been a passable Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, so, too, is it possible to imagine Hartman driving a Dodge Stratus. And though Hartman ultimately lacked the sheer volume of signature characters that Ferrell had — and was cruelly robbed of the post-SNL career he so richly deserved — the two are forever united by one simple fact: They made everyone around them and everything they touched better.

It’s this last point that I think helps explain their dominance throughout these seven days of contentious voting. I wrote Wednesday about how the unpredictability of the live broadcast is what makes SNL great and what makes it last. It’s also quite often the reason why it so often stumbles: a misread cue card, a botched stunt, a torn photo. All comedies require a leap of faith on the part of the audience, and that leap can feel considerably bigger after midnight. There are few things more painful on television than the long, slow death of an unfunny SNL sketch. String a few together, and pretty soon your living room begins to feel like Vegas and the remote control morphs into a pair of uncooperative dice. Just one more before bedtime — maybe give it until “Weekend Update”! And then Rob Schneider’s face fills the screen …

More than anything else, Will Ferrell and Phil Hartman were slump busters. The sight of them in a sketch allowed viewers to exhale. It was like seeing this guy boarding your plane: No matter how turbulent it got, you could at least be assured of a relatively safe landing. Incandescent rockets like Eddie Murphy, Chris Farley, and Kristen Wiig may have occasionally flown higher, but they could also crash and burn. (Even today, there are few more contentious words in the English language than “Gilly.”) Ferrell and Hartman never, ever wavered. They were deeply, intensely hilarious, but they were also, strangely, comforting. They didn’t tame the chaos that surrounded them so much as they absorbed it, making it safe, appealing, and palatable for two distinct generations.

Unwieldy, subjective, borderline-insane exercises in democracy such as our SNL bracket tend to favor the flashy and the recent. Not in this case. I think the voters got it right: Will Ferrell is the greatest Saturday Night Live cast member of all time, with Phil Hartman a close — but again, not too close — second. Even if we knew this to be true at the beginning, that doesn’t make it any less so at the end. To excel on SNL isn’t to be the funniest or the noisiest or smartest. It requires outsize talent, yes, and ambition to match. But it also requires grace, magnanimity, and a perverse sort of awareness: that even when you are carrying the show, the show is also molding and making you. (That one set of footprints in the sand? It belonged to Lorne Michaels. Or at least to his caddie.) No one star is bigger than Saturday Night Live. But Will Ferrell and Phil Hartman filled Studio 8H like no one else before or since. It’s been 12 and 20 years since they said their respective last good-nights. Yet even now, the show’s cowbell tolls for them.

Illustration by Linsey Fields

You might have noticed some Saturday Night Live nostalgia here on Grantland recently. The show’s been going for four damn decades! And hosting the premiere of Season 40 on September 27 will be Christopher M. Pratt, arguably the sole winner of 2014. (Ariana Grande, who’s on pace to be a bigger artist than you could’ve imagined, will be the musical guest.) It’s Pratt’s first time hosting, so why don’t we glance at the year that made him an undeniable front-runner for the job?

January

Pratt confirms that he will star in Safety Not Guaranteed director Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World, which has a decent chance at being the best Jurassic movie since the 1993 original. This is among the strongest ways a person can begin a new year.

Parks and Recreation, on which Pratt costars, also scores its best Season 6 ratings (3.43 million) with “Second Chunce.” It’s the most-viewed episode since February 2013.

February

The Lego Movie — starring the voice of Chris Pratt — opens at no. 1 with $69 million. (A sequel is green-lighted before premiere day.) The unanimously beloved film remains on top for three weeks and stays in the box office top five for five weeks. Domestic total: $257.8 million. Worldwide total: $468 million.

Pratt also says the velociraptor is his favorite dinosaur. Still on a roll. Then video evidence emerges that he basically predicted his Jurassic World role four years earlier:

March

Pratt and Anna Faris, his wife, are tapped to star in Steve Pink’s Vacation Friends, a comedy.

April

Parks and Recreation wraps its sixth season in brilliant fashion. It’s announced that Season 7 will be the show’s swan song.

Pratt posts the following on Instagram: “This is a weird thing to brag about but I did that glorious french braid. #Baller #man #ManBraid #RealMenBraid #isItBrade? #SpellingQuestion #StillBallerTho #WhyIsItFrench??? #ICallItAFreedomBraid #GoUsa”

(He’ll later double down on this special talent, stopping an interview to demonstrate his skills.)

Then Pratt shows up at the MTV Movie Awards pretending he has a microphone he doesn’t really have, helping establish the show’s distinct “do I look like I give a fuck?” tone.

June

Today visits the set of Jurassic World. Quizzed about his newly buff body, Pratt says, “Those are America’s abs.”

August

The biggest moment for #chrispratt2014: Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, starring Pratt as Peter “Star-Lord” Quill, opens at no. 1 with $94.3 million. The widely beloved film drops to no. 2 for two weeks before returning to no. 1, where it’s currently been for the last three weekends, giving it the most no. 1 weeks of any Marvel film. Pratt has now been on top of the box office for seven of 2014’s 36 weekends, or 19.4 percent of the year. With a current domestic total of $295.5 million, Guardians is the highest-grossing film of the year in America, and the biggest Marvel “starter” movie (not a sequel or a tie-in, like The Avengers) ever. The worldwide total is sitting at $587 million right now. Awesome Mix Vol. 1 — a collection of 12 ’60s and ’70s cuts enjoyed by Star-Lord — goes to no. 1 on the Billboard 200.

And with Guardians of the Galaxy comes a slew of year-clinching moments for Pratt. For example, he shows off his rap lyric recall and does a killer Eminem impression, right after talking about the time in his life when he lived in a van and smoked weed every day. 

And then Chris Pratt’s yearbook photos emerge on Reddit. They are — surprise — great.

Even when making the most benign, predictable moves, Saturday Night Live can’t escape scrutiny. (Considering we just got done doing this, that’s probably not something we need to point out to you too strenuously.) But when the move’s a big one — like, well, the dropping of Cecily Strong from the “Weekend Update” desk in favor of relative unknown Michael Che — the autopsy tongs are whipped out with ever greater fervor. So: What the hell just happened?

On Thursday night, the New York Times reported that Che, 31, a stand-up and a writer on the show, would be taking over for Strong. Out of her 2012 class, Strong arguably came on the fastest, getting some of that mythical newbie traction for her “Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party” bits. Lorne Michaels promoted her to the desk last year, which seemed really quick, but he was in a bind: Seth Meyers, who’d held us down for seven summers, was leaving for Late Night, and Michaels didn’t have that much time, or that many options, for crafting a personality we’d feel comfortable with. When Meyers left halfway through this past season, Michaels didn’t leave Strong to jump into the fire alone. Colin Jost, Meyers’s successor as head writer, took over for Meyers — both his literal desk spot and the more amorphously defined position of “nonthreateningly handsome white guy with great hair and a power-smirk.” By their own admission, they hadn’t quite locked into the smoothest of grooves. “I don’t feel like what I’ve done so far is a full realization of who I am,” Jost said in July. But they’d only had half a season to get it together.

Which is why the news of Che’s bloodless coup might seem like a demotion for Strong. In reality, though, it’s not hard to believe that Michaels truly felt Strong wasn’t being best served delivering the jokes straight, and that taking her off “Weekend Update” would get her back on the “Kristen Wiig Memorial recurring-character-creation-by-the-pound” track. As the Times says, “Mr. Michaels reasserted his confidence in Ms. Strong as one of the show’s best players and said the move would give her the opportunity to appear more frequently in sketches this season, a move Ms. Strong herself had asked for.”

Still, you might be surprised that it’s Jost staying: Generally in shakeups, it’s usually the less-established players that go, right? But ‘Update’ stardom is a niche role in the SNL ecology, one that Jost is basically contractually obligated, as head writer, to make a run for. And Strong may yet have a more universal appeal to deliver. At the very least, now she can come back to do the “Girl You Wish” stuff!

Also making this all seem pretty sensible: Michael Che is super funny. In 2012, the Times profiled him as an ascendant comic, noting his particularly quick rise in the scene. And ever since then he’s bore down on fulfilling all of that potential.

He was hired as a correspondent for The Daily Show this year, and gave us the goods —

— and had already been writing for SNL at that point. That Che was able to convince Michaels and everyone else he was the man for the job in just one season in the writers’ room is both mysterious and highly impressive. Maybe it was Jost and Che’s natural chemistry? Maybe Che’s stand-up chops had Michaels imagining him at the desk the whole time? Maybe Che acquired highly compromising photos of Michaels, perhaps in or near a bathtub?!

… New York stand-up Pete Davidson! Originally from Staten Island, Davidson is just 20 years old; that’d be one year older than Eddie Murphy when he made his debut, and two years younger than Jimmy Fallon at first curtain. Says Deadline, “Davidson started his career in comedy at 16, using it as a therapeutic outlet after losing his father, a New York City firefighter, on 9/11.” (He nods to his father, and his father’s company, here.) And just four years later, he’s on Saturday Night Live.

Sensibly, following last season’s bloated cast and its ensuing offseason purge, Davidson will be the only new featured member joining the cast. So if you’re keeping track at home, that’s Noël Wells, John Milhiser, Brooks Wheelan OUT by way of being fired; Mike O’Brien OUT by way of returning to the writers’ room from whence he came; Nasim Pedrad OUT by way of Fox’s Mulaney; and Michael Che, our new “Weekend Update” co-anchor, and young Petey definitely IN.

Davidson, who landed a holding deal with Fox after shining in a showcase, has guested on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and starred in a pilot, Sober Companion, that wasn’t picked up. He’s also done Kimmel, filling a solid five minutes with jokes about dorm-room boners and Rachel McAdams flying face-first through a car windshield.

Also: He was on Wild ’N Out!

And sometimes he tweets about marijuana usage.

And here is the young man, in a photo snapped by his girlfriend, Girl Code’s Carly Aquilino, celebrating his recent good fortune with some artisanal breakfast options.

Awwww. Good luck, Pete!

Don Pardo was 57 when he uttered the very first “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” in 1975. He continued his role as announcer until May’s Season 39 finale. And after passing away in August at the age of 96, Pardo will be succeeded by Darrell Hammond, one of the only people on earth with an SNL history as lengthy as Pardo’s. Hammond filled in for Pardo on several occasions, doing an impression he remembered fondly in a recent chat with Grantland. But the impressions are over — come September 27, the voice of SNL is all Hammond.

Here’s a great new trailer for Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children.

Seth Rogen may be Waka Flocka Flame’s official blunt roller. (Annual salary: $50,000.)

No McConaughey in Magic Mike XXL.

Channing Tatum will star in the true story of a man who became a math savant after suffering a brain injury.

Key & Peele’s coming back, and the guys are fighting aliens.

Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word will air on MTV on October 17. The documentary special, hosted and produced by Cox, “will profile seven transgender individuals ranging in age from 12 to 24, with a focus on the particular challenges they each face.”

Apple and U2 are coming out with a new music file format?

Zach Braff is making a new show with Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence.

Jack White is upset at the existence of Internet articles.

Dr. Dre’s “album” will not be called Detox.

There’s a concept trailer for Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro, and Norman Reedus’s new Silent Hill.

And here’s the first look at A Most Violent Year, from All Is Lost/Margin Call director J.C. Chandor. It’s got Jessica Chastain, Oscar Isaac, and David Oyelowo.

Unsurprising surprise! Kerry Washington, Scandal star, loves Game of Thrones, HBO star. “I’m a big fan of Game of Desks, also,” she told Fallon. Olivia Pope’s IRL personage started watching Thrones ’cause her parents watch it, obsessively, like “we will hang up on you Sunday night ’cause we’re goin’ to Westeros” obsessively. So Kerry cooked her mom a Thrones dinner for Mother’s Day. Awwwwww. (Also, BTW, here’s a supercut of allll the times they refer to “gladiators” on Scandal.)

Photos of Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in Fast 7 have emerged. (Well, two of Vin. One of Paul. They’re pretty standard set shots.)

Imagine being at a 40-person surprise Louis C.K. show in New Orleans alongside Bryan Cranston and John Goodman.

Outkast’s last shows of their tour this weekend, in Atlanta, titled #ATLast, will feature — deeeeepbreath — Childish Gambino, Solange, 2 Chainz, Janelle Monáe, Bun B, Kid Cudi, Killer Mike, Devin the Dude, Gipp Goodie, DJ Unk, and EVEN MOAR.

SIMBA AND TIMON IRL! (I mean, go compare with the actual Lion King …)

Holy Midas touch, Batman: the minister who marriaged Kanye and Kim is getting a show.

New Interstellar pics are here, on this Internet, the one you’re on.

Don’t worry, Taken 3 is called Tak3n. (I know you weren’t worried! I just worry that you worry.)

The SNL Documentary, by James Jiminy Franco, is premiering on Hulu on Friday.

I gotta fevah, and the only prescription … is more Christopher Walken as a batty Captain Hook for NBC’s Peter Pan Live. [via]

X-Men will recast Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Storm before Apocalypse.

Those crazy lovebirds Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose made it to the one-year mark before divorcing.

And Keanu is now amenable to Sp33d 3. (Or just more amenable than he used to be, which was “not.”)

On Friday, a day before SNL’s 40th anniversary premiere, James Franco’s documentary Saturday Night hit Hulu Plus. Originally conceived as an NYU film school assignment — a seven-minute observational short on Bill Hader — and shot during the week of the 2008 John Malkovich episode, it eventually ballooned into a proper, feature-length making-of doc. Franco’s spoken of it since, and it’s had one-off screenings, but it’d never before seen the public light of day. And, look: Whatever your issues with Franco in general, and with the dark and jumpy footage of this project specifically, it’s hard not to appreciate him on this at least a little bit. The industrious young man used his celebrity privilege not for evil, but for good: to give us access to something we’d never seen before.

“But we are already fully aware of every last detail of the SNL process, right on down to scheduling minutiae,” some might say. “There’s been like a billion books and magazine articles on all this stuff. Is more behind-the-scenes coverage of SNL really what you need in your life?” Need? No. Want? Yes, absolutely! Like, yeah, we knew the writers all get in Lorne Michaels’s office and meet the host and pitch sketches at the top of the week. But had you ever actually seen ’em do it? They all crowd around and sit on the floor?! That’s so crazy! And listen to Will Forte explaining how the sketches that do the best in pitch form aren’t usually the ones that go the distance; if a writer’s really sold on the idea, Forte theorizes, they’re not giving away the punch line that early. That makes so much sense!

For those SNL unbelievers, it surely feels like just more overkill. And to them, I humbly suggest there was a moment in the 40th season premiere that went some way toward justifying all of that overkill.

Toward the end of “Weekend Update,” Pete Davidson, the latest addition to the cast, and the youngest — he’s the first SNL’er born in the ’90s — showed up. Fellow new guy Michael Che set him up, with a news story about a teen in trouble “for photographing himself in a sexual position with a statue of Jesus.” And, mirthfully, off Davidson went, delivering a few rambling minutes of concentrated confetti-toss joy.

The material (presumably culled from his stand-up stuff? Maybe even used in his audition?) was great: “One of your friends’ll be like, ‘Hey, man, would you go down on a guy for a million dollars?’ And then we would all lie and be like, ‘No.’” But it was his particular facial expression — calibrated perfectly somewhere between aw shucks and holy shit I’m crushing this — that really did it. There’s a moment there, about a minute and a half in, when he stops for a laugh break, and smirks, and soaks it in, and it’s like he’s maybe actually thinking, Here it is, right here, the exact moment where my life changes forever. It’s probably too early to print up the Clinton/Davidson ’16 bumper stickers? But the potential was so definitively flashed, and it was thrilling. And no other show on TV can give you that moment.

How was the rest of the episode? Eh, you know, pretty good? So-so-ish? I mean, come on. It’s SNL!

Peter Quill

Presumably, a Chris Pratt backlash¹ will come eventually, because that’s just how these things work. But for now, at least, he’s still charming as all get-out. I always like it when the hosts seem a bit nervous and genuinely out of their minds about being on SNL, and Pratt gave us some of that quite organically. (See Joseph Gordon-Levitt for the more, uh, extreme end of this particular approach to the monologue.) Pratt’s nod to his lady, Anna Faris, was adorable, the little flubs during his song were endearing, and my gosh was that a well-cut suit.

Much like fellow handsome goofball Jon Hamm before him, Pratt felt like a natural for the hosting gig, the type of dude SNL might just have to keep having back. And there was a lot to work with. Guardians of the Galaxy led to a nice little Marvel spoof, probably the best, and certainly most replayable, bit of the night.

Throughout, Pratt did yeoman’s work, whether popping up as an NFL player announcing his crime (“American Taliban!”) or a video-game lothario letting Vanessa Bayer get all up in his disgusting chest wound. The “He-Man and Lion-O come to life” sketch had its charms: Taran Killam getting really into crotch-tapping was great; unintentionally, his having a fake six-pack next to Pratt’s still-real one was pretty funny, too. The “shy singles at the bar” sketch was a clever nod to our Summer of Ass, but it was the one time Pratt couldn’t quite hang. (To be fair, Aidy Bryant was quite nicely locked in there.) Our host was arguably underused overall, but surely he’ll return?

“Weekend Update”

It’s generally the most reliable portion of the program, but this weekend’s “Update” felt like it was going on forever. New coanchor Che had his stumbles, but they weren’t so bad. Question, though: Should we be concerned about Colin Jost? He’s gotten the Lorne vote of confidence to return to the desk, and seems no more comfortable for it (especially compared with my boy Davidson). To be fair, it’s still pretty new for the dude, plus now he’s got a new partner to feel out, too. And by the end, with the direct-to-the-prez stuff (“You might not get an airport like Reagan, but it’s got to be pretty cool to know that one day parents may tell their children not to go north of Barack Obama Boulevard”), the two did build up a nice little back-and-forth. And so this continues to be a wait-and-see situation.

Bad Boys

With a pretaped bit, my other boy Kyle Mooney and his writing partner Beck Bennett delivered one hell of an oddity: a sitcom parody delivered in the flattest of flat affects. Like, “everyone bash their heads into this concrete wall for a half-hour before we tape” flat. I liked it, but I was mostly just impressed they managed to get that on air. I don’t know about its mass appeal, but it was truly, almost unsettlingly strange, and that’s great to see. You know what they say about weird Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett sitcom parodies: Only 3,000 people saw them, but all 3,000 of them went on to make weird sitcom parodies of their own.

Ariana and Darrell

Ariana Grande was perhaps a bit boring, which is no great crime. I’ll mostly remember her for bringing out The Weeknd. It might be easy to forget now, but there was about a month in the summer of 2011 when the dude — before the game got real and face was revealed — was without a doubt the coolest person in music. Now he’s circling Ariana while making intermittent eye contact. Life comes at you fast?

By the way, this was Darrell Hammond’s first show as announcer. Is it a bit of a bummer that after a record 14 years on the show, Hammond can’t think of a single thing better to do than to hang around Studio 8H, not doing anything that can in any way be considered comedy? Um, who’s to say! Meanwhile, once again — RIP to da gawd Don Pardo.

All right, everybody. Pop some Cialis Turnt and enjoy your week.

I like Coldplay. A lot! My wife and I have considered Ghost Stories our us-album since May, and “Midnight” is like ghost-synth Bon Iver. But Ridley Scott’s Exodus is a film that very much does not need to have this song over its first full-on, three-minute trailer! Anyway, you either know the story of Moses by now or you don’t. You’re gonna watch this trailer or won’t. I must set you free. (K, quick take: Exodus: Gods and Kings might be slick and Christian Bale–y enough to overcome its disruptively Caucasian cast and all the rehash blues and even that clunky-ass title.)

Kendrick showed up at Prince’s two-album release party in Minneapolis and came onstage to throw some bars at a ’98 Prince joint, “What’s My Name.” Coolest thing of the week, probably/definitely. “The duo’s virtuosic talents were a fine complement to each other, with Prince’s inimitable guitar shredding weaving in and out of Lamar’s quick verses.”

It’s Quvenzhané’s world, though, still.

Hey, back-to-back wonderful people hosting SNL! Kinda can’t believe, at Season 40, that I’m excited about this show TWO WEEKS IN A ROW.

Charles Manson musical opens on Broadway in Hamburg, Germany.

You’re* voicing an Angry Bird, and you’re** voicing an Angry Bird! [*Maya Rudolph, Danny McBride, Peter Dinklage, Hannibal Buress, Bill Hader.] [**Keegan-Michael Key, Danielle Brooks, Josh Gad, Kate McKinnon, Tony Hale, Jason Sudeikis, Ike Barinholtz, Cristela Alonzo, Jillian Bell.] [Congrats, literally everyone!]

Sweet, FX ordered a pilot starring the good/great/overdue for some huge shine Bill Burr from a couple of the Always Sunny folk.

I’m just never going to need a “reason” to post a new Hack Into Broad City webisode.

MORE TWILIGHT FOREVER. (Via short films. Short films on Facebook.)

Ethan Hawke is rumored for Doctor Strange now. (And like with Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, I am already so sick of having to type out “doctor” vs. “dr.”?)

Tetris (the best puzzle game/maybe all-around video game of all time, OF ALL TIME) is becoming a movie.

Knock-knock, who’s there, the creepy opening credits for American Horror Story: Freak Show, OK, please go away, don’t return, no solicitors.

Last week’s SNL premiere had all the baked-in drama one would expect from an offseason of upheaval, mixed up with the inherent giddiness of the first day of school. It also had some great bits, and at least one standout performance from a dude most of us had never heard of before. This week, the show had a little extra oomph: Sarah Silverman — who’d had a brief, unfulfilled run as a writer and featured performer in the ’90s — was returning, triumphantly, as host. For the most part, it felt, disappointingly, like we were deep in midseason-slog form. But at the very least, Sarah’s joy shined bright.

“The return” was an angle, played up with self-aware delight, by Silverman herself. The truth is, when it comes to Silverman’s career, SNL is one of the very last things you’d remember. (The same can be said for fellow Studio 8H hit-and-run’ers Robert Downey Jr., Ben Stiller, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus before her.) As Splitsider explains, Silverman “came … up against an overcrowded and male-dominated cast including Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, Kevin Nealon, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, and David Spade … only one of her sketches made it so far as dress rehearsal, and she was subsequently fired at the end of the season.”

Unlike Janeane Garofalo, though, who was in the building around the same time and would not be shy in criticizing the corrosively bro-y environment, Silverman was ultimately positive about her experience. Here she is in a TV Guide interview from 1997 (via Splitsider again): “SNL was the best boot camp. Then I got fired. So I went to L.A. and immediately got hired on a pilot. Right before we shot the first episode, I got fired. After that, I was so gun-shy. I’d wait until the last second to show up at any job, plenty of time for my manager to call and say, ‘Don’t show up, you’re fired.’ And then, little by little, I didn’t get fired anymore.”

And here’s Silverman’s one appearance on “Weekend Update.” She crushed it.

As expected, Silverman’s monologue leaned on her first, brief stint. First, we got a string of playing-to-type jokes — “I wanna be bathed, like a princess, or a … paraplegic”; “If you’re ever drunk at party and you throw up, I feel like you can save the moment if you muster up a tada!” — many of them told while sitting in the lap of an audience member who truly seemed like she hadn’t been briefed about what was going to happen. Then the monologue began cutting back and forth between present-day Silverman and ’90s Silverman from footage of her as an SNL audience plant. “Will you ever make a solo album outside of Wilson Phillips?” and “What did you feed the dinosaurs?,” young Sarah queried, and it was all pretty great. And by the time present-day Silverman told her younger self that maybe one day she’ll get to say, “We have a great show for you tonight,” I was genuinely touched. Never give up! Don’t ever ever give up!

The rest of the night was touch and go. The best stuff was prerecorded, whether it was the pretty brilliant Fault in Our Stars parody (“If doctors know so much, then why is my doctor dead from Ebola?”) …

… or this commercial for WHITES …

And Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett were back at it with a (not available online) surreal few minutes — Kyle falls in love with Sarah, Beck beats the living hell out of Kyle, everything is gauzy and romantic as hell — that I more respected than enjoyed. It’s stuff like this that makes you realize what a strangely perfect SNL machine the Lonely Island guys were: They just churned out easily explainable, high-concept bits that were still totally strange. The Mooney-Bennett administration seems like it can’t really be bothered by such mundane concerns as “concept,” which is both admirable and frustrating. These guys don’t like to telegraph their stuff; they’re slier than that. But you may have to be a bit blunter to get things to work on SNL. And some of their best work so far has come when they’ve bluntly hammered home an idea. Remember this?!

“Weekend Update” will continue to be overly scrutinized (were those suits weird or am I looking too closely?) until things click into place for Michael Che and Colin Jost. Yep, they were stiff still. But they did enjoy a nice little “You’re a white dude?! I’m a black dude!!” back and forth about the proper usage of such phrases as “bae,” “cray cray,” and “in da club.” And yet the segment was straight hijacked by Kenan’s unhinged Al Sharpton, raving about the security benefits of having your very own “Dirty Willie the Wino.”

Elsewhere, Silverman put her stamp on the show, turning in an uneven but appreciated ode to Joan Rivers (which also doubled in giving us the strangely appropriate sight of Bobby Moynihan as Benjamin Franklin) and taking the reins for the “soap operas where woman actually support each other” bit. (This also doubled in giving us the wonderful delight of Kate McKinnon doing an ethnically ambiguous accent. This should be a weekly occurrence. Cecilia Gimenez 4ever.)

The night ended, as will this post, with the complicated socioeconomic politics of owning a Vitamix. Next week: Bill Hader returns!

Twenty-four-year-old Irish singer-songwriter Andrew Hozier-Byrne — known simply as Hozier — is having a moment. On October 7, he released his self-titled debut LP, which is projected to enter the Billboard Top 10 this week. (It already went platinum in his home country.) The album has been bolstered by the gospel-tinged anthem “Take Me to Church,” which has notched more than 13.5 million views on YouTube. Two days ago, Hozier had his greatest mainstream exposure yet on Saturday Night Live, an oft-unforgiving showcase for young, largely unknown musical guests — though judging by comments on Twitter, he appears to have survived the snarking gallery with his career intact.

With his commanding tenor, delicately handsome features, and lustrous locks, Hozier certainly has the physical attributes of a pop star. But his music is equally striking: “Take Me to Church,” in particular, is one of the year’s singular pop hits, with a stirring piano-based arrangement spotlighting Hozier’s soaring voice. The rest of the album solidly mines similar territory, recalling the vocalist-driven Euro-soul of Adele and Sam Smith while also cutting its own path with amiably upbeat love songs and quietly bluesy ballads. It’s the sort of music that seems almost expressly designed to appeal to the only demographics still interested in buying music.

When I reached Hozier by phone last week, he was recuperating from a recent throat infection in his Manhattan hotel room. The illness forced Hozier to cancel several dates on his Stateside tour, including an appearance at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Naturally, he was “equal parts nervous and excited” about his impending SNL gig, as well as about his newfound fame.

For American musicians, it’s a big deal to be on Saturday Night Live. How aware were you of the show growing up in Ireland?

Certainly to play American television is a big deal, but to play Saturday Night Live is a massive, massive deal. My father introduced me to The Blues Brothers when I was very, very young. And Saturday Night Live — that’s where they started. I’m very, very aware of that.

The Blues Brothers isn’t exactly a kids’ movie.

Yeah, I was about 2 or 3 when my dad introduced me, to my mom’s disapproval. But it quickly became one of those films you watch as a child on repeat. You put the tape in and rewind it like a Disney film.

Were you drawn more to the comedy or the music?

A lot of the comedy would go over a very young child’s head. There’s a scene where he gets out of prison and he’s given back a stolen prophylactic. As a 3-year-old, that’s completely miles over your head. So I think it was more the music. And the car chases. That was a huge draw.

Obviously, American music is a big influence on the music you make. Now that you’ve visited the U.S. and toured the country a bit, how does the reality of America compare with your preconceptions?

I’m still figuring that out. I think all that we would know of America back home is foreign policy, and maybe the snippets of the madness of political culture. What did shock me is the sincerity of the people — the politeness and overall enthusiasm and optimism of the people. The U.K. and Ireland are very different. There’s a healthy cynicism that you don’t find in everybody here in America. They’re a little bit more energized and optimistic about things.

American listeners are just now getting to know you, but you’re already a budding superstar in your home country. How are you dealing with the early stages of celebrity?

It’s flattering, but you don’t feel any different. You just feel like you’re doing a job that you want to be doing, and then one day somebody asks you a question like that: What’s it like to be famous? It doesn’t really mean anything. The only difference is some people stop you and ask you for photographs.

Thankfully, I haven’t had too much of a chance to think about it. I haven’t been in Ireland for a meaningful period of time for months and months and months. The last few times I’ve been dropping in for less than a day for a gig, and then flying out. Truth be told, I’m not all that comfortable with celebrity culture. That was always something that baffled me, the obsession over fame. I don’t think that’s a reason why anyone should get into making music.

You come from a blues background, but you’ve already been put in this pop context. I imagine that must be strange.

It is a highly surreal experience being mentioned by pop stars, or having your name come up in an interview by a pop star. Taylor Swift came to the show in Nashville.

Taylor Swift has talked about you on Twitter as well. Did you meet her at the show?

I did! We talked. She’s a very intelligent, very funny person. She’s an articulate feminist as well. 

You’re the latest in a long line of white Irish musicians, going back to Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher, that’s been influenced by American R&B and blues. Why has that musical connection remained so strong for the Irish over the years?

Bob Geldof has talked about how Van Morrison is Celtic blues, and there is a rich tradition in Celtic culture and Irish culture of songs of bondage and songs of sorrow. Ireland has a very troubled history of famine and poverty and land being stolen. That’s all been expressed in music and poetry through the years. It’s certainly a very cathartic feeling for disenfranchised people.

You started playing publicly as a teenager in the mid-’00s by performing songs by Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. Did that make sense to audiences at the time, seeing this skinny white kid play stuff like “Hellhound on My Trail”?

I was 15 or 16. I started learning open tunings, so some of the first guitar I was good at was slide guitar, because it’s quite intuitive in a way. I used to do it at talent shows and stuff like that, and I suppose in a way it was something that was very much my own, and when you’re a teenager, it’s nice to have something that is very much your own thing. People didn’t know where I was coming from with that, and it certainly wasn’t anything my peers were into.

What was it about blues that spoke to you?

I listened to it when I was a child. It was very close to my heart, and it felt like home to me. I still get that same feeling when I listen to blues. I realized as a teenager, this is something I wanted to be able to express. I’m still not a lead guitarist — I was very drawn to Delta blues music, which is one mouth and one guitar, essentially. And that’s where it first started.

Were you influenced at all by contemporary bands like the White Stripes or the Black Keys?

Rubber Factory was a huge album for me. I listened to that album and got lost. The White Stripes, it took me longer to get into. The older hits were anthems of those years, and with Jack White — I don’t know, it just took me longer. I spent a lot of my time with my head buried in early 20th-century music at that time, anyway.

In interviews, you’ve alluded to feeling some distance from the poppier, more upbeat songs on the new album. Do you want your next record to be darker?

I don’t want it to be darker. I like playing with light and shade. I like saying awful things in very pretty ways.

James Andrew Miller, author of Live From New York, talks about his favorite moments from Saturday Night Live, his thoughts on “Weekend Update,” and much more.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Wiping out the ghosts of Bastille and Imagine Dragons past, this weekend’s SNL didn’t mess around with any flavor-of-the-week B.S. On host duties was Chris Rock, returning for just the first time since 1996; on musical-guest duties was the forever icon Prince. For the record, during Rock’s ’96 hosting gig, the band was the Wallflowers. (Says Wikipedia, of that long-ago November night: “Dana Carvey makes a cameo appearance, most notably as George H. W. Bush, who tells Norm MacDonald’s Bob Dole to give up hope on the … election.” F YEAH, 1996!). And so, with all due respect to “One Headlight” — truly, I am currently in the midst of conceiving a karaoke arrangement for it as we speak — this had the potential to be a touch more classic.

But here’s the thing: Some people’s skill sets are more particularly attuned to the strange demands of SNL. Last week Jim Carrey hammed it up like the crazy person that he is, and turned in the exact kind of sloppy hit-or-miss mania that the show does at its best. This weekend, though, was a little sleepy — with the primary exception, sensibly, of the monologue. Like Zach Galifianakis (who went absurd) and Louis C.K. (who busted out a hand mic), Rock basically just did a mini-set. And while it was a little shaky at first, it slow-burned its way to magic.

Dressed in all black, Rock paced around, working himself into a hell of a groove. Winding his way through the Boston Marathon bombings to the perma-fears of post-9/11 New York, Rock got to the Freedom Tower and a devastatingly simple bit. “They should change the name from the Freedom Tower to the Never Going In There Tower. ‘Cause I’m never going in there! Are you kidding me? My God! … does this building duck?!” He mentioned an anti-gun event he’d done in D.C., and how his participation got him all kinds of kooky death threats online. “‘Imma put one in your head’ … ‘I’ll slit your throat’ … ‘Don’t you dare come between me and my weapon!’ And I realize: Oh my God, I need a gun!” And then he explained how he’d come to a conclusion: “I will never get involved in any charity, or cause, for the rest of my life … if you see me talking about a disease, I got it!”

The rest of the show had its moments. The “black intellectual who’d never not support Obama, even if Sasha and Malia told him to ‘shut up, bitch’ in public” was pretty fun …

… as was Bobby Moynihan as Chris Christie (he put himself through kindergarten by working as a mall Santa), the “colonoscopy for chill bros” camera GoProbe, Jay Pharoah and Kenan Thompson crushing it as Katt Williams and Suge Knight, and OUR DUDE Pete Davidson on STDs: “I sent it in a nice way. I was like ‘Hey, ma, sorry to bother you, do you see anything wrong here?’ She responds, ‘Yeah, Pete, definitely something wrong. You’re sending me pictures of your penis.”

Elsewhere: Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney gave us another solid prerecorded bit about polite bank robbers —

— and Kate McKinnon and Cecily Strong, as bedazzled ’90s queens, blacked out and entered some kind of perfect astral plane together:

There were some truly off moments, too, none more so than a bickering-married-couple sketch Rock did alongside Leslie Jones (still, sharing that much screen time with Rock must have been a hell of a moment for Jones, who’d just been promoted from writer to cast member). For the most part, though, it wasn’t anything more than flubbed lines and weird pacing. Rock was a cast member on SNL for three years in the early ’90s. But that’s a career footnote. He shines when he’s the only dude onstage.

In a great new profile in this week’s New Yorker, Rock says, “Part of me gets a little bored with standup sometimes … It’s like any kid: you get really good at a video game — what’s the next game?” The article’s about Rock’s new movie, Top Five, which he directed and also stars in; the rub is that this might be Rock’s first movie — at the age of 49 — to succeed in translating all that makes him great as a stand-up to the screen. (Advance word on the festival circuit has been mostly positive as well.) The article leaves you full of hope and joy for the dude, but the SNL monologue does just serve to remind us: When it comes to pure stand-up, there is only one Chris Rock. So: hopefully not too bored?

Oh, yeah — Prince (with a cameo from young gunner Lianne La Havas) played, too! Turns out he’s pretty good at music!

Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels joins Bill Simmons to discuss the show’s ups and downs over the last 40 seasons.

Listen to the podcast here.

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