Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

by Tom Shales

The following year, Lorne told me he had been approached to do a weekend replacement show for The Tonight Show and said it would be a cross between Monty Python and 60 Minutes. And I thought, “I’d watch that,” you know. It was a big break and I thought, “This’ll be great.”

Laraine Newman

The joke that I had as the number one joke in this compilation of jokes was, just to show you how long ago this was—because of the reference in it—was that the post office was about to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a ten-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter. We even did it on the show. I remember we were short on jokes. Chevy might have done it. Yeah, I think he did. I think that was my one contribution to the first show, the one that George Carlin hosted.

Al Franken and Tom Davis were a two-for-one kind of bargain basement. They were just starting and anxious to get into the business—you know, let’s give them a tryout. I was definitely in the conversations about all that stuff.

BILL MURRAY: It was Davey Wilson who didn’t want us ad-libbing more than Lorne didn’t want it. But the thing about the ad-libbing is that the camera cues, the camera cuts, are all on the script. They’re supposed to go from this person to that person on this line. So that was a technical thing that was sort of a limit that you had. You’d screw things up if you ad-libbed at the end of something. Davey caught a lot of stuff because he was fast. If he could see in your eyes that something was coming, he’d hold on it. You’d hear him in the booth: “Oh Christ, where’s he going?” You learned that if you were going to fix something, the easiest way for everybody was to figure out how to fix it and still say the last line so they had the cuts right. You could actually watch them go, “Awgh!” You could hear six or seven people in the booth go “Awgh!” like he got it, and there’d be this glee as the technical director would push the camera button switch; there’d be this delight that you did it right, that you respected their technology and what they had to do. That was when you got good at it. It takes a while to learn how to do that. Not everybody did.