On “Saturday Night” and “The People’s Joker”: A Tale of Two Revolutions

I was raised to believe that the good guy in any David vs. Goliath scenario was David. Intrinsically. As far as I know, that used to be the American Way. Until a few decades ago, most of our stories reflected that, and some still do. The confusing part, though, is that in America, Davids sometimes become Goliaths, and that is also the American Way. For those whose minds aren’t particularly nimble it can be confusing to parse out. We admire someone, and then they transform into someone not so nice, not so sympathetic. To be principled, you have to adjust your opinion. But most humans aren’t wired that way. We’re apes. We travel in bands and form associations and tend to remain blindly loyal to friends and family no matter what they turn into. It is customary to regard that as a virtue. I have seldom been inclined to regard it that way. Tribal apes are on the ascendant in American culture at present, and have been for some time. People who just can’t help admiring Goliath have captured the country. Well, we’ll just see where that takes us, won’t we?

Anyway, it’s the theme of today’s post. Two recent movies, both of which I very much enjoyed, cast their gaze in the direction of the same man from two very different perspectives, from Underdog to Ubermensch. The man is of course Lorne Michaels.

As it happens, and quite coincidentally, I was in a perfect frame of mind to evaluate Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s stylized snapshot of the premiere episode of the groundbreaking sketch revue show now celebrating its 50th season. During my first bout of Covid (2021, I think?) I binge-watched the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live during my convalescence. I was surprised to realize that I had never done that before. I was 10 when the show premiered; I didn’t start watching it until around the 3rd season, 1977 or 1978, since by then I was finally old enough to stay up that late. I’d always felt that I knew the earlier seasons well though, as they were sometimes rerun, and the best sketches were repackaged for home video, and I also had a terrific book that included the scripts for many of the early sketches. This one:

I could kick myself, I don’t seem to have that book any more. I must have read it 200 times. But now I do have this one:

But the point is, I had not actually seen those complete early episodes as they originally aired, uncut, in their entirety, warts and all. It’s an illuminating exercise to do so. The show was not always brilliant (although it frequently was). It’s often technically bumpy in a way that can be exciting. The worst moment I caught belonged to musical guest John Sebastian, who started his song, flubbed it, and then pitifully asked if he could restart, seemingly forgetting that he was on a live show. Live television is unforgiving in that way. It’s just like live theatre, and damn it is an exciting art form that really deserves to be revived.

Lorne Michaels knew that, being a baby boomer. He knew there was was integrity and an honesty in live television that could not be matched. You show up and deliver or you fall on your face and everybody sees it. A few years earlier, Norman Lear had rediscovered the joys of taping in front of a live audience. Michaels took it a step further by going completely live. And as with Lear, that aesthetic adjustment came with an entirely different approach to show production overall. Edgier, smarter, and riskier writing. A cast of fresh, young unknowns. An obvious alliance with the counterculture with all that that entailed: chiefly sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Michaels was an innovator. He catalyzed a transformation in American culture. No one can take that away from him.

The foremost surprise about Saturday Night (the movie) is that given all the sycophancy that has come to surround Michaels, it has taken this long for anyone to make a movie about him. The closest thing I can think of is that dreadful Belushi bio-pic Wired. That such a film would be an admiring one goes without saying. The piece of the story that Saturday Night tells is full deserving of respect. And naturally Jason Reitman was the guy to make it, his dad being the man who produced and/or directed all of those movies with Belushi, Aykroyd and Bill Murray: Animal House,Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters, etc.

I heard that the movie was surprisingly good, and it is. Basically it is an exaggerated take on the frenetic chaos leading up to the show’s premiere episode. 22 year old Gabriel LaBelle from The Fabelmans plays the young Michaels at the center of a maelstrom of his own making. As told here, his predicament isn’t just a professional one but an existential one. It feels that way in show business: you succeed or you die. The journey feels like a fraught fruit salad combining elements of The Actor’s Nightmare, A Night at the Opera, A Hard Day’s Night, Hellzapoppin, The Play That Goes Wrong, Noises Off — an architecture of terror built out of comic bricks. Some of the funny moments are of course classic bits from the show, some are what happens offstage and behind the scenes.

I’m pretty well steeped in the lore, having read all of the books on the topic, and listened to dozens of taped interviews with the principals, and you may be surprised to know that very little of the film’s account is fictionalized, properly speaking. Granted, many real events have been compressed for dramatic and comic effect. Much that transpires in the movie’s real-time 109 minutes actually happened prior to the day in question or some time afterward. The movie depicts many events as transpiring mere minutes to airtime which had really occurred hours and even days before. That’s all legit as far as I’m concerned. Artistic license. Naturally, much dialogue is invented, as well, and relationships and story events are tweaked for effect, and that’s okay because, duh, that’s how you write scripts.

As a chronicler of show biz history I am obliged to tell you that The Rumpus Room, the straw man (straw show?) meant to stand in for all the weak and corny prime time variety shows of that day is one of the movie’s bigger stretchers. There actually had been a show called The Rumpus Room, hosted by game show announcer Johnny Olson, but that had gone off the air in 1952. And most of the old school vaudeville style acts shown backstage at the fictional Rumpus Room went out with The Ed Sullivan Show in 1971. By late 1975, what was left of television variety was stuff like The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour and The Captain and Tennille Show, which kind of gets you half way to Saturday Night Live anyway. It’s kind of why SNL happened in the first place. But that’s not as strong a choice from the point of view of dramaturgy.

Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) was probably a little less disgusting than he is made out to be in this movie, and he certainly wasn’t around the SNL set when the show debuted, though he was booked as a guest a few months later. His presence in the film, along with a bitchy phone call from Johnny Carson, and the antagonizing presence of Willem Dafoe as an oily network executive are there to demonstrate what Michaels was pushing up against as an untried producer in an ossified commercial medium back then. All valid, to my mind.

As with the original SNL, Saturday Night has few recognizable faces. Matthew Rhys proves himself a genius yet again as George Carlin. Nicholas Braun of Succession is downright magical in the dual roles of Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman (it’s kind of like Frank Morgan playing multiple roles in The Wizard of Oz). The lovable Robert Wuhl plays Dave Wilson, the show’s crusty director (in live TV, the director is more of a technical role, he doesn’t direct the performers, just the crew). Tracy Letts plays veteran comedy writer Herb Sergeant. Paul Rust of Love is Paul Shaffer.Josh Brener (Big Head from Silicon Valley) is writer Alan Zweibel. Brad Garrett is the hack comedian Zweibel writes for before joining SNL at the 11th hour (didn’t happen that way, of course). The Tonight Show‘s Jon Batiste is musical guest Billy Preston.Cooper Hoffman (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son)from Licorice Pizza is the brown-nosing network exec Dick Ebersol (who later produced the show with disastrous results).

Okay, never mind, that IS a lot of recognizable faces, but they’re all character actors, playing minor parts, amounting to cameos almost. The principles in the ensemble are generally cast more for their resemblance to the people they’re portraying, though some are closer than others. The best are Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Matt Wood as Belushi, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, and Tommy Dewey as head writer and sometime performer Michael O’Donoghue.

Of the women, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster (Frank Shuster’s daughter, Lorne Michaels’ wife, and a writer on the show) comes off the best. The characters of the three female cast members (Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, and Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman) are treated almost as shabbily as the real women were on the show. They scarcely get more screentime than Corrine Britti as Valri Bromfield, who was in a mere two minutes of the first episode of SNL without becoming part of the cast. Conversely, in one of Saturday Night‘s best touches, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation) gets quite a bit of attention, evening the scales somewhat, for he too was given short shrift on the original program in spite of his copious talents. Here, he gets to have his say. It would have been nice to have seen the female characters given the same kind of attention.

At any rate, the film does a great job of selling the message that Saturday Night Live was a major departure from what had come before, which I’m not sure that a lot of younger people know. And Lorne Michaels, and the team he assembled, fully deserve the tribute. They had a vision, they were brave, and they took risks.

That was then, this is now.

SNL was fairly cutting edge until the departure of Michaels and his original staff and cast after the fifth season, resulting in the disastrous sixth season headed up by Ebersole. When Michaels took the reigns again in the early ’80s…what can I say? It was a Reagan era show: occasionally funny or otherwise entertaining but pretty much always safe and non-controversial. The whole country watched it, not just the original narrow youth demographic. Occasionally it got marginally edgier and better (I enjoyed it in the early ’90s for example) but mostly it became a sort of treadmill, a factory for spitting out comedians, the most popular of whom became movie stars. Michaels produced many of those movies. In other words, this former lean, mean, adventurous show became a HUGE cash cow. An empire. The stakes were huge. It is one of life’s ironies that the richer and more powerful people, rather than using their resources to do good, instead become more cautious and conservative. I wrote this relevant piece about how they were handling their theoretical satire about Trump very early in his first administration. I watched an episode last week and had to turn it off because it was even more toothless than it had been in 2017. Their treatment of this menace to humanity borders on affectionate. What a wacky, loveable, huggable old eccentric, they seem to be saying! That’s all I’m getting from their sketches about him.

Further, no one dares call him on it. Michaels has that much power. Listen to veterans of the show, or aspiring comedians talk about him on podcasts or whatever. You can practically hear the terrified quaver in their voices as they kiss his ass. It sounds like they all have guns to their heads. You can hear them wanting to say something else, but they probably only ever express their real opinions in whispers in restaurant bathrooms. After all, SNL is now the big show everyone aspires to get on, the latter day equivalent of The Ed Sullivan Show or The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. To be banned from it would be show biz death. So Michaels is now the boss in the suit who stands in the way of free expression. He is now the Goliath in the story. And none dare say so — until now.

In Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, Michaels is presented as a kind of dystopian supervillain presiding over an all-powerful comedy show called UCB Live, a dig both at SNL and Upright Citizen’s Brigade, the latter (one guesses) standing in for the entire improv-industrial complex which includes other comedian factories like Second City and others. To get on the show all you have to do is be identified as a “Jokeman” by a computer and cough up $15,000 for classes, which turn you into a cookie cutter comedian. Females on the other hand, are cast as mere “Harlequins” — back-up dancers.

Writer/director/producer/editor/ star Drew actually studied at Second City as a teenager, but got her toehold in show business as an editor on tv shows of renegades like Tim and Eric, and Sacha Baron Cohen. From them she takes the in-your-face, aggressively noisy aesthetics of the former and the guerilla tactics of the latter. The movie merges her personal journey from being a repressed boy-child to a transgender woman, with the story of Batman’s Joker as seen through the prism of the Joachim Phoenix version, which itself is a twist on Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy. The painted-on smile comes from a medication she has been prescribed since childhood which simulates happiness whether you’re feeling it or not. With fellow outsider comic Oswald Cobblepot i.e. The Penguin (Nathan Faustyn) she starts an anti-comedy club (since unapproved comedy in this dystopia is criminal). The very notion reminds me of Rev Jen’s Anti-Slam at Collective Unconscious and the entire scene at Surf Reality long about 20 years ago. Furthermore, it is located into a run-down amusement park I can’t help associating with Coney Island. But Drew is an L.A. person; no doubt that town has counterparts to NYC’s old underground out there that I’ve not experienced.

At any rate, I found Drew’s righteous, fearless anger at today’s buttoned-up, ossified, dinosaur comedy scene to die for. It’s stuff I’ve grumbled about for years, but to see it in a movie is like, well, huffing nitrous oxide. It’s enough to make you giddy with exhilaration. First shots across the bow! Women have a hard enough time navigating comedy’s douche bro culture, a trans woman must have to muster twice the gumption to get in the door. (Actually, I know a couple or three, and yes they’re brave and plucky lasses). Drew has threaded many needles here. It’s not just very funny and very acid (in a “Fuck You”/ Valerie Solanas/ “I Don’t Give a Shit” way) but it is frequently also very touching.

And like any real revolutionary act, it breaks the rules. For instance, Drew forged ahead without rights to the DC comics characters, which means that even while she is taking on the comedy powers-that-be, she is also taking on this other huge corporation. Shit has gone down to keep you from seeing this movie. It was pulled out of festivals. (In the end, enough folks have trusted in the “fair use for satire” precedents that have been set by some courts. The new administration makes me genuinely fearful that the laws will not be interpreted so liberally in the future.) Sarah Squirm (Sarah Sherman) originally played Lorne Michaels in the film, but she took the unusual step of backing out AFTER the film’s premiere, so her scenes were recast with Maria Bamford and reshot. There are some other recognizable names in cameo parts in the film, including Robert Wuhl (busy year, Bob!), Bob Odenkirk, Tim Heidecker, and others. Wuhl seems to have been tricked into the film against his will by way of a Zoom call. That’s the kinda guerilla film-making I’m talking about.

Further: this is the PEOPLE’S Joker. It’s like folk art made from materials appropriated from corporations. It was crowdfunded, and many hands seem to have gone into the making of it, not just actors, but animators, and puppeteers. As in Godard’s early movies it switches rapidly from style to style, voice to voice.

Speaking of revolutions…how much of one was Lorne Michaels’ REALLY? He started out in show biz as the son-in-law of one of Ed Sullivan’s favorite comedians (true story). Censorship was tested, but to what end, ultimately? In the end, the arc is like the one in The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” — the new boss is the same as the old boss. Whereas…do we think Vera Drew has a shot at making half a billion dollars (Michaels’ net worth) and becoming Bull Goose of the entire comedy scene, like, ever? Even if she could, the point of a REAL revolution is to replace the old system with something ELSE. A different set of values. And that is precisely what this is. The idea is not to become the biggest asshole on the block, it’s to make room for EVERYONE. To share the power. Since the time of the Greeks that has been known as Democracy, and while you were sleeping it became illegal.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.