Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of “Saturday Night Live”

Every week at “Saturday Night Live” is just like every other week. The weeks are the same because they’re always fuelled by hard work, filled with triumphs and failures and backstage arguments, and built around a guest host—Jennifer Lopez, Lizzo, Elon Musk—who often has no idea what he or she is doing. Over the past fifty years, the job of Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, has been to make the stars look good, and to corral the egos and talents on his staff in order to get the program on the air, live. Since the début of “S.N.L.,” in 1975, he has fine-tuned the process, paying attention to shifting cultural winds. What began as an avant-garde variety show has become mainstream. (Amy Poehler has characterized the institution that made her famous as “the show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.”) But the formula is essentially unchanged. Michaels compares the show to a Snickers bar: people expect a certain amount of peanuts, a certain amount of caramel, and a certain amount of chocolate. “There’s a comfort level,” he says. The show has good years and bad, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership over it. Just about all viewers of “S.N.L.” believe that its funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. Michaels likes to say that people in the entertainment business have two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix “S.N.L.” (When J. D. Salinger died, in 2010, letters surfaced in which even he griped about what was wrong with the show.)

Cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret behind Michaels’s extraordinary tenure. “It’s him and Hitchcock,” John Mulaney told me. “No one else has had this kind of longevity.” Half of them think that Michaels has repeatedly been able to remake the show for a new audience because he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil. The other half wonder whether Michaels, gnomic and almost comically elusive, is a blank screen onto which they’ve all projected their hopes and fears and dark jokes—whether he, like the cramped stages in “S.N.L.” ’s Studio 8H, is just a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds.

The kickoff to every episode, the weekly Writers’ Meeting, is at 6 P.M. on Monday, on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, in Michaels’s Art Deco office, which overlooks the skating rink. Monday, Michaels says, is “a day of redemption,” a fresh start after spending Sunday brooding over Saturday night’s mistakes. (On his tombstone, he says, will be the word “uneven.”) The guest host, the cast, and the writers squeeze into Lorne’s office—everyone in the business refers to him by his first name, like Madonna, or Fidel—to pitch sketches. People sit in the same places each week: four across a velvet couch, a dozen on chairs placed against the walls. Others stand in the doorway or wedged near Michaels’s private bathroom, and the rest are on the floor, their legs folded like grade schoolers. The exercise is largely ceremonial. It’s rare for an idea floated on Monday to make it onto the air. The goal of the gathering, which Tina Fey compares to a “church ritual,” is to make the host feel like one of the gang. In the nineties, the host Christopher Walken both confounded and delighted the room when he offered, in his flat Queens drawl, “Ape suits are funny. Bears as well.”

Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Michaels at Elaine’s, in 1975.Photograph by Jonathan Becker

The Monday meeting unleashes a process that has been followed since the show’s inception. After Michaels and some handpicked staffers have dinner with the guest host on Tuesday, writers stay up all night churning out sketches. Michaels is a night owl, and he thinks nothing of scheduling a meeting at 1:30 a.m. As with many of his idiosyncrasies, he has turned his nocturnal habits into a philosophy. “Fatigue is your friend,” he told me, during a series of conversations. “Fatigue wears down the critical faculties, the inner editor. If you’re tired, it’s easier to go, ‘How about this?’ ” In the seventies, the overnight marathons involved a lot of drugs and drinking. Gilda Radner used to bake cookies for the writers—useful for forming alliances and getting them to write good parts for her. (That gambit wouldn’t work as well today, now that Ozempic is the drug of choice.)

Wednesday is when the contours of the week’s show emerge; from a lot of amorphous goofing around, sketches materialize. That afternoon, they are presented at a table read. Michaels reads the stage directions for each sketch aloud but refrains from commentary. “My favorite Lorne is read-through Lorne,” Seth Meyers told me, noting that it’s the one time of the week when Michaels is completely open. “I’ve been to plenty of them where he sat stony-faced for the full four hours. But when he’s surprised he has one of the great laughs, a real head-back, mouth-open thing.”

Afterward, Michaels has a smaller meeting, with his chief lieutenants, in which he “picks the show,” in “S.N.L.” jargon, selecting which sketches to pursue. The sketches that survive aren’t necessarily the funniest. Other factors inform the choices: What will make the host happy? Which groupings of pieces can be staged within the physical constraints of Studio 8H? Does everyone in the cast have something to do? Are there “tonnage” issues (too much scatological humor, too many accents)? Will enough sketches play in all fifty states? Is there enough topical material? Michaels has said that, in putting together a lineup, he is trying “to find enough colors to make a rainbow.”

On Thursday, carpenters are at work building fake living rooms and dive bars while the performers block and rehearse. An unusual thing about “S.N.L.” is that the writers are in charge of producing their own pieces: they dictate what the set and costumes look like and what music is needed, and they direct the actors. This is why “S.N.L.” ’s writers’ room generates so many future showrunners. As Mulaney, who used to write for the show, puts it: with each sketch, “for five minutes NBC is yours.”

On Friday, the staff often hears Michaels say, “We have nothing.” He’ll be staring tensely at the index cards on his bulletin board, which lay out each tentative segment. Employees a quarter of his age are amazed that, after fifty years, he can still seem scared. If things look particularly bleak, he’ll ask writers if they’ve been saving any good material for an upcoming host, telling them, “Sometimes you have to burn the furniture.”

On Saturday afternoon, in Studio 8H, there’s a run-through of the sketches. The show is often considerably too long at this point, so more sketches might be cut (and their brand-new sets scrapped). It would be more efficient to choose the lineup on Wednesday, but Michaels likes to mull. “Snap decisions get you into trouble,” he told me. “I tend to do rolling decisions.” Sometimes the guest host nixes a sketch. In 2015, Donald Trump was to play a tree standing next to the Giving Tree, the Shel Silverstein character who gives and gives of herself until she’s reduced to a stump. The sketch ended with the Trump tree calling the Giving Tree a sucker. Trump refused to do the piece, not because it portrayed him as heartless but because he worried that the tree costume made him look fat.

At 8 P.M., there’s a dress rehearsal in front of a live audience, with twenty to thirty minutes’ worth of excess material. This is the do-or-die moment of every “S.N.L.” week. It’s the first time the comedy is seen by “civilians.” Michaels, sitting in a foxhole underneath the audience bleachers, witnesses what gets a laugh and what doesn’t. An assistant scribbles as he issues notes, and writers stand nearby for instructions on revisions. Once, when Jonah Hill was hosting, I sat by Michaels under the bleachers. Noticing that Hill has heavily inked arms, he ordered the costume designer to cover them up: “Tom! Lose the tattoos.” After Hill muddled his way through a sketch about a cinema with a “farm to screen” snack menu, Michaels glumly declared, “Well, he can read.” He called another sketch “entry-level comedy.” To a writer of a segment that grossed out the audience, he icily said, “Can you take it and make it longer?”

But a subsequent meeting in his office each week, in the ninety minutes between the dress rehearsal and the live show, is when Michaels displays his superpowers. He is definite and direct in a way that he is not during the rest of the week—a mode that he describes as “being on knifepoint.” His aversion to confrontation is outweighed by the urgent need for triage. He gives orders quickly. There is little joshing around. According to the oral history “Live from New York,” by Tom Shales and James Miller, one night Michaels turned to Bob Odenkirk, then a writer, who was whispering to his neighbor as the minutes to airtime were slipping past. Michaels said, evenly, “Odenkirk, if you speak again I’ll break your fucking legs.”

Watching Michaels make these fast final decisions reminds Mulaney of a line from Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George”: “The choice might have been mistaken, but choosing was not.” Michaels’s choosing is the zenith of the week. He loves not having any time left to obsess over details. It’s all from the gut. The order is reshuffled, even more sketches are ditched, new endings are added. (Tina Fey has called such tweaks “adding a little turd polish.”) If he makes a bad decision, there’s always next week.

Late revisions are sent to a cue-card crew, who write new cards at lightning speed. Michaels has a superstitious side and clings to outmoded methods; he refuses to use teleprompters and requires script revisions to be done on paper. The atmosphere of controlled chaos is so well honed that the process can seem almost automatic, but it took Michaels years to establish his precepts of producing comedy. The problem with making it look easy, he often says, is that then people think it’s easy.

When Michaels started “S.N.L.,” he had dark, tousled hair, like Warren Beatty’s in “Shampoo.” His hair is now silvery and frequently barbered; it frames his face in a brushy fringe, as with a hedgehog, or a senator. He stands about five feet eight, but his posture and confidence compensate for his height. His smile, when he summons one, bisects his face like a slash. His eyes are close set and dark, with a glitter of mockery.

Michaels rules “S.N.L.” with detached but absolute power. His office is decorated with a sign that Rosie Shuster, his first wife and a writer on “S.N.L.” ’s early seasons, found in a West Village antique shop: “the captain’s word is law.” It’s a joke that isn’t really a joke. But he doesn’t micromanage every moment. “I’ve never been able to tell whether Lorne is driven by a managerial philosophy or a life-style philosophy,” Robert Carlock, a writer who went on to help Fey develop “30 Rock,” told me. “He’ll let everyone fight things out while he’s at Orso”—a midtown Italian restaurant—“and he’ll come back after a nice dinner and make the decision.”

A phrase that Michaels uses often is “the high end of smart,” and he likes to say, “If I’m the smartest person in the room, I’m in the wrong room.” But he harbors no illusions that his cultivated nonchalance is taken at face value. One talent agent routinely tells clients auditioning for Michaels to remember that he is the real star of the show. He is the alpha in most of his employees’ lives. To those people, and to the wider comedy world, he is a mysterious object of obsession. Conversations about him are peppered with comparisons: he is Obi-Wan Kenobi (Tracy Morgan), the Great and Powerful Oz (David Spade, Kate McKinnon), Charles Foster Kane (Jason Sudeikis), a cult leader (Victoria Jackson), Tom Ripley (Bill Hader). “There’s so many people who, their whole lives, have been trying to figure him out,” Hader told me.

Jon Hamm—a student of the show since he was six, when his divorced dad let him stay up and watch John Belushi—has hosted three times and says that he always learns from watching Michaels meet his deadline. He remembers Michaels explaining how sometimes he’ll pick one sketch over another not because the writing is stronger but because it will be more powerful live_._ Hamm once delivered a monologue that involved showing pretend “clips” of his acting jobs before “Mad Men.” The show could have pretaped the bits of him selling jewelry on QVC or doing standup on “Def Comedy Jam.” (The joke: he sounds and looks just like Don Draper in all of them.) But Michaels knew that it would be more exciting for the studio audience to see him running around making quick costume changes and popping onto different stages. This is the essence of producing.

Michaels didn’t always know how to do it. Born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto in 1944, he started out as a writer and a performer. The rudiments of producing were picked up over time, as he tried to find a place in show business where he could have creative control. After graduating from the University of Toronto, he and a law-student friend, Hart Pomerantz, formed a comedy duo in the vein of Martin and Lewis. Michaels played the straight man, often interviewing a “zany” character played by Pomerantz. The team’s signature creation, the Canadian Beaver, was played by Pomerantz as a bucktoothed rodent with an inferiority complex about his imperialistic neighbor to the south, the American Eagle.

“Legs? All I want is a comfortable bra.”

Cartoon by Dan Misdea

A gig on a CBC radio show ended with the duo being fired. Michaels wasn’t too heartbroken—he worried that their act was dopey and out of step with the culture. He and Pomerantz sold jokes to other comics and went to New York to meet with Woody Allen, who was looking for writers. The trio didn’t click, but after the meeting Michaels sent Allen a “bright joke”—one for smart people. A man is obsessed with the idea that there’s no such thing as an original thought—that, somewhere, another guy is thinking the exact same thoughts, at the exact same time. Eager to meet this mental doppelgänger, he somehow gets the other guy’s phone number. He dials the number . . . ​and the line is busy.

Allen didn’t use the joke, but he pronounced it very funny. “Woody saved my life with that,” Michaels told me.

In New York, he went to the Improv, in Hell’s Kitchen, and saw a young comic named Richard Pryor, who did a ten-minute one-man tour de force about a group of liberal New York actors bringing a play about interracial romance to a prison in the South. The warden keeps demanding to see a “dead n——” onstage. This was a new turn in comedy, devastating and brave, and Michaels wanted to follow it. He believed that comedy “should be of use.” He recalled being “messianic about it.”

But the work available to Michaels was far less ambitious. In 1968, when Michaels was twenty-three, he and Pomerantz moved to L.A. to be junior writers on an NBC variety program called “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.” Michaels arrived for his first day with long hair encircled by a hippie headband. His colleagues were men in their fifties and sixties who’d started out in radio. The work seemed outdated, too. “The first assignment we were given was to write fifty ‘fag jokes,’ ” Michaels said. (Rip Taylor played Diller’s hairdresser, Paul of Pasadena.) Each episode ended with a production number saluting a “forgotten American,” like President James K. Polk. Michaels told himself that he’d ruined his life. He was shocked, however, when the first episode got strong ratings. The newspaper columnist Joseph Kraft had recently coined the term “Middle America,” and as Michaels spent more time in network TV he would learn to keep that demographic in his sights. He now regularly reminds his “S.N.L.” staff, “We’ve got the whole country watching—all fifty states.”

Although the Diller show eventually flopped, Michaels learned a lot from his colleagues there. One of them, George Balzer, who’d worked for Jack Benny, gave Michaels stacks of old Benny radio scripts. They were deceptively short, “because they were all pauses,” Michaels said. “I began to see what a joke looked like on a page. It was like knowing how to prepare a dish. Like: ‘To start with, the eggs go here.’ ” As he became a comedy scholar, he started to recognize that his own talent was more curatorial. He knew what was funny.

When Michaels told people that he wrote for TV, they’d sniff and say that they didn’t even own a set—they read books. “Television was embarrassing,” he said. “It was vulgar.” It was still seen as the boob tube. He started to understand what the philosopher Marshall McLuhan had been talking about back at the University of Toronto—the idea that, whenever a new mass medium emerges, it frees up the medium that preceded it, allowing it to innovate. “Television becoming so powerful liberated movies, so that movies no longer had the burden of being mass,” Michaels told me. Auteurs such as Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes were making rule-breaking films; the Rolling Stones and David Bowie were pushing the boundaries of rock and roll. TV was a backwater. Michaels was stuck writing shopworn gags for a bitchy hairdresser character. “Everything but television was changing,” he said.

Although Michaels was questioning the point of TV, he still needed to work. After “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show” was cancelled, he and Pomerantz got hired at “Laugh-In,” a hit variety show on NBC that was hailed as TV’s first collusion with the counterculture. The comedy derived from pie-in-the-face burlesque, but what distinguished the show was its frenetic pacing. In a signature segment, the Joke Wall, performers in mod regalia poked their heads out of holes in a set, like cuckoos emerging from a clock, and spouted one-liners. (“What goes ‘Ho ho thump’? Santa Claus laughing his head off.”) The creator of “Laugh-In,” George Schlatter, proudly compared it to a pinball machine.